Outweigh cost of discarding affs that “think outside the box”
Intrator, 10 [David President of The Creative Organization, October 21, “Thinking Inside the Box,” http://www.trainingmag.com/article/thinking-inside-box
One of the most pernicious myths about creativity, one that seriously inhibits creative thinking and innovation, is the belief that one needs to “think outside the box.” As someone who has worked for decades as a professional creative, nothing could be further from the truth. This a is view shared by the vast majority of creatives, expressed famously by the modernist designer Charles Eames when he wrote, “Design depends largely upon constraints.” The myth of thinking outside the box stems from a fundamental misconception of what creativity is, and what it’s not. In the popular imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky. The creative process is magical, or divinely inspired. But, in fact, creativity is not about divine inspiration or magic. It’s about problem-solving, and by definition a problem is a constraint, a limit, a box. One of the best illustrations of this is the work of photographers. They create by excluding the great mass what’s before them, choosing a small frame in which to work. Within that tiny frame, literally a box, they uncover relationships and establish priorities. What makes creative problem-solving uniquely challenging is that you, as the creator, are the one defining the problem. You’re the one choosing the frame. And you alone determine what’s an effective solution. This can be quite demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, you are required to establish limits, set priorities, and cull patterns and relationships from a great deal of material, much of it fragmentary. More often than not, this is the material you generated during brainstorming sessions. At the end of these sessions, you’re usually left with a big mess of ideas, half-ideas, vague notions, and the like. Now, chances are you’ve had a great time making your mess. You might have gone off-site, enjoyed a “brainstorming camp,” played a number of warm-up games. You feel artistic and empowered. But to be truly creative, you have to clean up your mess, organizing those fragments into something real, something useful, something that actually works. That’s the hard part. It takes a lot of energy, time, and willpower to make sense of the mess you’ve just generated. It also can be emotionally difficult. You’ll need to throw out many ideas you originally thought were great, ideas you’ve become attached to, because they simply don’t fit into the rules you’re creating as you build your box.
Dialogic clash is itself a process of becoming—the benefit of our framework is the educational process
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