Go to your kitchen, open the cabinet for baking supplies, take out the rainbow sprinkles, and dump them all over your counter. Then mix up 10 pounds of frosting in a bunch of interesting colors. Then after you’ve been playing with combinations for hours, mix up some batter. Then go buy an oven.
I’m being sarcastic, but that’s close to the creative process I’ve seen so many really brilliant minds use to get at their muse or collaborate with fellow creators. It begs belief, it defies logic, it taunts Taylorism.
It’s, in a word, inefficient.
Want efficient creativity? There’s an AI that can write you counterpoint keyboard music so much like Bach, even performers who’ve studied his oeuvre can’t reliably tell the AI’s work from the classics.
But when the situation demands something that hasn’t been done before, something weird and eccentric and bold that might not work, the usual rules of “management” and “project management” become counterproductive.
Paradigm shifts don’t usually come from iteration. They’re perfected by iteration.
Paradigm-shifting work happens when people’s brains are sent off perpendicular to their accustomed habits, when people’s hands go places where they can’t rely on muscle memory anymore. We have to turn our brains sideways and stand on our heads, because we’re trying to see things from a perspective nobody thought of yet.
A team going through this will look like they’re wasting valuable time dumping sprinkles on the counter. Just wait.
Trust the process.
Or don’t start it at all.
