Chapter 27: Creativity and Problem-Solving

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."

— Steve Jobs

The customer experience strategy had a problem Jordan hadn't anticipated.

Section 3 was complete — the enterprise segment recommendation he had spent four weeks avoiding and then written in forty minutes. The data was sound. The logic was clean. Senior leadership had approved it.

The problem was execution. The strategy required a systematic improvement to the company's enterprise customer onboarding process — a process that spanned four departments, none of which reported to Jordan. He could recommend what should happen. He could not make it happen.

For two weeks, he had been trying to solve it as a political problem: mapping the stakeholders, identifying the decision rights, crafting the business case. All valid activities. None of them was moving the actual problem.

Then, on a Tuesday morning run with Leon — the city planner he had met in the running group — Leon had described a problem in urban planning that was structurally identical: the need to coordinate change across siloed agencies that each had partial jurisdiction over an outcome and no incentive to absorb the coordination cost.

Jordan had said: "How did you solve it?"

Leon: "We didn't try to solve it through formal authority. We built a coalition of the people who cared most about the outcome, regardless of where they sat organizationally, and gave them a shared reporting structure. The departments didn't change. The alignment did."

Jordan had said nothing for the next quarter mile. Leon eventually said: "You just solved something, didn't you."

Jordan: "I think so."

The insight was not information he didn't have. He knew about cross-functional coalitions. He had been trained in stakeholder management. What had changed was the frame: he had been thinking about the problem as a coordination problem, and Leon's description of a structurally isomorphic problem in a different domain had made the solution visible that his direct analysis had not.

This is what the research calls an analogical leap: using a structural similarity between two apparently different problems to transfer a solution. It is one of the most reliably documented mechanisms of creative problem-solving.

This chapter is about creativity and how it actually works — not as mysterious inspiration, but as a learnable, practiceable, designable set of cognitive processes.

Section 1: What Creativity Is (and Is Not)

Defining Creativity

The most widely accepted research definition of creativity requires two criteria:

Novelty: the idea, product, or solution is new — either absolutely new (has not existed before) or new to the person or context.

Appropriateness (or value): the novel idea must also be useful, fit for purpose, or otherwise appropriate to the problem context. Pure randomness is novel but not creative; a genuinely creative solution is both new and useful.

This two-part definition excludes both "anything novel" (which would include arbitrary nonsense) and "anything useful" (which would include routine solutions to familiar problems). Creativity is at the intersection.

Margaret Boden's useful typology: - Combinational creativity: combining existing ideas in new ways (most common; most accessible) - Exploratory creativity: pushing the boundaries within an existing conceptual space - Transformational creativity: restructuring the conceptual space itself — changing the rules of what is possible (rarest; most revolutionary)

The Creativity Myths

Several pervasive myths about creativity are contradicted by the research:

"Creativity is a special talent some people have." Creativity is distributed across the population. While there are individual differences in creative potential (as with most traits), creativity is substantially influenced by environment, learning, practice, and motivation. Most people are significantly more creative than they believe.

"Creative insights arrive fully formed from nowhere." The "eureka moment" mythology is seductive but misleading. Research on insight shows that apparent sudden insights are preceded by extended periods of preparation and incubation — the solution arrives suddenly into consciousness, but it has been assembled over time below the level of awareness.

"Creativity requires complete freedom." Constraints facilitate creativity in well-documented ways. The blank page is intimidating; the page with a specific problem and a defined scope is generative. Constraints force lateral movement rather than defaulting to the first obvious solution.

"Intelligence and creativity are the same thing." Above a threshold IQ (~120), intelligence and creativity are essentially uncorrelated. The most creative people are not necessarily the highest-IQ people; above the threshold, other factors (openness to experience, intrinsic motivation, tolerance for ambiguity, domain knowledge) matter more.

Section 2: The Cognitive Architecture of Creativity

Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking

J.P. Guilford's foundational distinction (1950):

Divergent thinking: generating multiple possible responses to an open-ended question — the ability to produce many, varied, and unusual ideas. Fluency (how many), flexibility (how varied), originality (how unusual), and elaboration (how detailed) are the four components.

Convergent thinking: narrowing multiple possibilities down to the single best solution — the analytical ability to evaluate, select, and refine.

Both are required for creative work: divergent thinking generates the material; convergent thinking shapes it into something useful. The research on creative processes consistently shows that the failure to separate these modes in time is a primary source of creative block — evaluating ideas while generating them shuts down divergent thinking prematurely.

The brain networks underlying divergent and convergent thinking overlap with, but are not identical to, the default mode network (DMN — active during mind-wandering and unconstrained thought) and the executive control network (ECN — active during focused, goal-directed cognition). Creative thinking involves the co-activation of these usually antagonistic networks, which is why creative states often feel different from both resting and focused states.

Insight Problem-Solving

The aha moment — sudden insight — is neurologically distinct from non-insight problem-solving. Research using brain imaging shows that insight solutions are often preceded by a burst of high-frequency neural activity in the right anterior temporal lobe approximately 300 milliseconds before the solution enters conscious awareness.

What produces the aha moment? The current account: insight occurs when the problem-solver breaks the mental set — the initial, wrong framing of the problem that has been preventing the solution. The solution was available; the framing made it invisible. When the framing shifts, the solution becomes obvious.

This is why problems that have resisted sustained effort often yield to incubation: stepping away from the problem allows the initial mental set to relax, which creates the perceptual conditions for the insight.

Mental set and functional fixedness: the tendency to think about objects and concepts only in their familiar functions and contexts. The person who cannot see how to use a candle holder as a door stop is demonstrating functional fixedness. Breaking functional fixedness — deliberately considering the unfamiliar uses of familiar objects and concepts — is a trained skill that facilitates insight.

Remote Associative Thinking

Sarnoff Mednick's theory of creativity as remote associates: the ability to find connections between concepts that are normally considered unrelated. High-creative individuals have flatter associative hierarchies — their concept networks have fewer dominant associates, meaning unusual connections come to mind more readily.

The Remote Associates Test (RAT), developed from this theory, presents three words and asks for a fourth that connects them. (Example: PINE — CRAB — SAUCE → APPLE.) Performance on the RAT correlates with creative performance in real-world tasks, suggesting that associative flexibility is a genuine component of creative capacity.

The practical implication: creative problem-solving can be facilitated by deliberately searching for unusual connections — by asking not "what does X lead to?" but "what else does X resemble? What is X structurally similar to in a completely different domain?"

Section 3: The Creative Process

Wallas's four-stage model of the creative process (1926) remains a useful organizing framework:

Preparation: immersion in the problem — gathering information, defining the problem space, exploring the existing solutions and their limitations. The preparation stage is effortful and deliberate; it loads the cognitive system with the relevant material that incubation will process.

Incubation: stepping away from the conscious effort to solve — allowing the problem to process below the level of awareness while conscious attention is directed elsewhere. The research support for incubation is substantial: time away from a problem (sleep, walking, engaging in unrelated tasks) reliably improves subsequent insight problem-solving.

Illumination: the insight — the sudden arrival of a solution or a promising direction. Often experienced as unexpected and disproportionately vivid.

Verification: the critical, analytical work of evaluating whether the illuminated solution is actually correct and useful, refining it, and implementing it. The convergent thinking phase.

The model is not perfectly sequential — real creative work involves iteration across all four stages — but the basic architecture is well-supported and practically useful.

Incubation: The Neuroscience

Why does stepping away from a problem help? Several mechanisms:

Spreading activation: the default mode network continues processing problem-relevant material during mind-wandering, allowing unusual associations to activate that focused attention suppresses (because focused attention narrows the associative search).

Mental set relaxation: the wrong framing of the problem fades during incubation, creating the perceptual conditions for a reframing.

Sleep and memory consolidation: during sleep, the hippocampus replays and consolidates material from the day, including problem-related information. REM sleep specifically facilitates the recombination of distantly associated memories that produces novel connections.

The practical implication: deliberately building incubation into creative work — not as avoidance but as structured stepping-away — improves creative output. The best preparation for a creative insight is often to work hard on the problem and then stop.

Section 4: Conditions That Facilitate and Impede Creativity

The research has identified the conditions that make creative work more or less likely.

What Helps

Intrinsic motivation: Teresa Amabile's Componential Theory of Creativity places intrinsic motivation as the primary motivational driver of creative work. People are most creative when they are primarily motivated by the interest, enjoyment, or challenge of the work itself rather than external rewards.

Amabile's research on the intrinsic motivation principle: external rewards that are controlling (contingent, expected, focusing attention on the reward rather than the work) reliably reduce creative performance. External rewards that are informational (providing feedback about competence) or that are not controlling do not harm creative performance.

Positive affect (at moderate levels): mild positive mood is associated with broader associative thinking, greater cognitive flexibility, and higher creative output. The mechanism: positive affect signals safety, which allows the loosening of focused vigilance that facilitates the broad, inclusive search characteristic of divergent thinking. Extreme positive affect (manic states) is associated with fluency but reduced appropriateness — more ideas but less evaluation.

Psychological safety (Chapter 25 connection): creative risk-taking requires the belief that novel, unformed, potentially wrong ideas can be shared without penalty. This is precisely what psychological safety provides. Teams with high psychological safety show higher creative output not because they are more talented but because they surface and develop ideas that lower-safety teams suppress.

Domain knowledge: creativity in any domain requires sufficient domain knowledge to recognize the problems worth solving, identify the constraints that matter, and distinguish genuinely novel solutions from merely ignorant ones. The "outsider perspective" effect is real — people new to a field sometimes ask the questions experts have stopped asking — but it requires enough knowledge to know that the naive question is actually interesting rather than already answered.

Constraints: counterintuitively, well-designed constraints facilitate creativity. The effect is strongest when constraints are tight enough to force lateral movement away from obvious solutions but not so tight as to make the problem insoluble. "You have 20 minutes and three specific ingredients" produces more creative cooking than "cook whatever you like."

What Impedes

Evaluation apprehension: the knowledge that ideas will be immediately judged suppresses idea generation. This is the primary problem with ideation in evaluative contexts — people self-censor before sharing. The separation of generation from evaluation is the primary solution.

Time pressure: moderate time pressure can increase creative productivity (urgency focus). High time pressure reliably reduces creative quality for complex, novel problems — it narrows the search to already-known solutions and reduces the time for incubation. The "time pressure creativity fallacy" (Amabile): people feel most creative under high pressure; they actually produce less creative work.

Surveillance and control: being watched while doing creative work reduces creative output, even without explicit evaluation. The watching alone is experienced as controlling.

Extrinsic focus: when attention is primarily on the reward, evaluation, or comparison rather than the work itself, creative performance suffers. This is the Amabile intrinsic motivation finding: not that money always hurts creativity, but that the focus on the reward shifts attention from the intrinsically engaging creative problem to the instrumental task of earning the reward.

Section 5: Problem-Solving Frameworks

Design Thinking

IDEO's design thinking framework, developed by Tim Brown and colleagues, operationalizes human-centered creative problem-solving:

Empathize: deeply understand the people who experience the problem. Not just their stated needs but their behaviors, context, and unstated pain points. Ethnographic observation, user interviews, "a day in the life" immersion.

Define: synthesize what you've learned into a clear problem statement. The most important step in design thinking — a well-defined problem is significantly closer to solution than a vague one. The "how might we...?" format.

Ideate: divergent generation of potential solutions. Deferring judgment, building on others' ideas, seeking volume before quality, encouraging wild ideas.

Prototype: build rapid, low-fidelity representations of promising solutions. Not to build the final product — to make ideas tangible enough to test.

Test: put the prototype in front of the people who have the problem. Learn from their response. Return to the earlier stages with what you've learned.

The critical contributions of design thinking: the emphasis on understanding the problem deeply before solving it (most problem-solving skips this), the explicit separation of generation from evaluation, and the iterative prototype-test-return cycle that builds learning into the process.

The Double Diamond Model

The UK Design Council's Double Diamond model describes creative problem-solving as two diverge-converge cycles:

First Diamond — the right problem: - Discover (diverge): wide exploration of the problem space; what is the full context? - Define (converge): synthesize into a focused problem statement; what is the most important thing to solve?

Second Diamond — the right solution: - Develop (diverge): generate many possible solutions to the defined problem - Deliver (converge): select, refine, and implement the best solution

The model makes explicit that problem definition is itself a creative, iterative process — not something you get right the first time but something you converge on through exploration.

Six Thinking Hats (De Bono)

Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats framework structures group discussion by assigning different thinking modes:

• White hat: facts and information only — what do we know?
• Red hat: emotions and intuitions — how does this feel?
• Black hat: critical judgment — what could go wrong?
• Yellow hat: optimism and value — what is best about this?
• Green hat: creativity and alternatives — what else might be possible?
• Blue hat: process management — how are we thinking?

The value: structuring discussion so that the group thinks together from the same angle at the same time (all wearing the same hat), rather than simultaneously arguing from different angles. This reduces the defensive dynamic of creative group work and ensures that both the critical (black hat) and generative (green hat) modes are explicitly engaged rather than merged.

SCAMPER

A generative checklist for expanding existing ideas:

• Substitute: what could be substituted for a component?
• Combine: what could be combined with something else?
• Adapt: what could be adapted from another context?
• Modify/Magnify: what could be changed, enlarged, or emphasized?
• Put to other uses: what else could this be used for?
• Eliminate: what could be removed?
• Reverse/Rearrange: what could be reversed or rearranged?

SCAMPER is not a deep creative framework — it is a practical checklist for escaping the obvious when you're stuck. Used systematically, it generates directions for exploration that systematic analysis might miss.

Section 6: Brainstorming — The Research

Brainstorming, introduced by Alex Osborn in 1953, is the most widely used creativity technique in organizational settings. It is also, the research consistently suggests, less effective than most people believe.

The Problem with Brainstorming

The four rules of classical brainstorming: (1) defer judgment — no criticism during ideation; (2) go for quantity; (3) build on others' ideas; (4) encourage wild ideas.

The research finding (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987 and subsequent): brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer and less original ideas than the same number of people working independently (nominal groups). The gap is large and robust.

Three mechanisms explain it:

Production blocking: only one person can speak at a time. While others are speaking, individuals are suppressing or forgetting their own ideas, or waiting rather than generating.

Evaluation apprehension: despite the no-criticism rule, people self-censor ideas they think will be judged. In practice, the no-criticism rule reduces explicit criticism but does not eliminate the social anticipation of evaluation.

Social loafing: individuals in groups exert less effort than they would independently, because individual contribution is less visible and because they can free-ride on others' output.

What Works Better

Brainwriting (each person writes ideas independently first, then ideas are shared and built on): removes production blocking while preserving the building-on-others aspect of brainstorming.

Electronic brainstorming: simultaneous idea entry in a text environment eliminates production blocking entirely. Research shows electronic brainstorming groups outperform both in-person brainstorming groups and nominal groups on quantity.

Independent generation then group discussion: the Delphi method and its variants — each person generates ideas independently, ideas are aggregated anonymously, then the group discusses the aggregated set — consistently outperforms in-person brainstorming.

Psychological safety before ideation: team contexts with high psychological safety show higher brainstorming effectiveness, because evaluation apprehension is reduced by the environment rather than only by the rule.

Section 7: Building a Creative Practice

Creativity is not only a talent or an event. It is a practice — a set of habits, environments, and skills that can be deliberately cultivated.

The Creative Habit (Tharp)

Choreographer Twyla Tharp's account of creativity as habit: creative work does not begin with inspiration. It begins with showing up. The ritual of arriving at the studio, of picking up the tools, of beginning — this is the creative practice. Inspiration is what sometimes arrives after you have already begun.

The practical corollary: creativity is less available to people who wait for it to arrive than to people who build the conditions in which it can occur. This includes: - A designated time and space for creative work - A beginning ritual that signals "creative mode" - A record-keeping system (notebook, journal, voice recorder) that captures ideas when they arise — because ideas arrive at inconvenient times and disappear if not captured - The discipline to begin before you feel ready

The Creative State

The conditions for creative work differ from the conditions for analytical work:

Diffuse attention: the broadly inclusive attentional state associated with the default mode network facilitates divergent thinking. This is why creative insights often arrive in the shower, on walks, while making coffee — these activities engage just enough cognition to prevent mind-wandering but not enough to fully recruit the executive control network.

Moderate positive affect: mild positive mood facilitates associative thinking. The stressed, anxious state is particularly unfavorable for creative work — it narrows attention and reduces cognitive flexibility.

Reduced self-monitoring: the inner critic — the editor who evaluates each idea as it is generated — suppresses divergent thinking. Practices that reduce self-monitoring (freewriting, mindfulness, explicit "no judgment" periods) facilitate idea generation.

From the Field: Dr. Reyes on Creative Problem-Solving in Clinical Work

The best clinical work I've ever witnessed — in my own practice and in supervision — has the quality of creative problem-solving. Not scripted technique application, but genuine responsiveness to what is in front of the practitioner.

Most clinicians I've supervised plateau at technique. They learn what to do and they do it, reliably, in the situations the technique is designed for. The best clinicians develop something different: they notice when the standard technique isn't working, and they can think about why, and they can improvise a response that is grounded in theory but not scripted by it.

That improvisation is creativity in the technical sense: a novel response that is also appropriate to the therapeutic context. It requires domain knowledge (the theory), pattern recognition (the ability to read what is happening), and the willingness to deviate from the script when the script doesn't fit.

The thing that most prevents this kind of creative clinical work is exactly what the research predicts: evaluation apprehension — the fear of doing something wrong that is observed and judged. The clinicians who develop most creatively are the ones in supervisory relationships where genuine experimentation is safe. The ones who plateau are the ones performing competence for their supervisors rather than developing competence with them.

Research Spotlight: Amabile's Componential Theory of Creativity

Teresa Amabile's componential theory identifies three components required for creative performance:

Domain-relevant skills: the knowledge base and technical skills specific to the domain. You cannot write a creative chemistry paper without chemistry; you cannot compose innovative music without musical knowledge. Domain knowledge is necessary but not sufficient.

Creativity-relevant skills: the cognitive processes and working styles that facilitate divergent thinking — associative flexibility, tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to take risks, the ability to defer judgment. These are learnable and developable.

Intrinsic task motivation: the degree to which the person is motivated by the intrinsic interest and challenge of the work itself. This is Amabile's central contribution: motivation quality, not just quantity, is the primary predictor of creative performance.

The intrinsic motivation principle: external rewards and constraints that are experienced as controlling reduce intrinsic motivation and therefore reduce creative performance. Not all external rewards harm creativity — those that are informational or unexpected and non-controlling do not. But the default of outcome-contingent, controlling reward structures systematically undermines creative work.

Key Terms

Common Misconceptions

"Brainstorming is the best way to generate creative ideas in groups." Brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer and less original ideas than independent work. Brainwriting, electronic brainstorming, and independent generation before group discussion are more effective.

"You have to wait for inspiration." Inspiration is more available to people who have built the habits and environments that allow it to arrive. The creative practitioner doesn't wait for inspiration; they show up and begin, and inspiration sometimes follows.

"Constraints kill creativity." The research consistently shows that well-designed constraints facilitate creativity by forcing lateral movement away from obvious solutions. Complete freedom often produces generic solutions; tight constraints produce original ones.

"Creative breakthroughs come from pure intelligence." Above a threshold IQ, creativity and intelligence are essentially uncorrelated. Domain knowledge, associative flexibility, intrinsic motivation, and tolerance for ambiguity are better predictors of creative performance than raw intelligence.

"Positive thinking always helps creative work." Moderate positive affect facilitates divergent thinking. Extreme positive affect (very high arousal) can reduce the appropriateness of ideas. And artificially induced positive affect (forced positivity) in the face of genuine problems is not equivalent to genuine positive affect.