The discovery and creative process
Divorce reason from the discovery process. Discovery is intuition. Discovery is trial and error. Discovery is the, “ah ha” moment. Justification of the discovery requires an explanation and that’s where reason comes in – but not before.
The creative process that leads to breakthroughs – penicillin, post it notes, and airbnb – is a function of intuition, experiment, and luck.
Archimedes and the gold crown illustrates this point. The king gives a goldsmith a block of gold to make a crown. The goldsmith delivers the crown but the king’s skeptical if all the gold got used for his crown or if the goldsmith pinched off gold for himself. The king enlists Archimedes to solve the problem and if Archimedes doesn’t figure it out, it’s off with his head.
Finding a solution consumes Archimedes. Mundane experiences like shopping for groceries are inseparable from solving the problem. Days go by and the king grows impatient. Pressured and stressed out, Archimedes tries to relax so he slips into the bath, the water moves up the side of the bath and eureka, there it is. The water level before he entered the bath and after is related to the object placed in it.
Now imagine a scientific journal asking Archimedes to publish his findings. Do you think he’d write, “I was panicked. Everything I looked at needed to be a solution. Stressed the hell out, I got into the bath. I thought about slipping under the water for good, leaving it all behind, when I noticed the water on my tub rising and I thought the difference in water height is related to the object placed in it!”
I doubt it. It would probably read more like this: “It seemed logical that I needed to test for the density of the crown. I’ve studied water patterns my whole life and it was natural to start with the most abundant material on earth. After a bath which primed my brain, I poured some water over rocks in a beaker, ran a few other obvious experiments, and concluded the change in water height (which I’ll call displacement) would be the most logical solution.”
Archimedes is being rational in the explanation and justification process. But the discovery process was anything but that.
Discover and create with experiment, trial and error. Use inturition for both the question to ask and the answer to seek. Though nobody ever got fired for coming up with an idea they arrived at through reason, use reason for the justification process, for getting people bought into your idea.
Why does this even matter? Because coming up with good ideas and innovation matters. If you’re responsible with coming up with good ideas (you work in marketing or advertising) you should be concerned with the process that goes into coming up with them.
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