Pulling creativity to the forefront
Editor’s note: Ben Jenkins is co-founder of Okay Human and has spent 25 years studying the emotions and motivations of consumers for brands that include Levis, Johnnie Walker, British Airways and Axe. The first half was as a brand strategist at ad agencies, including BBH, Droga5 and Ogilvy. Find Jenkins on LinkedIn.
It’s the mid 2000s and I have a boss who hates me and everything I stand for. He is left-brained and analytical so we called him “brain on a stick.” Meanwhile, I am scrappy, intuitive and emotional to the point of paranoid. I’m ready to be fired at any moment when something unexpected slips from his pursed, angry lips.
“You’re more creative than I’ll ever be.”
In that moment something profoundly shifted in me. He’d just told me that my chaotic, messy brain was a sought-after commodity.
Twenty years later and I’m the person I am today because I grew in an environment that not only tolerated but encouraged my messy mind. But how many of these spaces exist today? I was fortunate enough to have skidded into the workplace in time to harvest the wisdom of elders from an analogue age – where ideas and creativity were hard won, but there was an art to coaxing and conjuring them into existence.
Unlike today’s orthodoxy, just enough of my teachers were comfortable with the circuitous, ill-formed or the humble “I don’t know.” They embodied it for me to mimic. I had permission to fumble for the idea. This culture even celebrated a feelings-first approach to creativity, where fragments of an idea were divined, nurtured and, only then, ferociously interrogated. We didn't impatiently push for premature perfection because we knew that hurried conviction was a threat to the fragile ideas that produce brand-transforming magic.
Upholding this doctrine today demands thicker skin, leading to a creativity crisis. In the march toward the frictionless and the efficient, we’ve been conditioned to expect slick, simple soundbites with zero mental load thanks to the reductionist smelt we’ve ingested. This conditioning intensifies as AI enters the scene and sprays us with more perfect answers. But perfect in creativity isn’t smooth, it is rough, spiky and obnoxious.
Creators today are asked to be slick long before they’re ready. Failure to swiftly capture attention risks instant alienation. The formula has been codified and validated, by those like Mr. Beast and his followers, and it demands strict adherence. A societal fear of the slow produces slop and thwarts our right brain where ideas find us.
Capitalizing on knowledge and doubt
Skills I developed in the pre-Instagram age are gasping for air as colleagues and friends glaze over when I linger too long on half-chewed ideas. The last quarter century bred us to worship clipped, confident “experts”, producing certainty-peddlers like Clavicular who tell us we can be rich and hot. In a world of data-backed certainty, you’re a loser if you only half know something.
Uncertainty, doubt and even questions are feared, and the elevation of convenience buries curiosity altogether. At work, answers rule and questions betray weakness.
Now imagine how rare creative leaps are for those who only ever knew a tech-mediated world. Arthur Brooks blames a creativity deficit on the easy problem-solving this generation was gifted by tech. In his book, “The Meaning of Your Life,” he asserts that the meaningless epidemic stems from a societal conditioning of left-brain thinking. An abundance of rational systems told us we can solve complicated problems with complicated technology and simple UX. But that has left us hopeless at solving complex problems such as love, beauty or the meaning of life. The very components that feed creativity. For those we need our right brains which have atrophied for a generation.
Two decades of flipping switches to solve problems builds unrealistic expectations and doesn't prepare us for struggle. The thing about solving problems is that you literally cannot know the answer at the beginning. Comfort with this reality makes you a much better thinker. Bad ideas are necessary on the journey to epiphanies. But these are woefully undervalued in a world that spouts speedy sycophantic AI solutions to every query.
Reprograming our brains
Too timid to trust our instincts, we resign ourselves to the takes on the internet. As we’ve spun up this giant interconnected online brain, we’ve deprogrammed our beautiful human ones.
For eight years I’ve been working on reanimating humans. Beginning in my quest for emotionally lucid interview participants. I found that humans do reanimate and emote profoundly even around the dullest topics when appropriately stimulated. More recently the AI revolution has accelerated our exploration into computer and human minds – including how creativity comes about. “The Emergent Mind” by Gaurav Suri and James McClelland describes how AI only entered its growth spurt when it borrowed from humans. Before 2010, AI was built using strict rules and commands, but neural networks replaced this. New research into emergent thinking exposes how the human mind is even more nonlinear and emergent than AI can ever be. According to Suri, “We have as many ways of getting to a thought as there are atoms in the universe.” Idea formation is truly more embodied and sensorial, involving discomfort, emotion, imagery, embarrassment, dreams and even trauma.
Creativity in research
To trigger pathways (and creative ideas) human neurons must be warmed up through fun, fear, humor or any true emotion. Emotions aren’t an inconvenient sideshow to be regulated. They are instrumental in serious work, especially if your work involves creativity. In fact, there is nothing more rational than harnessing emotion. The rationalists agree: Emotion makes creativity happen!
The human mind is the original efficient machine. It can solve complex problems that an AI might fail to solve even while consuming the energy of a village. Tech may have mastered the complicated left-brain problems, but we must solve the numinous tasks by reawakening the fleshy machines we walk around in. Here some places to start:
- Notice how liberating it feels when you say, “I don’t know.” The truth is we don’t know. At least not until we begin the journey – and this must start with curiosity. Free yourself from the belief that not having an answer is weakness and feel the power of ignorance.
- Sit still and allow ideas to materialize. Most people abandon ideas too early, mistaking discomfort for dead ends. Reflection isn’t a luxury, it’s where meaning forms. Maintain the energy by staying in the question.
- Feel for the friction. Pay attention to what feels off, rough or unresolved. When every problem you face is deftly dispatched by tech, you start to lose your feel for it. Everything becomes smooth, sanded, swift and strangely empty, like the infinite scroll. Friction brings you back to something real.
- Look for lies and have fun with them. We cling to what feels true because it gives us certainty, but certainty shuts things down. Instead, put yourself into a state of play chasing down what might not be true. Lie-hunting is not only more fun but reveals way more lies and truths on the journey.
- Luxuriate in the uncomfortable. There’s a tendency to clean things up quickly, to resolve tension before it’s done its work. Resist that urge and stay in the awkward, the half-formed. Discomfort isn’t a flaw in the process; it is the process.
- Don’t fetishize the “finished.” We’re wired to value the polished, the certain, the complete. But finished thinking is often the least interesting kind. Keep things open a little longer, let them stay in motion – ideas that are still forming have more life in them.
- Feel before you explain. Not everything can be understood cleanly through language and forcing it too early can flatten it. Let yourself feel something before you try to explain it. Notice the images, sounds and sensations that come up. When you stay with that for a moment, you access something deeper than logic alone can reach.
- Engage AI as a trickster: Finally, don’t give up your agency to the machine. Give it the job of reanimating you. Far from being the rational, omnipotent or sensible one, make it start fires, wrongfoot you, mock, upend and even troll. The play instinct is awakened and sharpens our ability to imagine, spot lies and create new opportunities. Be clear that it’s humans that arrive at the most innovative places, AI simply gets you into a heightened emotional state of creative receptivity.