What do you mean by ‘begin with the answer’? They don’t call it a “creative leap” for nothing. Nobody talks about a series of steps that lead to a creation, a genuinely creative idea. The concept of divergent thinking, or “going wide,” is key to creating truly new ideas. Most of what we typically do is convergent thinking: reducing, criticizing, judging, deciding. Once you have an answer, that’s exciting. Then you can usually work back through it to prove it should work in theory. That’s what I mean by starting with the answer. Everyone likes to think that you can start with an analysis of the data and come up with an insight. Then you can start talking about possible solutions, proceed in a linear process of steps, and arrive at a great idea. I just haven’t experienced that ideas happen in that way. Great ideas come out of generating lots of ideas, most of which will be bad, one of which—just one of which—could be brilliant.
