THE BIG FIVE: EXPERIMENTATION

Why creativity needs inefficiency.

Last week we turned up the dial on Openness, the first of the Big Five Creative Behaviours. This week it’s all about the second one: Experimentation.

Think of it this way: if openness invites possibility, then experimentation allows us to discover what’s possible.

The creative process is an iterative one. Using our creativity is trial and error, so experimentation, as a fully dialled-up behaviour, is crucial.

Sounds simple enough in principle.

In practice, not so much.

Why?

Well, we live in a productivity-obsessed world, increasingly focused on results, outcomes, and what can be measured.

Productivity needs efficiency and predictability. It favours the shortest route from A to B. That way, we can see where we’re going before we begin.

Even though we need it, if we’re not careful creativity becomes the casualty of productivity.

Experimentation is different. It needs the detours, the diversions, the dead ends

Experimentation actually needs inefficiency.

Every experiment follows the same basic pattern. We start with a question or an idea. We test it. We observe what happens. We learn from the results. Then we adjust and try again.

Interestingly, this is also the creative process.

Using experimentation as a creative behaviour encourages us to loosen our grip on the outcomes by committing to the process instead. We try new combinations, test unconventional ideas, and push the limits of what’s possible without knowing whether or not it will work.

By prioritising the process over the results, and course correcting as we go, we arrive at unexpected destinations, discovering things we never would have found otherwise.

The journey will probably take longer. There’ll be more jeopardy along the way, but there is far greater potential for the results to be more creative ones. That’s the payoff. To earn that payoff, we will need an increased tolerance for risk, a higher threshold for failure, and a willingness to persevere.

To help put this creative behaviour into action, I’m going to use cooking as an example, because cooking exists on a scale of creativity.

At one end, you have efficiency and predictability, the end where you diligently follow a recipe, leading you to the known results. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this by the way, when we’re hosting a dinner party for twelve people, predictable outcomes are welcome. Following a recipe however is not in itself a creative act.

Cooking becomes a creative act when we treat it like an experiment.

By dialling up experimentation as a creative behaviour - trusting instincts over instruction, deviating even slightly from the recipe, adding an alternative ingredient, tasting the flavours and then tweaking them, introducing a new technique, s, adding just a splash of imagination - we turn the process into a creative one.

Bangers and mash every night of the week might not be creative but experimenting with how we make bangers and mash differently every night of the week; one night caramelising the onions, another adding mustard, another serving it in a Yorkshire pudding, well that becomes a very different story.

The more we experiment, the more permission we give ourselves to play, to have fun, to stop worrying about getting everything right straight away. That’s when we begin to turn the dial on this behaviour up, and when our creativity begins to wake up and get involved.