Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 7. The survival of the weirdest

We'll carry on writing music forever, whatever else we're doing, because you can't just stop. You find yourself doing it whether you want to or not.

—John Lennon, ITV interview, 1964

That their brains work differently is problematic enough. That their personalities are difficult makes them all the more egregious. But the thing that finally curses creative people to lives of disgrace is the compulsion to follow a distant drummer that the rest of us cannot hear.

One of the favourite examples of the self-promotional literature of creativity trainers is the invention of Velcro. It is quoted with clockwork regularity as evidence that ordinary people like you and me can come up with brilliant ideas if we'd only put our minds to it.

Here is Sidney Parnes telling us how you too could invent a Velcro if you only used his Visionizing process, a recent adjunct to CPS:

The heart of Visionizing's creative process is the breaking of habitual mental associations and forming new ones – including remote associations. Analogies can provide a powerful tool to promote this process. The sticky 'burr' you pick up on your slacks in the woods may provide a remote analogy to a desired closure process in buttoning or zippering – if you can redefine the problem in a new way. If we are able to view the problem as one of 'connecting' two pieces of cloth, we might suddenly realize that we might 'connect' them with something like the burrs. (His italics.)

On the face of it there's ...