The Riddle: Where Ideas Come From and How to Have Better Ones

Chapter 10. SUDDENLY BRILLIANT Codes

What do grandmaster chess players, the 1960s sitcom Gilligan's Island, serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, and improvisational theater share in common? Codes. Creativity codes are frameworks on which innovators generate new ideas (mostly, ideas that work). As you've come to appreciate by now, creative insight is not necessarily the result of random events. Based on experience identifying constraints, making unorthodox connections, and challenging prevailing conventions, innovators ultimately develop over time an almost automatic ability to generate new ideas by using a set of creative frameworks for interpreting the world around them. They use codes.

Creative codes arise as the result of years of experience working, successfully and unsuccessfully, within a given field. These codes are the stuff on which intuition, or gut instinct, is created. You've likely experienced your own creative code at work. Think about it this way. Have you ever had an idea that just felt right? You didn't necessarily know why it was a good idea or the right solution to the problem, but you knew that it would work. You likely felt that way because the idea fit your creative code. It fit the framework that you have used many times in the past, either consciously or unconsciously, to solve a problem. Therefore, the new idea, as crazy as it may seem, makes sense to you. It's as if you have seen it before.

Once you are aware of something, it seems to pop up all over ...