Should idea conception be left to specialists?

I collect quotes from songwriters and other creative people in which they talk about how they experience organic (natural, spontaneous, inspired) imagination as they go about their work. Here are a few of them.

“You walk around with your aerials out and it gets delivered to you. It’s more about feeling it than thinking about it.”
David Arnold, film composer

“Often when you’re working you feel that something is coming through you.”
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things

“When you get it right, it’s like someone is writing it for you.”
Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music frontman and solo artist

The quoted experiences not only contradicted the sacrosanct design thinking principle that idea generation is done in groups using a diverge-converge method such as brainstorming — they also played a part in the creation of such masterworks as David Arnold’s Casino Royale score and Iain McGilchrist’s book The Matter With Things.

The Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the most significant book or books published by Members during the year. Over fifty books have been singled out during that period. The quality and number of significant books published by Members in 2021 is unprecedented since the inauguration of the Prize. The outstanding book of the year is undoubtedly The Matter with Things by Dr Iain McGilchrist, who also received the 2009 Prize for The Master and his Emissary. In view of this Iain is awarded the Grand Prize for his Herculean achievement running to 1,600 pages and based on 5,700 references.

David Lorimer, Programme Director, Scientific and Medical Network | View source
The Matter with Things—one videoed conversation per chapter

The two forms of imagination

Brainstorming and other diverge-converge methods use the brain’s left hemisphere and synthetic imagination, which is fine if all that’s needed is a modest idea.

But when you need an idea that has the potential to generate extensive or exceptional downstream value, as well as being a good all round fit, a codified process, mechanical method or choreographed technique will not do the trick. The right hemisphere must be brought into play.

Given that brainstorming sessions tend to produce mediocre (“halfway up the mountain”) results, I’m wondering why leaders of Now-to-New (innovation, change and problem solving) projects don’t turn instead to specially selected individuals, either on the payroll or from outside the organisation, who can deploy organic imagination on demand in order to conceive potent, “top of the mountain” ideas that will be elaborated downstream by a well prepared and properly resourced group deploying the Idea-to-Concept Method.

Idea conception is too important to be left to unequipped, left hemisphere dominant players with a limited understanding of the project’s nuanced demands and dynamics.

Demands are the needs the project must satisfy — the value requirements, outcomes, deliverables and states of affairs.

Dynamics refers to the moving parts, their relationships and the broadest context in which they operate.

Each stage of a Now-to-New project — conception, development and actualisation — calls for people with distinct abilities, working alone or together according to the nature of the work that lies ahead.

More quotes

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men¹. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden, cited by Roger S Bacon in The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius

Steinbeck is clearly referring to the initial spark and not to subsequent concept development, otherwise we could cite many counterexamples such as Lennon and McCartney, the Wright brothers, and French and Saunders.

There is only one stage in the true model of the Creative Process. At the simplest level, creativity is the act of being and doing folded into a state of flow called life. I claim that we naturally spend all of our time in a state of flow, despite claims in the popular press to the contrary. Even when we’re analyzing a problem (in the Identity stage), we’re DOING something (in the Building stage), and employing tools of some sort (in the Using stage). We simultaneously embrace a rapidly evolving picture of what we want to do that unfolds just before we do it (in the Vision stage). See, it all folds together into one. What the popular press describes as a state of flow occurs when the execution of the creative process becomes jubilant, and consequently high performance.

We divide the Creative Process into pieces in an effort to understand and picture the complexity of the entire process. But let’s not fall into the trap of believing that we actually execute the pieces in some sort of lock step fashion. It’s convenient and instructive to perceive that creativity has certain stages, and that we can all emotionally, physically and mentally relate to these stages, but to hold any model of the creative process as a precise description of creativity, and to force others to adhere strictly to its application is foolish. Stuart Kauffman uses an expression to describe the difficulty of modeling any living system: “the algorithm is incompressible.” In other words, there’s no shorter method, routine or program to describe life or living systems than life or the living system itself. Models are representations of reality but they are not the reality itself. There is no algorithm or equation that we can force creativity into that is shorter than the creative act itself.

Bryan Coffman when at MG Taylor Corporation, referring to stages in the MG Taylor DesignShop process | View source