The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better.

The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of absence”. They mistake inconceivability as dead nonexistence. If such an inhospitable person points their eyeballs or minds at something, and nothing is perceived or conceived, to them it is pointless to engage. They cut it off, implicitly or explicitly, through a variety of tactics (* see note below), painfully familiar to anyone with a living designerly soul. They are invalidation tactics, meant to not only assert but demonstrate and enact impossibility, and to convince everyone involved that the incipient idea is not worth further consideration. In this way, they sap the enthusiasm, energy and hope required to invite the future into the present.

The best design collaborators, though, are vividly alive to the omnipresent possibility that something miraculous might irrupt into the world at any moment.

They adopt an attitude and receptive charge of imminent miracle. Kate Bush sung it well:

I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don’t know when…
But just saying it could even make it happen

Do not mistake this outburst for an optimistic prediction. These sung words are a speech act, that expresses, describes and invokes the conditions for coaxing the unconceived from nowhere into presence, ex nihilo. What is invoked is an acutely charged expectation that something shockingly new and good might shock us with its spontaneous appearance.

But the expectation is only a necessary condition. It is not in itself sufficient. The irruption ex nihilo emerges from efforts to summon it forth. Ideas are invited to consummation through participation in its development, emergence, strengthening and maturation.

But… If we deny this expectation, and refuse to cooperate and participate in its emergence, the idea’s worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes nowhere because we refuse to come along.

This awareness and attitude toward nothingness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Another insight into nothingness is crucial: the sober understanding that these miracles are cloaked with dread, and with this understanding a second attitude: courageous resolve to endure the dread, and press forward through the agony.

A delightful process will not yield delightful results. It will yield only frivolous and derivative drivel. It is the harrowing processes that produce brilliant breakthroughs of insight.

I once got into a surprisingly bitter fight over this matter. I had a philosophical friend who insisted that my tragic sense of creativity was passé. Maybe in his youth he had too much vulgar existentialism, with all its angsty melodrama and alienated brooding.

His claim — his doctrine, actually — was that we can generate novelty without any pain. We could frolic about in the world of ideas, and through pure play produce exciting new ideas with joyous profusion. His view was that it was much more blazingly and boldly original to reject the necessity of creative pain than to embrace it.

This pissed me off. Maybe it was because this vision of frivolous creativity reminds me of how nondesigners think design probably is or should be.

But annoyance became hostility, when I began to notice that whenever I tried to share with him one of my painfully won insights, he didn’t understand them. And he would sit and smirk, as my attempts to convey my insights failed to penetrate his skull. His own incomprehension and my frustration were amusing evidence that there was no point to my babble.

But then — eureka! My confusion had given him a new novel idea! Perhaps he would write it into the book he was writing.

And see? No angst. No suffering. Just floating playfully above, amused, detached, waiting for inspiration to alight.

And he would then proceed to paraphrase my own idea to me as his own, as if he himself conceived what he refused to be taught.

No wonder he believed that frolicking about in the playground of other people’s ideas was sufficient to stimulate original thought.

He couldn’t conceive the difference between kidnapping someone else’s insight and birthing his own.

Rejection of the radically unfamiliar, passive consumption of novelty won through distant ugly work — two facets of the same attitude toward approaching nothingness. Two strategies for avoiding the labor pain, strain, uncertainty and terror of giving birth to new being ex nihilo.

Note * — One common way to destroy possibility of radical newness is to interrupt. This kills the line of intuitive thought before it can gains flow, momentum, musicality. Chop the song into isolated notes, and interject each with soul-killing frustration, and the melody will stay dismembered and never come to life.

Or digress. Change the subject (“subject” in the most literal, egregoric sense). Or impose and reimpose an alien field of relevance upon the conversation. “What you are trying to say is irrelevant, and should therefore be snuffed out before it wastes more time.”

Or confront the fragile embryonic subject with some overpowering objection, and turn the nursery into an arena, where the infant must prove its right to eventual maturity by defeating gladiators and lions. Even if the infant survives the arena, the very deprivation of nurture and protection will turn the idea monstrous and ugly.

Pessimistically pick at the idea, and find innumerable reasons why it the idea can never come to anything. Destroy the ideas faith in itself until it is dispirited and ready to give up the geist.

In fearful organizations, another routine tactic is lethally effective. For the sake of efficiency or rigor, clap procedures, formalities and norms onto the collaboration. These misnorms afford credibility only to well-established, pre-comprehended ideas, Only sturdy, old, established, workaday idea-blocks are admitted, and the only innovation permitted is in permutations of stacking. One can build whatever out of the provided LEGO block set, but nothing on the order of inventing LEGO blocks could ever happen. However novel the stacking, the notion stacks never feel promising, only stalely sufficient. But it serves its true purpose, which is to check boxes that require checking, and make one’s colleagues more likely layoff targets than oneself. The output lacks all excitement, but never mind that. A marketing department will coat the quotidian with noncredible hype calculated to be adequate for making a fraction of a percent of a segment choose this option of that one. The experience of this bullshit coated chickenshit, is commonly known as “corporate”. It is the natural consequence of trying to add “desirability” at the end of an engineering process (often social engineering that mistakes itself for design because it considers “people”) that should have been designed starting from desirability.

It is commonplace — and by commonplace logic, it is the precisely the commonplace that determines all meaning — to call all vision-oriented planning design.

To design is to imagine a possibility with such specificity that specifications are produced that can serve as a plan. (“Design is the rendering of intent”, to use the poetically spare jargon of one typical design “thought leader”.) According to this definition of design, one designs a book or a service in the same sense as one designs a microchip or jet engine.

But we know, even when we can’t or won’t admit it, that design has a second, deeper meaning. And it is this meaning that gives design its mystique, and that is because design (in this second sense) it is rooted in the same soil as mysticism. Design in this sense taps into depths of human meaning, draws it to the surface and nourishes the world with strange new vivacity. There is something vividly alive, important and ineffable in a great design artifact — unprecedented, artificial (in the strict sense) but as natural as nature itself — enhanced, renewed, human.

If Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” explored “rendering of intent” design, someone should write a followup: “Arts of the Second-Natural” to explore design that materially manifests meaning. The blurring of these two conceptions of design has made it far too effortless to lose the second, far more vulnerable design that serves an technocratic order that numbs and is numb to love, even of the minutest magnitude.

If you want creativity here’s what you really need:

1. The right approach.
   Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg.
2. The right expectations.
   Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though.
3. The right team.
   It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked.
4. The right inputs.
   Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”.
5. The right conditions.
   Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants.
6. The right tests.
   The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made.
7. The right support
   Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.