Why humans beat the bots at creativity

Creativity is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in the professional world. When we hear the word, we tend to think of great artists, songwriters or novelists. The term doesn't sit so easily in the context of lean project management, finance and KPIs.

Which is a shame, because learning how to be more creative can have a direct positive impact on all of those things. (Except creative accounting, which is something quite different. Don't do that.)

Essential for progress

The problem is partly one of definition. Creativity is simply the ability to come up with original ideas, see things differently and solve problems that have previously proved intractable.

Whenever you do any of these, you are making – or creating – something that didn't exist before. When we put it that way, it becomes easy to see that it's not just relevant but essential to our working lives if we want to make progress.

Fortunately, the human brain is naturally creative. And I don't just mean the brains of people we might think of as creative geniuses. We all have this ability. In the right state, anyone's brain can come up with ideas that are truly original – if we allow it to.

One way the brain does this is by combining two ideas that have seemed completely unrelated until that point. And it often does so at the very moment your focus is somewhere seemingly off-topic. For example, you might be out with the dog, weighing up the long versus the short route, when an idea pops into your head about how to frame a project to your boss.

The key is that you're not deliberately following a logical thought path in an effort to solve a problem. In fact, following the same well-worn path is often what keeps us stuck.

Human advantage

Instead, you're allowing the mind the necessary breathing space for random thoughts to collide.

We often talk about the brain as if it were a computer, even though we obviously know it's not really an ordered circuit board full of microprocessors.

But it differs in another way too. It doesn't run defined programmes with predictable outcomes (at least not in the case of conscious thought). It's a living, messy, biological structure that's constantly changing.

And it's precisely that messiness that allows for true creative thinking. It's why the brain is so amazingly adept at connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. In contrast, AI apps are pretty much incapable of doing this.

AI excels at the obvious

The large language models that power the apps work by finding related ideas. They work on probability, regurgitating concepts that many other people have already connected to whatever you happen to be asking about.

Their output is based on what has already been written or said. This makes them very efficient at finding the obvious when our messy brains have missed it. That is one of the reasons they can be so useful.

But only a human can come up with a truly original solution, for the simple reason that no one else has thought of it before.

AI has its place if you use it properly. It can absolutely help you along the way to those ideas. But the key word here is 'properly'. One thing you shouldn't do is outsource your thinking wholesale to a bot.

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