Our Dreams Make Different Shapes: How Your Creativity can Make the World a Better Place and why the World Will Try to Stop you

You ought to be asking yourself all the time, ‘What is the most important thing I could be working on right now?’ If you’re not doing it why aren’t you? (Aaron Swartz)

Chapters and Chunks

Coronavirus and the crisis of creativity

Introduction

Creativity matters

How to use this book

A Manifesto for Using Creativity to Build a Better World

Creating a Better Future

Why

The Problem of The Future

Creativity as General Skill

Creativity and Me

How to Be More Creative

We Need to Talk About Memory

Your knowledge is not the sum of the things you know but the product of the things you know

Creativity’s First Ingredient: How to Learn Lots of Things About Lots of Things

Beginning to Build Your Knowledge Frame

Building a Palace of the Mind

A brief note on aphantasia

Finding a memory Palace That Works for you

Joining the Dots

Mycelium

The Neuroscience of Creativity

Hooks and Tendrils: Plumbing your Mind Palace for Leaks

David Hume and the Association of Ideas

Creativity is not Enough: The Cassandra Curse

The Local Maximum

Downclimbing the Dyno

Some Random Thoughts

Shifting the Paradigm

Be More White Rabbit

The Final Piece of the Puzzle: Curious Institutions

Open Access: Where Do You Build the Floor?

Do Better With Boxes: Recruiting Teams

Hiring for Non-fit

Consistency: From vision to communication

Driven to distraction: why do we accept some interventions and not others?

Against the Search for a Single Outcome: convergent and divergent goals

What Institutions Do

Red Teams

Co-production and Co-exploration

Where Now?

Bibliography and further resources

Acknowledgements

Coronavirus and the Crisis of Creativity

If I’d got my act together and written this book six months ago when I meant to, it would have been out of date by now. Coronavirus has changed the world completely – and as I write and beyond it will keep on changing the world.

One thing we should have learned from this crisis is just how important creativity is in forging a better future. But in the UK we have seen something different. We have seen a crisis of creativity. And this has happened because we have seen the championing of the most disastrous kind of creativity from Dominic Cummings and his coterie of special advisors. We have seen what it means to be original for originality’s sake.

Cummings is worthy of much study – his blog in particular illustrates so many points about creativity, its fascination, its importance, and how it can go catastrophically wrong if it is seen as an end in itself. He is a devotee of a very particular way of approaching problems – the small, agile team with all the money they need at their disposal (which, given the size of the team, isn’t much in relation to its potential impact) led by scientists and assorted weirdos as his notorious blog post in January 2020 put it. Like much of Silicon Valley, he idolises the frontierspeople of DARPA (the US’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency which emerged during the Cold War) and the seeming magic that behavioural scientists are able to conjure with.

In casting himself as the creative alternative to an inexpert and moribund decision-making establishment led by career civil servants he has engineered a crisis of creativity. Because his failure has become identified as a failure of creativity. It is not. Because what Cummings misunderstands – or misrepresents – is the role that creativity can and should play in tackling our most pressing problems.

Where Cummings is right is that when a problem arises that cannot be solved within an existing paradigm, the only hope lies in a new one. Where he is catastrophically wrong is in believing that the paradigm failure is one of science. It is not, it is a moral one. Creativity is a tool – a means of achieving a vision of the kind of world we want to live in, and it’s an incredibly powerful one. Without that vision, though, it is more like a sea of downed power lines writhing and sparking without direction. Remarkable things may have come from DARPA, but DARPA was established in the same environment and to serve the same aims as the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, devised by John von Neumann and the game theorists Cummings also idolises, to avoid a nuclear war by brute fear. Cummings is in love with the bunker mentality – almost a prepper mentality – of the brilliant few not having to worry about the ludicrous or horrific ends to which their brilliance might be put, just being free to be brilliant.

He is also in love with government by expert managers. Expertise, like creativity, he believes will ensure good decision making. It won’t. It will ensure efficient implementation of an agenda that can pretend it isn’t there, hiding behind creativity and expertise. Through these category mistakes, Cummings is responsible for the demise of expertise and creativity. It is one of our most important tasks to reclaim them.

Introduction

A lot of people, when they think of creativity, think of creative arts like storytelling. So it’s surprising that it is actually really hard to write a story *about* creativity. It’s the creative equivalent of the moment in a horror film where you have to show the monster. You can spend ¾ of the film murmuring, whispering, building a mythology, alluding to nightmares, reimagining the terror of a cousin of a cousin of the pub landlord, embroidering the tale with ever more elaborate and nightmarish details to give you a reason to stay for one more. But at some point we need to see the damn thing.

A few years ago I was commissioned by the Oxford Playhouse to write what they called an adult fairytale. I didn’t set out to write a story about creativity. It just sort of arrived, in the corner of my eye, as I was doing something else. I wanted to retell the greatest ghost story of them all, The Monkey’s Paw. And I wanted to do it in a world I’d been exploring in short stories and novellas for several years, a world set in the tunnels under Oxford, on its rooftops and in its abandoned warehouses, a world of vast and intricate connections between the lost, abandoned, and forgotten souls not just from Oxford but from anywhere who found themselves part of an invisible self-teaching, free running, skateboarding, poeting, coding parallel university, one that was free to roam not only the books that lined the buildings above but adopted techniques and methods and ideas and ways of collaborating and experimenting not possible within the confines of those – or any – walls. It was unseen less because of its stealth and more because no one cared to look, but for those who went after it, it left scratches on the surface of the regular world – stickers and street art, QR codes and rumours, and bootlegs of fragments of poems and fly posters for gigs that never happened.

Scratches on the surface – scratch marks you could follow if you were curious enough. That metaphor had intrigued me for years and finally the commission to write a fairytale enabled it to find its form.

The focus of the story was a character called Stitch, who lived by twilight and by night in the gutters between the bases of the city’s rooves and their parapets and by day retreated to the safety of the labyrinthine structures where this community hung out, learning, sharing, training, thinking, doing, building. Stitch would scour the city from their perch, watching for the misfits and the malcontents, identifying souls in the process of being lost, the ones being slowly failed by the nightmaring spires of a city built on dreams too rigid to ever feel like home.

It was Stitch’s power (this was a work of magic realism) to see – and to record – people’s dreams as they slept, so once these souls in the process of being lost had been identified, Stitch would follow them, settle onto the roof of their dwelling, and experience their dreams while they slept, not simply the images being played out in their heads but the aspirations behind them, the hopes, the better futures they connected to, the part the dreamer would play in bringing those better worlds to pass.

This filtered film would save itself to a micro SD card. When dreamers were at the point of deepest sleep, Stitch climbed down from the roof, through an open window or even just the cracks in the wall, and into their room and without disturbing their sleep would make the tiniest incision with the sharpest of obsidian blades, between the shoulders where it was almost impossible to reach – but not quite – and place the card under the skin, then stitch the wound closed with the finest of thread that would seal itself almost perfectly, and disappear.

In the morning, the person would wake, and all they would notice would be the slightest itch. So slight it was almost not there, but persistent, never fading as the days passed. Some people would learn to live with the discomfort. Some would forget about it altogether in time, living a new normal as though nothing had happened.

But a few would scratch. And they would keep scratching till they had worked away enough to reveal a tiny lump, and eventually to prise free the card. And if they got that far, and watched what was on the card, they would find themselves drawn into this world of tunnels and rooftops, part of a community in which everyone works together to make all the better futures they had imagined real.

Of course, an itch that just has to be scratched is a multipurpose metaphor. But it is particularly appropriate for creativity. From – or rather at – an early age, many of us notice things about the world that seem, for want of a better word, off. We wonder why what we have been told by people seems not to fit with what we are being told by our senses. There are gaps – either chasms between these different understandings (what people say and what our senses say), or abysses, ledges of our understanding that lead into darkness.

Questions are our way of doing two things – bringing light to the darkness, yes. We’re used to that way of thinking about curious minds, we find it comfortable, unchallenging, a host of feelings that we do best to leave behind sometimes. But questions are also something less comfortable and altogether more important. They are the mechanism by which we step off the ledge and into the darkness.

This might sound like two ways of saying the same thing, but it’s not. All too often bringing light to the darkness is like being a runner, alone at night on a path through the woods, who turns on their headlamp to get a better view of the path. As we become adults, move into society, discover the acceptable limits of thought, we become more and more like this runner, shining and brighter and brighter light on a narrower and narrower path.

After their run, of course, such a person will arrive at the pub, hole themselves up in the warmth with a pint and regale their friends with stories about how well they know what’s out there, in the wilds of the woods.

Of course, they know nothing of the badgers and the deer, the tangled roots and poison berries and achingly sweet taste of fresh wild garlic and the crenelated rubber feel and endlessly nuanced scent of mushrooms eating away the old to make way for the new. Learning that is simple, of course. All they need to do is turn off their headlamp and step aside from the path and into the tangled darkness.

But they don’t, because they’ve learned that there be dragons (or, at least, badgers and brambles). This is how we learn to learn at the expense of creativity as our initial questions are closed down with a sigh, or an eye-roll, or a not now, and eventually a series of can’t you find something more productive to think abouts. We are acclimatised through our childhood to believe that questions are there to shine a light onto the narrow road mapped out in front of us by what we have been told, not to enable us to leap into the glorious darkness beyond its edges of which our senses offer tantalising hints.

But some people keep picking away at the itch – asking whatever questions their minds prompt them to about the offness of the world. And that’s where creativity comes from. And where it leads is often the discovery that like the deepest ocean or the cosmos far beyond the reach of the naked eye, the darkness is actually a seething, breathing soup of beauty and wonder.

This book is a reminder to some that the darkness is there, a warm woollen blanket of familiarity to others who find the world where they are told to focus their attention anodyne and strange.

Creativity matters

It’s one of the most widely repeated ideas, and you will find it everywhere from school prospectuses to newspaper articles to TED talks to university mission statements to panels at the World Economic Forum.

It’s also one of the simplest ideas. Creativity is just coming up with new stuff. New ideas. New ways of thinking. New ways of doing. New ways of communicating. New ways of relating – to each other, to non-human species, to the world we live in. New ways of being.

And it’s one of the most obviously true ideas. We need new stuff because the old stuff is broken. If we carry on doing things the way we do them now, we will fall off a cliff.

What very few people seem to have recognised is that this simple idea – creativity matters – is also the most radical idea you could imagine. And this is why. What creativity matters says is simple. To say creativity matters is to say that the nearer you are to the sources of power as they stand, the less important you need to be in the future. And the further you are from the sources of power as they stand, the more important you need to be in the future.

No one idea has the potential to empower the marginalised, the ignored, the outcast than the two word phrase that passes people’s lips without a moment’s thought. Creativity matters.

This book is not just an invitation to everyone who has butted up against authority and found the door closed. Though it is that.

This book is not just a call to action for everyone who finds themselves on or outside the margins of power. Though it is that.

This book is an instruction manual for a world that that needs to pull itself back from the cliff edge before it’s too late.

This book is written to tell you that you are central to that mission, that a better future cannot happen without you. It is written to give you the tools you need not just to be part of the most important task facing us in the coming decades, but to lead the way. This is your time. You are the heroes we need. And creativity is your superpower.

How to use this book

Bill Hartston – chess master, delightful trivia aficionado, sloth-wrangler, and all-around creative mastermind – is the setter of the questions for the Creative Thinking World Championship. He has been doing this since 1997. Every year, at the start of the competition, he makes a deadpan announcement about the rules of competition:

If you have a question, whatever it is, the answer is yes.

This book is written in that spirit. There is no right way to use it, and very few wrong ways – it doesn’t make a particularly good sandwich toaster (apparently), but trying to use it as such isn’t, strictly speaking, wrong. Many of you will be here because you want tips and tricks for generating new and interesting ideas. You will find many of those (heading to the how to be more creative sections will start you off on the most promising track. Others