Introduction
Creativity plays a vital role in the field of design, as it empowers designers to deliver innovative and engaging solutions. When users interact with a digital product, they seek not only functionality but also a delightful and memorable experience. To achieve this experience, designers must harness their creative abilities to think outside the box and push the boundaries of conventional design.
Now, it is not news that John Cleese knows humor. But did you know that he studies it and collaborates with scholars on how it functions in the human mind? The man knows his craft inside and out after years in the business, and after years studying how to be the best at it has discovered that creativity is key. When asked about creativity, specifically how to be creative, he has some definitive responses and ideas that I have found to be invaluable.
Cleese’s conditions to unlock creativity really are boiled down to five things. What Cleese calls, the “open mode”:
- Creating a Space for Creativity (a.k.a your creative oasis)
- Embracing Playfulness and Humor
- Embracing “Time Out”
- Divergent and Convergent Thinking
- Creating Safe Spaces for Experimentation
But where did Cleese come by this formula? Drawing inspiration from Guy Claxton’s “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind”, John Cleese developed his philosophy of creativity, and as we delve into both philosophies below, we will uncover how creativity governs the realm of design, and establish how we can unlock the power of creative thinking and its impact on design solutions.
The Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind
The ability to think outside the box, break boundaries, and push the limits of innovation is what distinguishes outstanding designers from the rest. However, harnessing creativity is not a linear process. It requires understanding the intricate balance between the impulsive “hare brain” and the deliberate “tortoise mind.” Guy Claxton’s fascinating concept of the hare brain and tortoise mind explores how the principles can enhance creativity.
Guy Claxton, a renowned cognitive psychologist, proposed the metaphor of the hare brain and tortoise mind to describe the duality of human thought processes. The hare brain symbolizes our fast-thinking, spontaneous, and impulsive nature, whereas the tortoise mind represents our slower, reflective, and deliberate thinking.
Applying this concept to design, we can see that the “hare brain” often dominates our creative process. We brainstorm, sketch wireframes, and rapidly iterate to generate new ideas. However, Claxton argues that to produce truly innovative and original designs, we must also engage our “tortoise mind.”
The tortoise mind, conversely, represents a more contemplative and methodical approach to problem-solving. It excels at careful analysis, critical thinking, and disciplined exploration of ideas. The tortoise mind helps designers validate and refine their concepts, ensuring that creativity is grounded in feasibility and usability. Nevertheless, relying solely on the tortoise mind can stifle innovation and limit the potential for groundbreaking solutions.
The “tortoise mind” encourages us to slow down, step back, and deeply understand the problem at hand. By embracing reflection, research, and empathetic understanding of the user’s needs, designers can gain invaluable insights that inform their creative decisions. It’s in this space of thoughtful contemplation that novel ideas emerge, leading to user experiences that stand out from the crowd.
To foster creativity effectively, designers must strike a harmonious balance between the hare brain and tortoise mind. Here are some strategies to achieve this equilibrium:
- Cultivate curiosity: Nurture your hare brain by cultivating curiosity. Explore diverse fields, engage in interdisciplinary learning, and embrace unconventional sources of inspiration. Encourage yourself to think freely and let your mind wander, unearthing hidden connections and innovative ideas.
- Embrace divergent thinking: Give yourself the freedom to generate a wide range of ideas during the ideation phase. Embrace divergent thinking techniques like brainstorming, mind mapping, and concept sketching to harness the full potential of your hare brain.
- Validate and refine: Once you have a collection of ideas, employ your tortoise mind to validate and refine them. Analyze the feasibility, usability, and potential impact of each concept. Conduct user research, gather feedback, and iterate on your designs, ensuring they align with user needs and preferences.
- Foster collaboration: Collaborate with fellow designers, stakeholders, and end-users to enhance your creative process. Engaging in group discussions, critique sessions, and user testing helps to challenge assumptions, gain fresh perspectives, and inspire new ideas.
- Embrace experimentation: Break free from conventional design patterns and experiment with new approaches. Embrace rapid prototyping and user testing to validate your ideas early in the process, allowing for iterative improvements.
John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity
John Cleese is a renowned actor and comedian and has long been an advocate for creativity, offering valuable insights into its nature and how we can cultivate it. Cleese believes that creativity is not a talent limited to a select few, but rather a skill that can be fostered and supported through certain attitudes and approaches.
Cleese also highlights the importance of embracing the “open” and “closed” modes of thinking, in tandem. The open mode encourages curiosity, exploration, and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas (see Claxton’s Hare Brain). Concurrently, the closed mode is necessary for decision-making, refining ideas, and focusing on execution (see Claxton’s Tortoise Mind). By consciously switching between these modes, designers can establish a dynamic creative process that combines exploration and refinement, leading to compelling user experiences.
One crucial aspect of Cleese’s philosophy is creating a conducive environment for creativity. He emphasizes the need for a “playful”, “creative oasis” free from time pressures and judgments, where ideas can flow without restraint. In the context of design, this means providing designers with the freedom to explore unconventional concepts, take risks, and experiment with different approaches.
Fostering Creativity
Space
Seal yourself away in a quiet space, an “oasis” as Cleese calls it, because you cannot become playful and creative if you are under the same everyday stressors. Create an oasis of quiet for yourself by setting boundaries in space and time. That place where you can achieve Zen without interruptions, where you can remain in a creative state.
According to Cleese, “you cannot become playful and creative if you are under the same pressures” of everyday life, which makes perfect sense. The emails, text messages, instant messages and meetings of our day-to-day are overwhelmingly distracting to the playfully creative process. If you are “keeping all the balls in the air”, you are stifling the creative process.
I leave my office for this exercise. The office is for work, and while I am creative there, I want a space that is separate from work a space that is intended for creativity. I tend to sit in my back patio oasis, or in a cozy reading area of our home, but ideally you could go anywhere you are most comfortable letting your creativity flow.
If you are at work, then perhaps blocking out some time in a conference room or simply closing your office door with a do not disturb sign or one that says “will be back at such and such time”. Don’t forget to shut down the computer too so you are not tempted to just check on things. Creative ideas do not come from our laptops.
Time
Set aside a specific period of time in your week where everyone around you knows you are unavailable for anything. This time should have a set beginning and set end. Cleese suggests that 90-minute chunks once a week are ideal and states that “play is distinct from ordinary life. Play begins, and at a certain moment it is over, otherwise it is not play.”
No calendar reminders or quick chats should interfere with this place during your assigned time. This is your time to play without boundaries and let your mind be free of distraction allowing free flowing thoughts. Play is the key word here. You are entertaining your creativity by allowing it to run wild without boundaries about whatever subject you are focusing on.
“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original” is something we find difficult to do in this day and age, because we are required to be decisive in our work constantly. Here are some direct quotes from Cleese on taking the time to be creative:
“The most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it. Because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety that we all experience when we haven’t solved a problem. If we have a problem and we need to solve it, until we do we feel inside us a kind of internal agitation, a tension or uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort. So in order to do so we take a decision. Not because we’re sure it is the best decision, but because taking it will make us feel better. Well, the most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for much longer. And so, because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are far more creative.”
And…
“The people I find it hardest to be creative with are people who take all the time to project an image of themselves as decisive. And who feel to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly and with a great show of confidence. Well, this behavior, I sincerely suggest is the most effective way to strangle creativity at birth.”
“Before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself the question, ‘When does this decision have to be taken?’ And having answered that, you defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time. Which will lead you to the most creative solution. And if while you’re pondering, someone accuses you of indecision, say, “Look, […] I don’t have to decide until Tuesday, and I’m not chickening out of my creative discomfort before then; that’s too easy.”
It should be noted, this has nothing to do with being inactive or sitting on your thumbs. You may be taking your hour-and-a-half weekly creative oasis time while there is still a deadline at hand, but that invaluable time is productive time, generating ideas and maybe even solutions. In fact, you’ll feel more energized and effective as a result of having taken the creative oasis time. If you have a date for when a task is due, then you would essentially give “your mind as long as possible to come up with something original” rather than set an end-time that can stress you out and hamper your creative flow.
Confidence
According to Cleese, “Nothing will stop you in your creative space as effectively as the fear of making a mistake.” Which is true about anything in life. Living in paralysis simply ensures there is no forward movement. Every great innovator down through the ages, says the same thing, EXPERIMENT. Asking the what ifs. What would happen if I did this or that?
The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen. Whatever happens is ok. You cannot be playful if you are fearful that moving in a direction will be “wrong” or something you shouldn’t have done.
You have to risk saying things that are silly, illogical or wrong. While you are being creative nothing is wrong and any dribble may lead to the breakthrough.
Humor
Humor breaks down barriers and encourages creativity. The easiest way to get to creativity is through the open mode and nothing takes us from the closed mode to the open mode faster than humor.
Humor is an essential part of spontaneity and an essential part of playfulness, and an essential part of creativity that we need in solving problems, no matter how serious they may be.
Cleese also touches on the solemnity we experience in the work place where we find ourselves surrounded by the serious and formal at debilitating costs. There is a time and place for solemnity, but it is not within the creative process.
Solemnity on the other hand, I don’t know what it is for. It serves pomposity and the self-important always know on some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat, and so dishonestly pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial. When it only makes them feel bigger.
How to Stop Your Peers and Subordinates from Being Creative (What Not to Do!)
Cleese pokes sarcastic fun at solemnity — but this is very important, not simply for creative professionals, but across the board. It is something to be mindful of in your day-to-day in general. We can also easily stifle creativity:
- Allowing subordinates no humor. Treating humor as subversive and frivolous.
- Keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable. Using your authority to focus on the negatives, only criticizing. Believing that praise makes people uppity.
- Demanding that people should always be doing and not just pondering.
We have all encountered this type of individual, or some have even been this individual for whatever reason. Brush it off as being a product of your environment or having a bad day, but it is a practice that should be let go in favor of truly embracing the creative process.
Cleese also suggests having the most junior individuals on the team express their views first in team environments, so they are not constricted by what has already been said by someone higher up the food chain.
It is easier to be creative if you do so with other people. If there is one person around that makes you feel defensive you lose the confidence to play, and it is “goodbye creativity”. So always make sure that your play-friends are people that you like and trust. Never say anything to squash them either. Always be positive: “would it be even better…?”, “I don’t quite understand, can you come at it from a different angle?”, “Let’s pretend.” Establish as free an atmosphere as possible.
Cleese points out that with any joke, the laugh happens when you connect two different frameworks of reference in a new way. What better way to do this than collaborating with like-minded individuals? You will not get to this point if humor is being stifled.
Conclusion
In the realm of design, creativity is a driving force that separates outstanding experiences from the ordinary. By drawing inspiration from Guy Claxton’s “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind” and John Cleese’s philosophy of creativity, designers can tap into their creative potential and craft user-centric designs that captivate and delight. Embracing deep understanding, reflection, playfulness, and a dynamic balance between open and closed thinking modes, designers can unlock new possibilities and forge a path towards truly exceptional user experiences.
I make a point with my design teams to encourage them to block off time during their work week and retreat to their creative oasis. Whatever time best suits them, ideally when they are not depleted from the long work week but while they are still relatively fresh of mind. For me this is Monday morning, before the hustle and bustle kicks in. But it can also be useful to engage your tortoise mind when stuck on a particularly troublesome issue. Shut the door, put the phone on silent, and block off the calendar.
Creativity happens all the time. But it happens easiest when we are relaxed and feel safe. You will find yourself keeping your mind gently on the subject you are pondering while performing your day-to-day activities. It is something of a daydream or waking meditation. And “…sooner or later you will be rewarded if you have put in the pondering time first.”
References
Claxton, Guy. “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.” HarperCollins, 1997.
Cleese, John. “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide.” Random House UK, 2020.
John Cleese on Creativity In Management. (2017, June 21). [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved December 30, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
John Cleese on Creativity (video from a training). (2013, March 17). [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved December 30, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y70nbDJI5Uk