king talk

I’m a huge fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, which means I have tremendous respect for John Cleese. In this video, he is talking about how he started writing, what helped him and what hinders the creative process.

One of his main points is that interruptions kill creativity, especially when you try to do deep thinking. Now, I know that these days it is en vogue to  promote lateral thinking and group thinking as the golden way to be creative. And certainly that kind of thought process carries great value and produces interesting results – as a matter of fact it is how most projects here at envis precisely get started.

But in the end, it only represents a small part of the creative process. The rest is mainly deep thinking, developing narratives and solving problems (and of course pushing pixels and lines of code). And this is where focus and concentration are sacred. Cleese makes a compelling case here, as he has more experience in being creative than most people out there calling themselves designers. Writers like him are probably among the most skilled people when it comes to using creativity, simply because they have to create both, a problem and a solution and weave them together into a story.

I really hope that this way of thinking gets back some traction in the design community. It is easy to point at a pile of post-it notes and label that »creativity«. But for every post-it, there is a story of an idea yet to be developed – and those stories deserve more exposure.