There’s an old story of a design instructor celebrating the end of the semester by taking her students to dinner at a new restaurant specializing in the unusual dishes of Madagascar. The professor watches how the students order and uses her insights to accurately predict which students will succeed in the profession and which will flop. According to the professor, students who scan the menu looking for a familiar dish will become drones or drop out, and those who seek out an unusual entree will turn out to be more creative and better problem solvers.

The logic goes like this: Creativity and problem solving is all about making new combinations. The more stuff you have to work with, the more connections you can make. So people who systematically accumulate experiences are going to have more creative material to work with. People who play it safe and stick with the familiar will have bupkis.

But creativity calls for more than a bucket full of experiences. You need two more things.

The first thing is memory. Take your notebook and camera along wherever you go. They will encourage you to pay more attention to what you’re experiencing. A photo or sketch of squid pizza will make more of that experience available to build on later.

Second, you need some systematic way to mash ideas together. There’s a Mark Twain quote that says something about the spark of a new idea being like the marriage of two notions that, until their union, no one even perceived were dating. If you’re going to exploit your experiences to make new ideas, you need something equivalent to speed dating.

Not everyone has what it takes. To some minds, facts are separate bits of knowledge. Squid pizza is just squid pizza to them. To others, facts are links in a chain. Squid pizza for them is an illustration of some general law applying to a whole bunch of facts. These folks have metaphorical minds. For them, squid pizza can mean two things at the same time. These are the people you want to have on your team.

Don Moyer, dmoyer@ThoughtFormDesign.com