Creativity Depth

When we see a work of art, regardless of media, we are seeing the end-product of a deeper creative process.

Many persons try to duplicate works, looking at the end result and fail to understand the depth of thought necessary in the making. A Celtic Knot, an Islamic Tile, or other patterns, was not free-drawn as a series of lines, but created on top of a complex set of geometries as the scaffolding to support the completed work.

The same is true for writing. It’s not only words on a page. There’s a higher-order organization to tell the story. In working with someone on a work, I organize our thoughts into a ‘systems’ view of inputs, processes, data, and outputs to test the assumptions with supply versus demand, roles, generic versus specific. Making a ‘system’ out of the material turned a random list of activities into a complete and understandable method.

In business, we see the ill-effects from a lack of depth – PowerPoint Leadership. The ease of creating a presentation belies the quality of the analysis to enable fact-free decisions.