Data as an Enabler of Creative Process

 

By TIMOTHY ORIEDO

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Summary

• Creativity is one of the most misunderstood ideas on earth.
• Most people assume you can overuse creativity (you can’t), you only have so much of it (you don’t) or some people just assume they aren’t creative at all (you are).
• Creativity is also often confused with the ability to draw, write, design, paint, photograph, edit, film, direct, illustrate etc.

Most often you’ll find a “there is no scientific process to idea generation”. While I am on the fence with regards to this, Looking at the entire big data gamut, data mining to data analysis to data visualisation it points to one thing — there is a quest to establish certain parameters of a problem or occurrence and that’s the confluence on data and creativity.

Creativity is one of the most misunderstood ideas on earth. Most people assume you can overuse creativity (you can’t), you only have so much of it (you don’t) or some people just assume they aren’t creative at all (you are). Creativity is also often confused with the ability to draw, write, design, paint, photograph, edit, film, direct, illustrate etc. Those are merely the vehicles of creativity. They’re the expression of creativity. Creativity starts way before any of those skills are even engaged.

Creativity is all about coming up with an idea to solve a problem. The real question then is what is an idea and how does one find one? Here is how data can help answer the question.

1. Data as an enabler for problem identification and articulation

Every idea is based on solving a problem. HIV, fresh water, poverty, poaching.. We totally get them and can empathise with these problems.

The problem articulation is easy and this data is an enabler to understand the scale of the problem.

Marketing teams need to become better at identifying and articulating problems data is a key resource in helping them drill down to the problem without which, you won’t get a great idea. The human brain is wired to stress about problems. So if you can work out the problem your product solves and clearly articulate it, the reason great ideas resonate so well with people is that you’re almost alleviating anxiety or stress of a problem.

2.Creativity is about connecting things — Cause effect

In data, there is what we call correlation analytics, or causation effect. Simply put, it is the analysis of two or more different occurrences.

Putting two simple things together to solve a problem is what makes an idea. Ideas are, simply, the connection of two previously unrelated yet brutally simple and totally understood things.

The simpler wand more unrelated the two isolated concepts are, the better the idea will be. An original idea is bringing together two previously unrelated things for the first time.

And the best ideas are obvious in hindsight. When someone says, that’s so simple, “why didn’t I think of that?” Well they’re obvious in hindsight because the two things were so simple and obvious in isolation yet very far apart.

They also, likely, had no real business together until a problem makes it possible and relevant for these two things to cohabit a space, that’s the essence of correlation analytics.

Java outlets can for example deploy a dynamic pricing feature leveraging on weather data and charge a premium when it rains as most people will converge at the Java outlets for coffee as they wait for rain to subside. Kenya Power can manage its infrastructure well by deploying corrective action whenever they is an outage because of rain.

Mr Oriedo, executive coach and data scientist ,Strathmore Business School Email: timothy.oriedo@predictiveanalytics.co.ke