ByBa Thesis #10: Creativity Is a Dynamic, Open, and Nonlinear System.

Creativity doesn't move in a straight line (in fact, it doesn't even walk).

If there's something reassuring about thinking of creativity as a sequence ("I do this, this, and this, and I get an idea"), I have bad news: if that were the case, it wouldn't be creativity anymore.

It would be like asking someone we want to photograph running to stop for the picture so it won't come out blurry: we'd be killing the very thing we're trying to understand.

We can design processes, train abilities, learn techniques, gather and reconnect references, frame a problem more effectively, or introduce constraints that force us to think differently. But none of these things allows us to know in advance what the outcome will be once we've set them in motion.

That's because creativity is a dynamic, open, and nonlinear system, never a recipe, a protocol, or a sequence.

Let's take it piece by piece.

Dynamic, because it changes as it unfolds. The problem we start with may no longer be the problem we're trying to solve ten minutes later. An unexpected association can change our interpretation. An initial idea can reveal a question we hadn't even noticed before. In mathematics and physics, a dynamical system is one whose state evolves over time according to certain rules. A pendulum is a classic example: its position and velocity change continuously, and each state is part of a trajectory.

Open, because the process doesn't happen in isolation. It constantly exchanges information with its surroundings. A conversation, an image glimpsed by chance, a memory, a budget constraint, a news story, a new tool, or someone else's comment can enter the system and change what's happening within it. In thermodynamics, an open system exchanges matter and energy with its environment. A living organism is an example: it takes in nutrients and energy, eliminates waste, and exchanges heat. It cannot be fully understood without considering what enters and leaves it.

And nonlinear, because a small change doesn't necessarily produce a small effect. Changing a single word in the way a question is framed can open up an entirely different territory. Encountering a reference at just the right moment can change the direction of an entire project. Being tired, excited, worried, or curious can make different connections visible or invisible within exactly the same problem. In mathematics, a nonlinear system doesn't necessarily respond proportionally to the changes it undergoes. Some nonlinear systems exhibit the famous butterfly effect, associated with Edward Lorenz: tiny differences in initial conditions can, over time, lead to dramatically different outcomes.

Two people could start with an identical brief, use the same methodology, and have exactly the same amount of time, yet end up in completely different places.

Even the same person would be unlikely to follow exactly the same path twice.

This doesn't mean creativity is pure chance, or that any attempt to influence it is pointless.

In fact, one of the great lessons of chaos theory is that a system can follow precise rules and still produce outcomes that are extraordinarily difficult to predict. Chaos, in its scientific sense, is not synonymous with disorder or the absence of rules.

And while not every nonlinear system is necessarily chaotic, this distinction helps us understand something fundamental about creativity: we can change the conditions of the system without being able to fully determine what will emerge from it.

We can enrich our stock of knowledge and experiences, train our attention in different ways, introduce new stimuli, change the context, or bring other people into the process. We can impose constraints, deliberately alter a variable to push our thinking off its usual trajectory, breaking biases and patterns.

And doing all of this, or even just some of it, will generate unpredictable outputs.

When we think of creativity as a system (rather than seeing it as an ability or a talent), the first thing we gain is the understanding that it is something we can work on, something we can manipulate:

We can prepare a system so that things that were previously less likely become more likely to happen.

This distinction is crucial because it also changes how we understand creative methods.

A method shouldn't be a recipe promising that if we correctly follow A, B, and C, we'll get D. Instead, it should work as an intervention: a way of perturbing the system, reorganizing its elements, introducing new relationships, and expanding its space of possibilities. We say it again and again: creativity is, at its core, the creation of a space of possibility.

Perhaps that's why so many ideas seem perfectly explainable in hindsight and yet were extraordinarily difficult to anticipate before they appeared.

Once they exist, we can reconstruct their story.

Before they existed, that story could still have taken countless paths; at the beginning, every story can be infinitely many stories.

If you'd like a few references to explore further:

1. David Schuldberg (2021), Creativity and nonlinear dynamical systems, published in the Journal of Creativity. It examines nonlinearity, emergence, and the possibilities of intervening in creative processes through this theoretical framework.

2. John R. Turner and Rose Baker (2020), Just doing the do: A case study testing creativity and innovative processes as complex adaptive systems. This qualitative study finds support for understanding creative processes as complex adaptive systems.

Forever curious,

Blithe Ernst