Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesCreativity has developed an unnecessarily strict dress code. It is expected to arrive looking spontaneous, surrounded by marker pens and saying something about freedom. If the idea comes from a statistical model, people call it analysis and deny it access to the interesting table.
That is daft. Creativity is the production of an unexpected and useful connection; the route is irrelevant. Comparing two columns nobody thought belonged together can be every bit as inventive as drawing a picture nobody expected. Search data can reveal the strange words customers use before they learn a category’s official language. Purchase sequences can expose an apparently trivial product as the doorway to a valuable habit. Complaint records can locate the failure in the gap between two individually excellent services.
The real enemy is routine. A standard report built to answer inherited questions will faithfully preserve inherited stupidity. “Which channel got the most clicks?” produces bookkeeping with coloured arrows. “Which first action predicts a customer still being here in six months?” might alter a decision. Numbers also generate industrial quantities of seductive rubbish. So do anecdotes, workshops and confident people near whiteboards. Every creative method has its preferred way of being wrong. The useful arrangement is mutual irritation: analysts puncture beautiful stories, writers attack dreary categories, researchers notice the variable everybody agreed was unimportant. Occasionally an idea survives all three and changes what somebody does on Tuesday. At that point, arguing whether it was born in a sketchbook, a regression model or on the back of a receipt is merely a dispute over which tribe gets to keep the trophy.