The levels of creativity concern everybody, including the people convinced they are not creative. If that sounds like you, you are almost certainly underestimating yourself, because we are all intrinsically creative and every one of us can become more so.
Beyond that democratic aspiration of everyone being creative, one detail matters. Like curiosity, creativity does not work the same way in everybody. None of us is Picasso, and all of us can learn to draw.
There are also several kinds of creativity, several levels we can treat as steps for growing our own creative potential rather than as a fixed ranking of talent.
Below are the five levels of creativity, ordered from the easiest to the hardest to master, with suggestions for developing each one.
| The cliche | The reality | The mirror |
|---|---|---|
| The five levels of creativityCreativity gets treated as a single trait a person either has or lacks. The levels of creativity describe five distinct practices instead: mimetic, bisociative, analogical, narrative and intuitive. | Each level has its own methodsCopying nature, connecting unrelated ideas, transferring understanding by analogy, building stories and quieting the mind are separate skills. Each responds to different exercises, and each can be practised deliberately. | The order is a staircase, not a hierarchy of talentThe levels run from easiest to hardest to master rather than from lowest to highest worth. Skipping to the intuitive level without the first four produces frustration rather than insight. |
Mimetic creativity
The first level of creativity is mimesis. Following Democritus rather than Plato, for whom the term concerned our relationship with the living world, mimesis is the imitation of nature through technique. Weaving imitates a spider’s web, and aircraft skin borrows from sharkskin.
This is the most rudimentary form of creativity, since it consists of observing nature in order to draw inspiration from it, which is what Leonardo da Vinci spent his life doing.
By extension, mimetic creativity enters the territory of adjacent innovation whenever you take inspiration from a discovery in another sector. Dyson borrowed dust extraction from sawmills. Drug dealers borrowed loyalty cards from Starbucks. The Mayo Clinic borrowed its patient experience from the customer experience at the Ritz-Carlton.
How to improve your mimetic creativity
Inspiration drawn from what already exists is the basis of every learning process. It works like building a Lego model by following the instruction sheet, and you have to go through that stage before you can leave it behind and build your own models.
Improving this level means discovering new environments and learning to observe them properly. Observation is the skill, and most people have never been taught it.
Go on a safari
Travel to new places and meet new people. Take your phone or a notebook and record what you find, so you can be conscious of the experience while it happens and review it later with a little time and distance to spot what you missed the first time.
Look for patterns and reference points, and for markers of success and failure, so you come away with a real sense of what works, what does not, and why.
You can use this service safari sheet to structure what you collect.
Take an excursion
The excursion is an efficient way of persuading a group to build new thinking patterns for unfamiliar situations and to form strategies out of their own analysis. The process runs through five steps.
- The facilitator asks participants to take an imaginary journey to a place with no apparent connection to the question in hand: a museum, a jungle, another planet. Once the journey ends, each participant draws eight to ten images from the experience.
- The facilitator asks them to draw similarities and establish relationships between the images from that imaginary excursion and the real problems in their own scenario.
- Participants analyse the links between the problems and the analogies, identifying the ones most closely and distinctly related to all the factors.
- Participants share their imaginary journey with their teammates: what they saw, who they interacted with, the analogies they drew and the solutions they reached.
- As with brainstorming, participants discuss each other’s ideas and reach a shared solution, along with a shared narrative that can hold all of their ideas.
Copy nature
The inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller created the geodesic dome by copying the geometric structure of spores and plankton. Observing something in the natural world and then modifying it through human ingenuity is called biomimicry, and it works as a form of accelerated evolution.
Leonardo da Vinci drew flying machines after watching birds in flight and maple seeds spinning to the ground. Naval engineers have shaped rudders after the hydrodynamic flipper of a humpback whale.
Pay attention to the form and the function of the natural world around you. In Australia that world is unusually strange, which is an advantage most local organisations never think to use.
Resources on mimetic creativity
- René Girard’s mimetic theory, from learning to apocalypse, presented by Charles Ramond, published by Presses Universitaires de France.
- Mimesis and cultural learning, by Christoph Wulf, in Le Télémaque, 2014 issue 1.
- The Biomimicry Institute publishes case studies of biological strategies translated into engineering.
Bisociative creativity
The second level is associative creativity, which the novelist Arthur Koestler called bisociation in The Act of Creation. He described how the conscious mind, when relaxed, can link rational thinking to intuitive thinking and produce the sudden idea, the eureka moment, or satori if you are a Buddhist.
Bisociative creativity happens when a familiar idea gets connected to an unfamiliar one to produce a hybrid.
This is the level Steve Jobs had in mind when he described creativity as connecting things. His point was that creative people often feel slightly guilty when asked how they did it, because they simply saw something obvious, having connected experiences they had lived through and synthesised something new from them.
How to improve your bisociative creativity
Connecting ideas often happens through contemplative means, and it can also be forced by bombarding the mind with a barrage of random thoughts to see what emerges. You have recognised brainstorming.
In 1994, coming out of near bankruptcy and working on Toy Story, four of Pixar’s early directors had lunch in a restaurant and threw around ideas for films they wanted to make. A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc. came out of that meal. An industry was reshaped over lunch.
Bisociative creativity runs on three Fs.
- Fluency. Having many unpolished ideas beats having a few good ones, because a wider diversity of ideas produces a wider range of possible solutions.
- Flexibility. We often have the right idea in the wrong place, so it has to be moved around until it finds where it fits.
- Flow. Nobody is creative on demand. We need to be both stimulated and relaxed to enter a creative state.
Use random words
Take a dictionary or a book, open it and land your finger on a random word. Connect your creative challenge to that word and see what the collision produces.
Say you are looking for ideas for a home delivery service and your finger lands on oxygen. Association might give you drone delivery, which is barely credible, or a monthly subscription giving members exclusive dishes and free delivery, which is a business.
The SCAMPER method
Brainstorming is the foundation of this level. Alex Osborn is credited with inventing the term in How to Think Up, published in 1942, and later set out a checklist of idea-spurring questions in Applied Imagination in 1953.
The educator Bob Eberle organised those questions into the SCAMPER mnemonic in his 1971 book SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development. The method has seven steps.
- Substitute. Put one element in place of another. What could be replaced? Who else? What else?
- Combine. Merge two concepts or two ideas. Could we merge two activities?
- Adapt. Place your concept in another context. Has something similar existed before?
- Modify. Change the meaning, the colour, the shape. Can we change the meaning, colour, movement, sound, smell or form?
- Put to another use. Are there other possible uses if we modify it?
- Eliminate. What is unnecessary? What can be subtracted, removed or reduced?
- Reverse. Invert the positive and the negative. Can I turn this around, put the top at the bottom, change the sequence?
Asking these simple questions connects ideas and actions in new ways and produces useful creative variations without much effort.
De Bono’s six hats
The physician Edward de Bono developed an indirect creative reasoning method he called lateral thinking. The basic idea is to go around a problem instead of attacking it head on, which gives a group a wider range of ideas and exposes their weak points.
The six thinking hats represent different modes of thought and different roles inside the group. Blue for objectives, white for information, red for emotions, black for judgement, yellow for optimism and green for creativity.
This technique earns its place when you want a genuinely new angle on a problem the group has already circled several times.
Resources on bisociative creativity
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity, both by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by Harper.
- Gamestorming, by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, published by O’Reilly.
- Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, and my own walkthrough of the six hats of creativity.
Analogical creativity
Analogical creativity uses analogies to transfer information we believe we understand in one domain, the source, in order to solve a problem in an unfamiliar one, the target. Analogies work as bridges that let our cognitive processes carry groups of information quickly from the unknown to the known, and back again.
They can also be used to disrupt thinking habits and make room for new ideas, which is the harder and more valuable use.
Great innovators have relied on them, from Archimedes in his bath to Einstein in his relativity lift. Vacuum cleaner design stayed virtually unchanged for nearly a century until James Dyson used a different analogy, the cyclone, to separate particles through centrifugal force.
How to improve your analogical creativity
An analogy helps us make sense of experience by assimilating what we do not know into what we do. This level also works in reverse: we can take something we believe we know and use an analogy to make it unfamiliar again. Artists call this defamiliarisation.
Albert Camus told a story from the point of view of a fly. Bernard Werber builds narratives from the point of view of an ant, then a god, then a cat, then the planet itself.
Consider what your strategy process would look like if it were run from your children’s point of view rather than your shareholders’ or your customers’. The exercise takes twenty minutes and it changes what people are willing to say out loud.
Adaptive reasoning
Adaptive reasoning describes how your perspective or your relationship to a problem can shift through the use of analogies. The basic approach reduces to one question: how is this problem like that thing?
How is building a successful marketing campaign for a new handbag line like making friends at a new school? The point is to vary your perspectives and form as many new relationships between them as you can.
Imaginary friends
Popularised by Napoleon Hill, this method puts you in the position of somebody you know personally or somebody famous. What would this person do with your challenge?
The source of the analogy stays the same as in every other analogical approach. The target, the unfamiliar domain, becomes a person rather than a second idea.
Resources on analogical creativity
- Serious Creativity and the wider toolkit work of Edward de Bono.
- Good to Great, by Jim Collins, published by HarperBusiness.
- Innovation and technology, by Loïck Roche and Thierry Grange, published by Maxima.
Narrative creativity
Narrative creativity is the ability to invent and tell stories, which makes it the creativity of storytelling. The purpose of narrative communication is to use stories or anecdotes to move an audience.
That connection is what carries complex messages diplomatically, and, to come back to our subject, what gives a direction for finding new ideas.
How to improve your narrative creativity
Three kinds of story do the work in a creative context, and each answers a different question. Origin stories answer who we are and where we come from. Value stories answer what we share. Vision stories answer what we believe and where we are going.
Origin stories are best known in the startup world, where every company has one. Two Americans in Paris for a conference cannot find a taxi in the snow, and one asks the other what would happen if an app brought a car to you with one tap. That is the Uber origin story, told and retold until it became doctrine.
Value stories answer what we share. When I was running Technoraid, it became clear quickly that we could not compete with the large vehicle manufacturers for candidates. So we built the Technoraid Way to explain that our size meant every person was listened to and valued, whatever their length of service.
Vision stories answer where we are going. In Italy, Alberto took over the foundry his grandfather founded, and could no longer compete on price. He stopped trying to match his competitors and hired a designer, with a vision of bringing Italian design into manufacturing. Hundreds of awards later, the name Alessi is known worldwide.
Storyboarding
For years Walt Disney appeared in living rooms on a Sunday evening, sitting in front of a wall of drawings joined by pieces of string. He developed storyboarding to pre-visualise a film by laying out characters and scenes on large note cards.
It let his animation team reorder the action easily, add and subtract characters, and get a real sense of the film before production started.
Software has removed the need for cards and string. The power of telling and retelling a story as a group remains an extraordinarily effective way of generating new ideas.
Morphologies
Morphologies break a challenge down into its most discrete elements. They are often used in the life sciences to understand how a living organism works, and they behave like building blocks you can take apart and reassemble in unfamiliar ways.
Break a story into characters and actions and you can rebuild a wide range of possible solutions. Treat a product or an experience as a set of functions and attributes in a matrix and you can assemble a series of new combinations across use, colour, size and flavour.
This is why I have built a number of card decks for working on a brand, a set of values or a business model. Physical cards force combinations a spreadsheet never suggests.
Building scenarios
No data exists about the future in which breakthrough innovations will happen, so how do you see ahead at all? You consider how the underlying forces at work today might determine what happens later: politics, economics and social wellbeing, to name three.
Scenarios are projections of possible courses of action. They ask the what if questions and help you weigh the impact and the likelihood of each possible story.
This connects directly to volatility, where the lesson is that the future cannot be forecast and can be prepared for. Anyone following my series on the VUCA world will recognise the argument.
Resources on narrative creativity
- Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull, published by Random House.
- The art of storytelling, by Guillaume Lamarre, published by Pyramyd.
- Strategic Reframing: The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, by Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson, published by Oxford University Press.
Intuitive creativity
This last level is the hardest to reach, because it asks for a considerable amount of letting go. It can also be intimidating, having been promoted over the centuries into spiritual tradition and wisdom.
This is where creativity exceeds us and transcends our individuality. It is the inspired, or rather the illuminated, side of creative work.
How to improve your intuitive creativity
Several methods exist for freeing and emptying the mind: meditation, yoga, walks in the bush and singing, to name a few. The founding idea is to distract and relax the mind into a fluid state of consciousness, the flow already mentioned, where ideas arrive easily.
The approaches are too numerous to cover here. Free writing is a simple way of connecting to our intuitive self by watching what comes out of the pen or the keyboard.
Bernard Werber puts it well when he says you should not wait to be inspired before writing, because the idea follows the pen and you have to start writing for inspiration to arrive.
The Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore developed meditative practices specifically to strengthen personal creativity, as did Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf education system.
Creative visualisation
A large part of our brain is built to make images, which is the reason metaphors are indispensable. We are unusual in that the images we create in our minds can alter our experience of reality, for better or worse.
Visualisation as a form of positive thinking helps us past our doubts and pulls us towards what we are looking for.
Because visual information is so vivid and so hard to distinguish from ordinary perception, visualisation is frequently an irresistible source of new ideas.
Free writing
Mozart is said to have never corrected a score, composing everything in his head. For most of us the process runs the other way, and it is in the iterative expression of our thoughts that we discover we have compelling new ideas.
The basic principle of free writing is that it is an act of communication with our intuition. The challenge is suspending your judging voice and simply watching what comes out.
The goal is a state of flow where we write faster than our mind can edit. Only after covering the page can we go back and discover our creative ideas.
Dream interpretation
The German chemist August Kekulé is said to have discovered the ring form of the benzene molecule after seeing it in a dream. The physicist Richard Feynman, who reshaped quantum mechanics, did a good deal of his thinking in a topless bar in Pasadena, which he described himself.
Dreams are awkward material because they are hard to capture, and even when we do we tend to adjust them into something that makes more sense.
Some research suggests waking at the same time each day helps prepare the mind to end the dream cycle at a fixed hour. Record the dream immediately as it came, without supplying a narrative, since the narrative is usually reasoning imposed after the fact.
Keeping a dream journal helps you develop an understanding of your own vocabulary of symbols. Universal symbols exist, and most therapists agree your personal dream vocabulary is entirely your own.
Resources on intuitive creativity
- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content, by Mark Levy, published by Berrett-Koehler.
- The Book of Possibilities, by Bernard Werber.
- Meditation applications such as Calm, Headspace or the Australian-made Smiling Mind, which is free and was built with clinical input.
Field note
The group that skipped four levels and got nothing
A leadership team booked me for a creativity day and asked specifically for the intuitive material. They wanted the meditation, the free writing and the letting go, because they had read that this was where the real ideas came from and they wanted to start at the top.
The morning was a polite failure. People wrote for ten minutes and produced nothing they were willing to read out, and one participant described the exercise as being asked to relax while somebody watched. After lunch I dropped the plan and ran a service safari instead, sending them out in pairs to observe businesses in the surrounding streets with a single sheet of paper each. They came back with more usable material in ninety minutes than the entire morning had produced.
The order of the levels is not decoration. Intuitive creativity works on material that observation, association, analogy and narrative have already gathered. Ask a group to let go before they have anything to let go of and you get an uncomfortable silence.
And artificial creativity?
Artificial intelligence has arrived inside creative work, in a field that was supposed to stay human. It sits awkwardly across all five levels rather than adding a sixth, which is what makes it interesting rather than threatening.
Where it helps and where it does not
A generative model is extremely strong at the second level, since bisociation is close to what these systems do mechanically. It is competent at the first and third, where imitation and analogy can be prompted deliberately.
It is weakest at the fifth, because intuitive creativity depends on having a body, a history and an unconscious. That gap is worth knowing before you rebuild a creative process around a tool.
The practical consequence
Use it where it is strong and protect the levels where it is not. A team that leans on generative tools for association will produce more combinations and fewer surprising ones, since the model averages what already exists.
I have written separately about how this plays out in practice.
Which level of creativity to work on first
The five levels suit different situations, and choosing by appeal rather than by need is the most common mistake. The level worth working on is the one your current problem actually requires, which is rarely the one that sounds most impressive in a workshop brochure.
The five levels compared
Each level answers a different question and needs different conditions. Read the table by the problem you have rather than by the level you would enjoy.
| Level | What it produces | Difficulty | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mimetic | Solutions borrowed from nature or another sector | Lowest | Your team has never looked outside its own industry |
| Bisociative | Hybrid ideas from unrelated pairs | Low to moderate | You need volume and range before choosing |
| Analogical | Understanding transferred from a known field to an unknown one | Moderate | The problem is genuinely unfamiliar and resists direct attack |
| Narrative | Direction, meaning and a shared story to build against | Moderate to high | You have ideas and no agreement about where you are going |
| Intuitive | Insight that arrives without being requested | Highest | The first four have already gathered the material |
Signals that point to each level
Four signals settle the choice quickly, and each one describes something you can observe in a room rather than something you have to measure.
- Every idea in the room resembles your own product, which points to mimetic work and getting people outside the building.
- You have plenty of ideas and no way to choose, which points to narrative work rather than more ideation.
- The problem has defeated three straightforward attempts, which points to analogy.
- People are producing polished ideas quickly, which usually means they are editing before they generate, and fluency exercises come first.
Find out whether your organisation lets anybody use these levels
Methods are the easy part, and permission is the constraint. Score your own practice with the managerial transformation diagnostic and find out whether creativity has anything to stand on in your teams.
How I can help you work the levels of creativity
I run these levels as practice rather than as theory, which means a session produces material your teams can use on Monday. The design depends entirely on which level your current problem needs.
Workshops and creativity sessions
Workshops start from a real problem your team brought rather than from a case study. Service safaris, SCAMPER, six hats, storyboarding and card decks all appear where they fit the problem, and none of them appears because it looks good in a programme.
Sessions end with a decision about what gets tested, and by whom, before anybody leaves the room.
Keynotes and creative leadership programmes
A keynote suits an organisation that keeps hiring creative people and keeps producing conventional work. Forty-five minutes is enough to show a room that the constraint sits in their conditions rather than in their talent.
Longer programmes connect these levels to enableship, the leadership of innovation, which is my own frame for the work a leader does to make other people’s contribution possible.
Conclusion: the levels of creativity are steps, not a ranking
Mimetic, bisociative, analogical, narrative and intuitive. Five levels, ordered by how hard they are to master rather than by how much they are worth.
Every one of these approaches is accessible. You simply have to keep trying new things, and to remember that a creative life gets built gradually rather than granted at birth.
Start where your problem is rather than where the interesting language is. The levels of creativity reward the person who works through them in order far more than the person who jumps to the end.
Frequently asked questions about the levels of creativity
What are the five levels of creativity?
Mimetic, bisociative, analogical, narrative and intuitive. They run from easiest to hardest to master. Mimetic copies nature or another sector, bisociative connects unrelated ideas, analogical transfers understanding between domains, narrative builds stories, and intuitive works by quieting the mind.
Can creativity actually be learned?
Yes, because each level has its own trainable methods, from service safaris and SCAMPER through to storyboarding and free writing. None of us becomes Picasso, and all of us can learn to draw. What limits most teams is permission rather than capability.
Who created the SCAMPER method?
Bob Eberle, in his 1971 book SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development. He organised into a mnemonic the idea-spurring questions Alex Osborn had published in Applied Imagination in 1953. The method has seven steps, not six.
Where does artificial intelligence sit among the levels of creativity?
Generative tools are strongest at the bisociative level, since connecting unrelated material is close to what they do mechanically. They are weakest at the intuitive level, which depends on having a body, a history and an unconscious. Use them where they are strong.
