Where’s your light-beam-riding thinking?

Einstein wondered what it would be like to travel so fast that you could catch up to light and ride a light beam. He is the definition of intelligent. But his breakthrough was made with creativity.

Mandie van der Merwe is chair of Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association

Reading the news fills me with a sense of existential dread. Existential dread and a kind of masochistic excitement. And the news at present is particularly distress-inducing – war in the Middle East, the slowing Chinese economy, another tumultuous US election, injustices of every kind and the state of rugby union in Australia.

Even though we know we can learn from our past experiences, make rational choices and find ways to adapt, it takes little to no effort to feel desperate and uncertain. AKA existential dread.

On the other hand, I am also a creative human. And any creative person will tell you that there is nothing more invigorating than a big, impossible problem to unlock new ways of thinking, new ideas and innovation. Masochistic? Yes. Exciting? Also yes.

This isn’t a new reality – we’ve had drama like this before. Back in the day we had things like the Black Death and the Crusades (in today’s language, “Covid and war”). At that time, the Catholic Church was dominant and the prevailing “intelligence” was driven by theology.

But turmoil, questioning the status quo and a collective movement away from dogma made people wonder if there was a new way of seeing the world.

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution – these were all periods of ultra-creativity that were precipitated by some Dark-Age person’s existential dread.

In marketing nowadays, we’ve got a dominant intelligence that we revere almost as greatly as our ancestors did the gods. It’s an intelligence built on measurement models that predict outcomes, data points that allow us to see patterns and research that transforms in decimal-point increments.

Don’t get me wrong … this type of intelligence is smart. It’s neat. It’s understandable. It’s efficient. But it’s not creativity.

Intelligence allows us to gather knowledge and use it. It allows us to learn from the past and relies on reasoning. Creativity loses that tether to the past. It relies on making seemingly random connections of concepts to create brand new frameworks to work within. We need both. But, most importantly, we need to ensure that we don’t conflate them in our minds and pretend they’re the same thing.

For a practical, non-advertising example of the difference between the two, let’s look at Einstein and his super-cool theory of relativity. No one can question Einstein’s grasp of quantum physics and mathematics. But the thing that led to his ground-breaking scientific discovery wasn’t intelligence. Famously, it was a creative thought experiment.

He wondered what it would be like to travel so fast that you could catch up to light and ride a light beam. Einstein is the definition of intelligent. But his breakthrough was made with creativity.

Right now, there is a chief marketing officer sitting in a boardroom somewhere in Australia facing immense stress. Budgets are tight, expectations are high and timeframes are short. And in walks a creative from an advertising agency.

The creative has read all the research, understands the data and looked at how the performance marketing is clocking sales. The creative also knows times are tough, the world is at war and that things are expensive – it’s her reality as well. But she’s come in to present an idea that involves riding a light beam.

There are many who won’t take this creative individual seriously – it’s a pretty fruity idea. It seems dangerous and untested. But the truth is that the case for creativity – truly new, light-beam-riding thinking – has never been stronger. Neither the problems on the front pages of our newspapers nor those that dominate conversations in our boardrooms are going to be resolved without making new connections to new concepts. Doing what has already been done is the most dangerous thing of all because the rate of change of our environment is much faster than the incremental improvement of relying on intelligence alone.

We need to make quantum leaps with our ideas. To do that, we have to doubt everything we think we know more regularly. We need optimism.

We need to be afraid of doing what has been done before. We need a hint of existential dread so that we have the courage to be gloriously wilder.

Wild enough to create weatherproof homes for an insurance company, to make doom-scrolling a good thing, and to make people laugh even when it feels like there’s so little to laugh about.

We need intelligence. We need creativity. And we need to remember that they’re not the same thing.

Mandie van der Merwe is chair of Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association.