The Illusion of the Pristine Studio

We live under the sway of a persistent myth: that true creation requires absolute tranquility. We idealize the image of the artist or thinker in a serene, sun-drenched studio, surrounded by silence, order, and immaculate tools. We imagine that brilliant thoughts descend like gentle dew upon a mind entirely unruffled by the turbulence of the world. This romantic portrait is appealing, but it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of creativity. Order does not generate energy; it merely organizes it. The true spark of creation rarely arrives in moments of static comfort. It is born out of disruption, uncertainty, and cognitive upheaval. Chaos is not the enemy of art and insight; it is the primordial soil from which they grow.

To understand why chaos fuels the imagination, we must examine the nature of order itself. Order strives for symmetry, predictability, and efficiency. It consolidates what is already known, refining existing models and optimizing established routines. Yet refinement is not invention. When a system—whether a culture, a science, or an individual mind—becomes too orderly, it exhausts its capacity for original thought. It turns in familiar circles, perfecting its methods while losing the ability to imagine anything outside them.

Chaos, by contrast, is a state of unbounded potential. In physics, entropy measures disorder, but in the realm of mind and culture, chaos represents an unmapped terrain of raw possibility. When the structures that organize our thoughts collapse, established rules lose their hold over us. Categories dissolve, boundaries blur, and concepts previously kept apart suddenly meet and fuse. It is precisely within these unexpected collisions that the muse awakens—not as a calm spirit offering gentle advice, but as a lightning bolt forged in atmospheric tension.

The ancient Greeks understood this intuitive truth. In Hesiod’s Theogony, creation does not begin with structure or light; it begins with Khaos—the vast, dark, unformed abyss that precedes all shape and definition. From this primeval void, Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Desire) emerge. Myth reveals what logic often forgets: form can only arise from the formless. Before something original can exist, the old structures must give way. Creation is an act of architecture built upon the ruins of past certainty.

The Tyranny of Unbroken Order

Order is essential for preserving civilization, transmitting knowledge, and refining craft. Without it, human effort dissolves into directionless noise. Yet when order becomes absolute, it transforms into a quiet tyranny. Hyper-regulated environments produce a mental stiffness where novelty is viewed with suspicion and variation is treated as error. In an overly structured system, every element has a fixed place and a predetermined function. Nothing unexpected is permitted to disrupt the pattern.

This calcification affects individuals and entire institutions alike. In academia, hyper-specialization often produces work that is technically flawless yet conceptually stagnant. In the arts, strict adherence to canon and technique can result in beautiful artifacts that say nothing new. When a mind feels entirely secure within its framework, it stops asking fundamental questions. It relies on cognitive shortcuts, mistaking familiarity for truth and routine for mastery.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations, but its execution demands the friction of the unknown."

From an information-theoretic perspective, absolute order contains almost no new information. A signal that is entirely predictable carries no surprise, and without surprise, learning stops. Chaos introduces the noise, anomalies, and disruptions that force an information system to adapt, reconfigure, and grow. Novelty requires a degree of error—a departure from the blueprint. Without the courage to allow systems to fracture, we sentence ourselves to a perpetual cycle of repetition.

Consider how routine affects daily perception. When we navigate familiar streets or perform habituated tasks, our consciousness goes on autopilot. We stop truly seeing our surroundings because our internal predictive models anticipate every visual detail. It is only when the unexpected occurs—a missed train, a sudden storm, an unfamiliar path—that our sensory apparatus wakes up. Chaos strips away the haze of familiarity, forcing us to engage directly with the world as it is, rather than as we expected it to be.

The Sublime and the Derangement of the Senses

In 18th-century philosophy, Immanuel Kant drew a vital distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime. The Beautiful belongs to the realm of order, form, and harmony; it pleases us because it aligns neatly with our cognitive capacities. The Sublime, however, strikes us when we confront something vast, formless, turbulent, or terrifying—a raging ocean, a mountain precipice, a shattering storm. The Sublime overwhelms our immediate ability to comprehend it, plunging the mind into temporary bewilderment.

Yet this bewilderment is precisely what elevates the spirit. Confronted with the Sublime, the mind is pushed beyond its comfortable limits, forced to expand its capacity to absorb the incomprehensible. Chaos acts on the creative imagination in much the same way. It disrupts our cozy, bite-sized categories and forces us to confront forces larger than our existing concepts. In wrestling with this disorientation, the creator reaches for higher forms of expression, forging language, art, and philosophy equal to the intensity of the experience.

"A poet makes himself a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses." — Arthur Rimbaud, Letters of a Seer

Arthur Rimbaud famously argued that the artist must cultivate a "reasoned derangement of all the senses" to break through the domestic placidity of conventional thought. Rimbaud understood that comfortable, orderly perception acts as a filter that dims the vivid complexity of reality. By disrupting routine perception, the artist bypasses conventional mental shortcuts, exposing the raw, unmediated currents of existence.

This aesthetic shock-therapy lies at the heart of the romantic and avant-garde traditions. When the French poet Gérard de Nerval walked a lobster through the gardens of the Palais-Royal on a blue ribbon, or when the Surrealists developed automatic writing to bypass conscious editing, they were deliberately inviting chaos into their creative process. They sought to break the executive control of the logical mind, allowing subterranean images, buried memories, and wild associations to surface unfiltered.

Historical Cataclysms as Aesthetic Engines

The historical record confirms that the most revolutionary artistic shifts rarely coincide with times of placid prosperity. Instead, they erupt out of periods of intense societal trauma, rapid technological displacement, and moral collapse. External chaos shatters the reigning intellectual consensus, rendering existing artistic vocabularies obsolete overnight. When the world no longer makes sense, old forms of storytelling feel hollow and inadequate.

Consider the birth of Dadaism during the First World War. In 1916, as millions of young men were consumed in the mud of Western Europe, a group of exiled artists, poets, and dissidents gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. They saw the war not as an isolated tragedy, but as the logical, monstrous outcome of European rationalism, nationalism, and bourgeois order. Logic had led directly to slaughter.

"How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, of worms, of everything nice and neat, fractionated, verbalized, humanized? By saying Dada." — Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto

In response, Dadaists like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Hannah Höch embraced absurdism, chance, and phonetic nonsense. They cut up newspapers to assemble poems by drawing words randomly from a hat; they created photomontages out of fractured media images; they staged chaotic performances designed to shock audiences out of intellectual paralysis. Dada was an intentional application of artistic chaos, designed to destroy a corrupt aesthetic order and rebuild culture from the ashes up.

Out of Dada’s deliberate madness grew Surrealism, and out of the ruins of interwar Europe came Modernism. Writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot did not experiment with stream-of-consciousness narrative or fragmented poetic structures simply to be difficult. They did so because the linear, omniscient narrative techniques of the 19th century could no longer convey the fractured experience of modern life. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land reads like a mosaic of broken cultural fragments because it was written in a world that had literally fallen apart.

The Neurobiology of Friction and Cognitive Disruption

Modern neuroscience offers a compelling perspective on why turmoil often fuels creativity. The human brain is essentially an advanced prediction machine. Its primary goal is to minimize surprise, conserve energy, and construct reliable internal models of the external environment. To accomplish this, the brain filters out vast amounts of sensory information, relying on well-worn neural pathways to process daily life with minimal effort.

This efficiency is vital for survival, but it is fatal to original thought. When our internal models work perfectly, we operate on cognitive autopilot. We reach for familiar metaphors, accept standard explanations, and follow established habits. Creative breakthroughs require what neuroscientists call "cognitive flexibility"—the ability to break away from habitual modes of thought, abandon outdated mental frameworks, and forge novel neural connections between previously unrelated concepts.

THE COGNITIVE CYCLE

• ORDER: Predictive models reduce cognitive friction.

• DISRUPTION: Novel/chaotic input breaks existing patterns.

• SYNTHESIS: Brain constructs new, more complex frameworks.

Disruption acts as a catalyst for this flexibility. When we experience emotional turmoil, deep grief, sudden displacement, or existential disorientation, our brain’s predictive models fail. The executive control networks that enforce cognitive discipline loosen their hold. In this state of disorientation, the brain's default mode network—associated with daydreaming, memory integration, and spontaneous conceptual synthesis—interacts with sensory input in unusual ways.

This neurobiological friction explains why so many iconic figures produced their most visionary work during deep personal crises. When life strips away our psychological defenses, we can no longer rely on superficial assumptions. Forced to confront reality without our usual filters, we are compelled to construct new, deeper frameworks of meaning to replace the ones that failed us.

Serendipity, Accident, and the Materiality of Art

Beyond its psychological effects, chaos serves as an engine of accidental discovery—what we call serendipity. In a strictly controlled environment, every variable is managed, which means the unexpected is systematically excluded. Yet true innovation frequently arises from anomalies, mistakes, and unintended side effects. Chaos introduces the random variations that push an artist or researcher beyond their conscious intentions.

Consider the role of physical accident in the visual arts. The painter Francis Bacon frequently spoke of the necessity of making "involuntary marks" on the canvas. To break through his own conscious habits and cliché images, he would fling paint at the canvas with a rag or sponge, intentionally creating a mess he could not fully predict or control. He would then look into that chaotic splash of color and texture, searching for half-formed figures and suggestions of form that his conscious mind would never have conceived.

"I want a painter to brush paint on the canvas as if he were throwing a stone at a wall. I want the mark to be made by an act of chance that shocks the eye into seeing." — Francis Bacon

In music, unexpected errors often open entirely new creative directions. During a legendary recording session for Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the pianist Bill Evans intentionally introduced sparse, ambiguous modal chords that left the traditional harmonic structure open-ended. Rather than resolving harmonies cleanly, the musicians were forced to improvise in real time over unfamiliar, shifting musical landscapes. By stepping into harmonic uncertainty, they created one of the most celebrated jazz albums in history.

Scientific history is similarly filled with breakthroughs born of productive disorder. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin occurred because a stray mold spore drifted onto an uncovered petri dish left near an open window in a cluttered laboratory. Had Fleming maintained an impeccably sterile environment, the mold would never have landed; had he rigidly discarded contaminated samples, he would have missed the bacterial death zone around the mold. The breakthrough lay in his willingness to pay attention to an unexpected disruption rather than dismissing it as a ruined trial.

The Perilous Edge: Romanticization vs. Reality

While chaos is an indispensable catalyst for creation, it is crucial to avoid a dangerous romantic fallacy: the fetishization of suffering, mental collapse, and destruction for their own sake. Chaos alone does not create art. Unchecked turmoil, severe psychosis, and addiction do not make a person creative; more often, they cripple the mind, destroy relationships, and silence talent prematurely.

The tragic lives of figures like Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, or John Berryman are often cited to argue that great art requires personal ruin. But a closer look reveals that Van Gogh did not paint during his worst psychotic episodes; he painted during periods of recovery, when he could bring discipline, focus, and craft to bear upon the chaotic emotional territory he had traversed. His genius lay not in his suffering, but in his rare ability to construct radiant order out of deep inner agony.

THE CREATIVE VECTOR

• PURE ORDER --> Sterility & Cliché

• PURE CHAOS --> Destruction & Silence

• CREATIVE EDGE --> Chaotic Input + Disciplined Form

Chaos provides the raw, unshaped marble, but discipline is the chisel. Without an "Apollonian vessel"—the structural skill, technique, and stamina required to give form to experience—chaotic energy simply dissipates into noise. The painter must still understand color and light; the poet must know rhythm and syntax; the scientist must master methodology. Creation occurs at the razor edge where chaotic energy meets disciplined craftsmanship.

This delicate balance requires what John Keats called Negative Capability—the capacity to remain in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." The weak mind demands immediate resolution, rushing to slap a superficial label onto an unsettling experience. The strong creative mind can endure the discomfort of chaos, allowing ambiguous images, conflicting emotions, and messy ideas to sit unresolved until a deeper, more organic synthesis emerges on its own time.

The Algorithmic Desert: Creativity in the Age of Optimization

If historical eras were threatened by excessive turmoil, our contemporary world suffers from the opposite malady: the hyper-optimization and sanitization of human experience. We live in a society obsessed with friction-free efficiency, predictive algorithms, and total control. We design our daily lives to eliminate inconvenience, surprise, and disorientation.

Our digital environments are carefully curated to deliver content that aligns with our existing preferences. Predictive text finishes our sentences before we fully formulate them, recommendation engines suggest what we should consume based on our past habits, and navigation apps ensure we never take an unplanned turn. While this offers extraordinary convenience, it poses a quiet, systemic threat to the human creative spirit.

"When you eliminate all friction from life, you also eliminate the sparks."

By banishing chance, discomfort, and disruption from our daily lives, we risk eliminating the very friction that sparks original thought. When thought becomes frictionless, it tends toward derivative monotony. Without unexpected detours, jarring encounters with opposing viewpoints, or the humbling experience of being lost, the imagination relies on pre-packaged answers. The current crisis of cultural homogenization—where popular music, cinema, and literature often feel manufactured by committee—is a direct consequence of a culture that fears chaos and penalizes creative risk.

We have built a world that values safety over discovery, forgetting that art demands a degree of peril. When art is stripped of danger and unpredictability, it turns into mere entertainment—a pleasant, easily digested product designed to soothe rather than transform. To keep the muse alive in an age of automated convenience, we must deliberately resist this slide into sterile predictability. We must find ways to invite meaningful disruption back into our intellectual lives.

Cultivating the Productive Storm

Inviting productive chaos into one's life does not require courting disaster, seeking out trauma, or burning down one's life. Rather, it means cultivating an attitude of radical openness to the unexpected, building a lifestyle that values curiosity over comfort and discovery over routine.

Strategies for Creative Disruption

• Break Cognitive Routines: Regularly alter your daily habits. Walk unfamiliar routes, read outside your field, and engage with art that initially confuses or repels you.

• Embrace Intentional Disorientation: Seek out environments, ideas, and cultures that challenge your foundational assumptions and force you to re-evaluate what you take for granted.

• Maintain Messy Workspace Boundaries: Allow space for unorganized brainstorming, untidy notebooks, and half-formed ideas before rushing to organize them into polished outlines.

• Reframe Errors as Information: Treat mistakes, missteps, and unexpected failures not as embarrassing setbacks to be hidden, but as rich informational sources revealing uncharted territory.

• Practice Delayed Resolution: When confronted with a complex creative problem, resist the urge to adopt the first easy solution. Sit with the ambiguity and let competing ideas clarify themselves over time.

By practicing these habits, we train ourselves to view chaos not as a threat to be neutralized, but as a partner in the creative process. We learn to step into uncertainty with curiosity rather than fear, trusting that our minds possess the innate resilience and craft needed to transform raw disorder into lasting meaning.

Coda: The Dancing Star

The relationship between chaos and the muse reveals a fundamental truth about human existence: we are meaning-making creatures forged in an unpredictable universe. We do not create in spite of life's turmoil; we create because of it. Chaos is the living ocean upon which the human imagination sails. It threatens to capsize us at every turn, yet without its currents, winds, and storms, we would remain forever marooned in stagnant waters.

The muse is not a pristine, distant deity presiding over a quiet temple of static perfection. She is a spirit born of the tempest—present where light meets shadow, where comfortable structures break down, and where the human heart dares to stare into the storm and sing. Her voice is heard not in the echo chamber of our certainties, but in the quiet, insistent melody that emerges when we attempt to make sense of a world falling apart.

To fear chaos is to fear the very mechanism of growth and renewal. To embrace it—with open eyes, a steady hand, and a disciplined spirit—is to step into the infinite stream of human creativity. In the end, the ultimate measure of an artist, a thinker, or a culture lies in their relationship to disorder: whether they cower before it, seeking shelter in comfortable dogmas, or step out into the storm, gather the lightning, and fashion it into a dancing star.

Full text

John Cleese's 1991 Philosophy on Creativity

A Non-Talent Approach Focused on Mood, The Open/Closed Modes, and The Five Pillars of The 'Oasis'

Creativity is fundamentally a way of operating—a mood—rather than an innate talent, having been shown by research (e.g., Donald McKinnon at Berkeley) to be unrelated to IQ above a minimal level. The ability to be creative hinges on cultivating the correct psychological state, categorized into two organizational modes (developed with Dr. Robin Skinner):

1. The Closed Mode: This is the habitual, work-driven state—active, purposeful, slightly anxious, tense, impatient, and lacking humor. It is essential for implementing decisions efficiently but actively strangles creativity.

2. The Open Mode: This is the creative state—relaxed, expansive, less purposeful, contemplative, playful, and characterized by a wider perspective and humor. It is characterized by the ability to "play with ideas" for their own sake, driven by curiosity (e.g., Alexander Fleming observing the uncultured dish; Alfred Hitchcock breaking intense work to tell unrelated stories).

Efficient operation requires switching fluidly between the Open Mode (for pondering/creation) and the Closed Mode (for decisive implementation), but the danger lies in becoming habitually "stuck" in the Closed Mode due to external pressures (e.g., political crisis mentality).

To facilitate the shift into the Open Mode, five factors must be intentionally established, forming a "Space-Time Oasis":

• Space: Creating a physically and mentally quiet, undisturbed environment, sealed off from external demands.

• Time (Duration): Dedicating a specific, bounded chunk of time (suggested minimum: 90 minutes) to allow the mind to quieten down and enter the open, playful state (a concept observed by historian Johan Huizinga regarding the boundaries of play).

• Time (Pondering): The willingness to tolerate the internal discomfort or anxiety of an unsolved problem and defer a decision until the very last possible moment, thereby sticking with the problem longer to reach a more original solution (McKinnon's key finding). Decisiveness should be applied only after the pondering phase.

• Confidence: Freedom from the fear of making a mistake. In the Open Mode, nothing is "wrong"; all experiments and "drivel" are acceptable, providing the necessary license for playfulness and spontaneity (as articulated by Alan Watts).

• Humor: The most rapid method for transitioning from the Closed Mode to the Open Mode, as it fosters relaxation and playfulness. Cleese distinguishes between matters that are serious (important) and the destructive nature of solemnity (which serves pomposity and egotism).

The Creative Mechanism and Group Work: A new idea is generated by connecting two previously separate frameworks of reference in a new, meaningful way (like the punchline of a joke). This process can be jumpstarted by generating random juxtapositions (e.g., "cheese with motorcycles") and using intuition to detect which connections "smell interesting." Edward De Bono's "Intermediate Impossibles"—deliberately absurd or illogical ideas—can be used as necessary stepping stones to reach a correct solution. Group creativity is enhanced in a trusted environment where participants are supportive, avoid squashing ideas ("never say no or wrong"), and prioritize positive building.

Satirical Suppression: In a sardonic conclusion, Cleese provides a guide for leaders wishing to actively crush creativity and maintain power, which involves: eliminating all humor (treating it as subversive), undermining subordinates' confidence (only criticizing), and demanding constant activity and urgency to ensure staff are permanently stuck in the non-creative Closed Mode.

Transcript

John Cleese's Legendary 1991 Speech About Creativity

[Applause]

You know when Video Arts asked me if I'd like to talk about creativity I said no problem, no problem, because telling people how to be creative is easy. It's only being it that's difficult. And I knew it would be particularly easy for me because I spent the last 25 years watching how various creative people produce their stuff and being fascinated to see if I could figure out what makes folk, including me, more creative. What is more, a couple of years ago I got very excited because a friend of mine who runs the psychology department at Sussex University, Brian Bates, showed me some research on creativity done at Berkeley in the 70s by a brilliant psychologist called Donald McKinnon, which seemed to confirm in the most impressively scientific way all the vague observations and intuition that I'd had over the years. So the prospect of settling down to a quite serious study of creativity for the purpose of tonight's gossip was delightful. And having spent several weeks on it, I can state categorically that what I have to tell you tonight about how you can all become more creative is a complete waste of time.

So I think it'll be much better if I just told jokes instead. You know the light bulb jokes? You know, how many Poles does it take to screw a light bulb? One to hold the bulb, four to turn the table. Um, how many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: five. One to change the bulb and four to sing about how much better the old one was. How many socialists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: we're not going to change it, we think it works. How many creative art...

The reason why it is futile for me to talk about creativity is that it simply cannot be explained. It's like Mozart's music or Van Gogh's painting or Saddam Hussein's propaganda; it is literally inexplicable. Freud, who analyzed practically everything else, repeatedly denied that psychoanalysis could shed any light whatsoever on the mysteries of creativity. And Brian Bates wrote to me recently: "Most of the best research on creativity was done in the 60s and 70s, with a quite dramatic drop off in quantity after then, largely I suspect because researchers began to feel that they had reached the limits of what science could discover about it." In fact, the only thing from the research that I could tell you about how to be creative is the sort of childhood that you should have had, which is of limited help to you at this point of your lives.

However, there is one negative thing that I can say, and it's negative because it's easier to say what creativity isn't, uh, a bit like the sculptor who, when asked how he had sculpted a very fine elephant, explained that he'd taken a big block of marble and then knocked away all the bits that didn't look like an elephant.

Now, here's the negative thing. Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. So, how many actors does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: thousands. Only one to do it, but thousands to say, "I could have done that." How many Jewish Mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: "Don't mind me, I'll just sit here in the dark. Nobody cares about..."

How many surgeons... You see, when I say a way of operating, what I mean is this: Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have. It is, for example, and this may surprise you, absolutely unrelated to IQ, provided you're intelligent above a certain minimal level, that is. But McKinnon showed, in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers, that those regarded by their peers as most creative were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.

So in what way were they different? Well, McKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood, a way of operating which allowed their natural creativity to function. In fact, McKinnon described this particular facility as an ability to play. Indeed, he described the most creative, when in this mood, as being childlike, for they were able to play with ideas, to explore them, not for any immediate practical purpose, but just for enjoyment, play for its own sake.

Now, about this mood. I'm working at the moment with Dr. Robin Skinner on a successor to our psychiatry book, Families and How to Survive Them. We're comparing the ways in which psychologically healthy families function and then the ways in which such families function with the ways in which the most successful corporations and organizations function. And we've become fascinated by the fact that we can usefully describe the way in which people function at work in terms of two modes: Open and Closed. So what I can just add now is that creativity is not possible in the Closed Mode.

Okay, so how many American Network TV Executives does it take to screw a light bulb? Answer: "Does it have to be a light bulb?" How many...

Well, let me explain a little. By the Closed Mode, I mean the mode that we are in most of the time when we're at work. We have inside us a feeling that there's lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we're going to get through it all. It's an active, probably slightly anxious mode, although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable. It's a mode in which we're probably a little impatient, if only with ourselves. It has a little tension in it, not much humor. It's a mode in which we're very purposeful, and it's a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic, but not creative.

By contrast, the Open Mode is a relaxed, expansive, less purposeful mode in which we're probably more contemplative, uh, more inclined to humor, which always accompanies a wider perspective, and consequently, more playful. It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.

Now, let me give you an example of what I mean. When Alexander Fleming had the thought that led to the discovery of penicillin, he must have been in the Open Mode. The previous day, he'd arranged a number of dishes so that culture would grow upon them. On the day in question, he glanced at the dishes and he discovered that on one of them no culture had appeared. Now, if he'd been in the Closed Mode, he would have been so focused upon his need for dishes with cultures grown upon them that when he saw that one dish was of no use to him for that purpose, he would quite simply have thrown it away. But thank goodness he was in the Open Mode, so he became curious about why the culture had not grown on this particular dish. And that curiosity, as the world knows, led him to the light bulb—I'm sorry—to penicillin. In the Closed Mode, an uncultured dish is an irrelevance. In the Open Mode, it's a clue.

Now, one more example. One of Alfred Hitchcock's regular co-writers has described working with him on screenplays. He says: "When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say, 'We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax. It will come.'" And says the writer, "Of course, it finally always did."

But let me make one thing quite clear. We need to be in the Open Mode when we're pondering a problem, but once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the Closed Mode to implement it, because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness. For example, if you decide to leap a ravine, the moment just before takeoff is a bad time to start reviewing alternative strategies. When you're attacking a machine gun post, you should not make a particular effort to see the funny side of what you're doing. Humor is a natural concomitant of the Open Mode, but it's a luxury in the Closed one.

Now, once we've taken a decision, we should narrow our focus while we're implementing it. And then, after it's been carried out, we should once again switch back to the Open Mode to review the feedback arising from our action in order to decide whether the course that we have taken is successful or whether we should continue with the next stage of our plan, whether we should create an alternative plan to correct any error we've perceived, and then back into the Closed Mode again to implement that next stage, and so on. In other words, to be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forwards between the two modes.

But here's the problem: we too often get stuck in the Closed Mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view. This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their non-political colleagues is that they become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour by hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the Open Mode. So, as I say, creativity is not possible in the Closed Mode.

And that's it. Well, 20 minutes to go. So how many women's libbers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: 37. One to screw it in and 36 to make a documentary about it. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: only one, but the light bulb has really got to want to change.

Oh, there is one, just one other thing that I can say about creativity. There are certain conditions which do make it more likely that you'll get into the Open Mode and that something creative will occur. More likely—you can't guarantee anything will occur. You might sit around for hours, as I did last Tuesday, nothing, zilch, bupkis, not a sausage. Nevertheless, I can at least tell you how to get yourselves into the Open Mode. You need five things:

• Space

• Time

• Time

• Confidence

• ...and Humor.

I do beg your pardon. Okay, let's take Space first. You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures, because to cope with them, you've got to be in the Closed Mode, right? So you have to create some space for yourself away from those demands, and that means sealing yourself off. You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.

Next, Time. It's not enough to create space. You have to create your space for a specific period of time. You have to know that your space will last until exactly, say, 3:30, and that at that moment, your normal life will start again. And it's only by having a specific moment when your space starts and an equally specific moment when your space stops that you can seal yourself off from the everyday Closed Mode in which we all habitually operate. And I'd never realized how vital this was until I read a historical study of play by a Dutch historian called Johan Huizinga. And in it he says, "Play is distinct from ordinary life, both as to locality and duration. This is its main characteristic, its secluded, its limitedness. Play begins, and then at a certain moment, it is over. Otherwise, it's not play."

So, combining the first two factors, we create an oasis of quiet for ourselves by setting boundaries of space and of time. Now creativity can happen because play is possible when we're separate from everyday life. So, you've arranged to take no calls, you've closed your door, you've sat down somewhere comfortable, you've taken a couple of deep breaths, and if you're anything like me, after you've pondered some problem that you want to turn into an opportunity for about 90 seconds, you find yourself thinking, "Oh, I forgot. I've got to call Jim and I must tell Tina that I need the report on Wednesday and not Thursday, which means I must move my lunch with Joe, and damn, I haven't called St Paul's about getting Joe's daughter an interview, and I must pop out this afternoon to get Will's birthday present, and those plants need watering, and none of my pencils are sharpened, and right, I've got too much to do, so I'm going to start by sorting out my clips and then I shall make 27 phone calls, and I'll do some thinking tomorrow when I've got everything out of the way."

Because, as we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it's also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we're not so sure about. So, when I say create an oasis of quiet, know that when you have, your mind will pretty soon start racing again. But you're not going to take that very seriously. You just sit there for a bit, tolerating the racing and the slight anxiety that comes with that, and after a time, your mind will quieten down again.

Now, because it takes some time for your mind to quieten down, it's absolutely no use arranging a space-time oasis lasting 30 minutes, because just as you're getting quieter and getting into the Open Mode, you have to stop. And that is very deeply frustrating. So, you must allow yourself a good chunk of time. I'd suggest about an hour and a half. Then, after you've got to the Open Mode, you'll have about an hour left for something to happen, if you're lucky. But don't put a whole morning aside. My experience is that after about an hour and a half, you need a break. So it's far better to do an hour and a half now and then an hour and a half next Thursday and maybe an hour and a half the week after that than to fix one four-and-a-half-hour session now.

And there's another reason for that, and that's Factor number three: Time. Yes, I know we just done time, but that was half of creating our oasis. Now I'm going to tell you about how to use the oasis that you've created. Why do you still need time? Well, let me tell you a story.

I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues, who seemed to me more talented than I was, did never produce scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time, and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it, even though I think he knew the solution was not very original. Whereas, if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out and finish by 5:00, I just couldn't. I'd sit there with the problem for another hour and a quarter, and by sticking at it, would in the end almost always come up with something more original. It was that simple. My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.

So, imagine my excitement when I found that this was exactly what McKinnon found in his research. He discovered that the most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it, because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety that we all experience when we haven't solved a problem. You know what I mean. If we have a problem and we need to solve it, until we do, we feel inside us a kind of internal agitation or tension or uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort. So, in order to do so, we take a decision, not because we're sure it's the best decision, but because taking it will make us feel better.

Well, the most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for much longer. And so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative. Now, the people I find it hardest to be creative with are people who need all the time to project an image of themselves as decisive, and who feel that to create this image, they need to decide everything very quickly and with a great show of confidence. Well, this behavior, I suggest sincerely, is the most effective way of strangling creativity at birth.

But please note, I'm not arguing against real decisiveness. I'm 100% in favor of taking a decision when it has to be taken, and then sticking to it while it's being implemented. What I'm suggesting to you is that before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself the question: "When does this decision have to be taken?" And having answered that, you defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time, which will lead you to the most creative solution. And if while you're pondering somebody accuses you of indecision, say, "Look, baby cakes, I don't have to decide till Tuesday, and I'm not chickening out of my creative discomfort by taking a snap decision before then. That's too easy."

So, to summarize, the third factor that facilitates creativity is time—giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.

Now, the next factor, number four, is Confidence. When you're in your Space-Time Oasis getting into the Open Mode, nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. Now, if you think about play, you'll see why. To play is to experiment: what happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that? What if...? The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, a feeling that whatever happens, it's okay. So you cannot be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong, something you shouldn't have done. I mean, you're either free to play or you're not. As Alan Watts puts it, "You can't be spontaneous within reason."

So you've got to risk saying things that are silly and illogical and wrong. And the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.

And now the last factor, the fifth: Humor. Well, I happen to think the main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the Closed Mode to the Open Mode quicker than anything else. I think we all know that laughter brings relaxation and that humor makes us playful. Yet, how many times have important discussions been held where really original and creative ideas were desperately needed to solve important problems, but where humor was taboo because the subject being discussed was so serious?

This attitude seems to me to stem from a very basic misunderstanding of the difference between serious and solemn. Now, I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner discussing matters that were extremely serious, like the education of our children or our marriages or the meaning of life—and I'm not talking about the film—and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand—I mean, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor, and it somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. And the self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat, and so dishonestly pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial, when it only makes them feel bigger.

Now, humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity that we need to solve problems, no matter how serious they may be. So, when you set up a Space-Time Oasis, giggle all you want. And there, ladies and gentlemen, are the five factors which you can arrange to make your lives more creative: Space, Time, Time, Confidence, and Lord Jeffrey Archer.

So now you know how to get into the Open Mode. The only other requirement is that you keep your mind gently round the subject you're pondering. Your daydreams, of course, but you just keep bringing your mind back, just like with meditation, because—and this is the extraordinary thing about creativity—if you just keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later, you will get a reward from your unconscious, probably in the shower later or at breakfast the next morning, but suddenly you are rewarded out of the blue, a new thought mysteriously appears, if you've put in the pondering time first.

So, how many Cecil Parkinsons does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: two. One to screw it in, one to screw it up. How many account executives does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: "Can I get back to you on that?" How many Norw... oh sorry, sorry. How many Dutch... I'm out of jokes.

Oh, one thing, looking at you all reminds me. I think it's easy to be creative if you've got other people to play with. I always find that if two or more of us throw ideas backwards and forwards, I get to more interesting and original places than I could ever have got to on my own. But there is a danger, a real danger. If there's one person around you who makes you feel defensive, you lose the confidence to play, and it's goodbye creativity. So always make sure your play friends are people that you like and trust, and never say anything to squash them either. Never say "No" or "Wrong" or "I don't like that." Always be positive and build on what's been said. "Would it be even better if...?" "I don't quite understand that, can you just explain it again?" "Go on, what if...?" "Let's pretend." Try to establish as free an atmosphere as possible.

And you know, sometimes I wonder if the success of the Japanese isn't partly due to their instinctive understanding of how to use groups creatively. You know, Westerners are often amazed at the unstructured nature of Japanese meetings. But maybe it's just that very lack of structure, that absence of time pressure, that frees them to solve problems so creatively. And how clever of the Japanese sometimes to plan that unstructuredness by, for example, insisting that the first people to give their views are the most junior, so that they can speak freely without the possibility of contradicting what's already been said by somebody more important.

Four minutes left. Ah, how many Irish... oh sorry, sorry.

Well, look, the very last thing that I can say about creativity is this: it's like humor in a joke. The laugh comes at a moment when you connect two different frameworks of reference in a new way. Example: there's the old story about a woman doing a survey into sexual attitudes who stops an airline pilot and asks him, amongst other things, when he last had sexual intercourse. He replies: "1958." Now, knowing airline pilots, the researcher is surprised and queries this. "Well," says the pilot, "it's only 21:10."

Now, we laughed eventually at the moment—the moment of contact between two frameworks of reference: the way we express what year it is and the 24-hour clock. Now, having an idea—a new idea—is exactly the same thing. It's connecting two hitherto separate ideas in a way that generates new meaning.

Now, connecting different ideas isn't difficult. You can connect cheese with motorcycles or moral courage with light green or bananas with international cooperation. You can get any computer to make a billion random connections for you. But these new connections or juxtapositions are significant only if they generate new meaning, right? So, as you play, you can deliberately try inventing these random juxtapositions and then use your intuition to tell you whether any of them seem to have significance for you. That's the bit the computer can't do. It can produce millions of new connections, but it can't tell which one of them smells interesting.

And of course, you'll produce some juxtapositions which are absolutely ridiculous, absurd. Good for you! Because Edward De Bono, who invented the notion of lateral thinking, specifically suggests in his book Po Beyond Yes and No that you can try loosening up your assumptions by playing with deliberately crazy connections. He calls such absurd ideas intermediate impossibles. And he points out that the use of an intermediate impossible is completely contrary to ordinary logical thinking, in which you have to be right at each stage. It doesn't matter if the intermediate impossible is right or absurd, it can nevertheless be used as a stepping stone to another idea that is right. Another example of how when you're playing, nothing is wrong.

So, to summarize: if you really don't know how to start, or if you've got stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting. Well, that really is all I can tell you that won't help you to be creative. Everything...

And now, in the two minutes left, I can come to the important part, and that is how to stop your subordinates becoming creative too, which is the real threat. Because, believe me, no one appreciates better than I do what trouble creative people are and how they stop decisive, hard-nosed bastards like us from running businesses efficiently. I mean, we all know: we encourage someone to be creative, the next thing is they're rocking the boat, coming up with ideas, and asking us questions. Now, if we don't nip this kind of thing in the bud, we'll have to start justifying our decisions by reasoned argument and sharing information, the concealment of which gives us considerable advantages in our power struggles.

So here's how to stamp out creativity in the rest of the organization and get a bit of respect going:

• Allow subordinates no humor. It threatens your self-importance, especially your omniscience. Treat all humor as frivolous or subversive, because subversive is of course what humor will be in your setup, as it's the only way that people can express their opposition, since if they express it openly, you're down on them like a ton of bricks. So, let's get this clear: blame humor for the resistance that your way of working creates. Then you don't have to blame your way of working. This is important, and I mean that solemnly. Your dignity is no laughing matter.

• Keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable involves cutting everybody else down to size. So, don't miss an opportunity to undermine your employees' confidence. A perfect opportunity comes when you're reviewing work that they've done. Use your authority to zero in immediately on all the things you can find wrong. Never, never balance the negatives with positives. Only criticize, just as your school teachers do. Always remember, praise makes people uppity.

• Demand that people should always be actively doing things. If you catch anybody pondering, accuse them of laziness and/or indecision. This is to starve employees of thinking time, because that leads to creativity and insurrection. So, demand urgency at all times. Use lots of fighting talk and war analogies, and establish a permanent atmosphere of stress, of breathless anxiety and crisis. In a phrase, keep that mode Closed.

Now, in this way, we nonsense types can be sure that the tiny, tiny, microscopic quantity of creativity in our organization will all be ours. But let your vigilance slip for one moment, and you could find yourself surrounded by happy, enthusiastic, and creative people whom you might never be able completely to control ever again. So, be careful.