Codification of Creativity

In your own mind, there are so many ways to think. Take for example the ways to think about a popular song like "Side To Side" by Ariana Grande. You might start with your emotional reaction. Excitement, joy, boredom, or annoyance are just a few thoughts that you might have. Or you might have intuitive thoughts that the song has reggae inspiration, that its just another pop song, or even that the lyrics are a new take on suggestive themes.

These thoughts are vague, despite how real and certain the thoughts feel. Even worse, the thoughts don't begin with clear words or imagined visuals. You need to work to put initial thoughts into clearer forms and more defined terms. Your mind cannot do it automatically - you need to actively form concepts, reassemble concepts with new discoveries, reorganize relationships between concepts, or more. This means that clear thoughts need to be reusable; a general sense or feeling would blur among all the other ways to think. Concepts are the reusable solution, and as thoughts, they are the basis to language. The first time you saw what you now know is a dog, perhaps it was the same thing as a rabbit and a cat to you. With the word "dog", it's easier to identify more dogs, and distinguish them from cats. Reasoned thought is then possible, with more specific understanding of dogs, or all the deeper meaning of a dog as representing an idea in a fable told to children. Clarity and definition would bring a means to evaluate "Side to Side", or a TV show like "Mr. Robot". Concepts about the global economy, one's connection to reality, revolutionary political action - all are critical themes in the show. These thoughts can go deeper than an initial emotion or intuition alone. "Mr. Robot" can be thought about with reasoning and narrative, putting the connection with emotion and intuition into a structure. Communicating the themes in "Mr. Robot" to another person needs another step. Just saying concepts won't always help someone understand, on top of the fact that not all people think of a concept in identical. You need to transform ideas and concepts into a form that others can learn from. This is codification. A written review of "Mr. Robot" is codification, as is writing up a reasoned response to a theory about the show. Codification is needed for creative teams as well, not just for consumers. When Pixar finished "A Bugs Life", they did their first post-mortem for completed projects:

[Participants] bring in lots of performance data—including metrics such as how often something had to be reworked. Data further stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions based on subjective impressions. (Catmull, 2008)

Putting the data on white boards, charts, or presentations all would be examples of codification. This isn't simply a business requirement - Pixar does post-mortems with the understanding that they help for both growth and creative success.

Consider when an individual team member finds that a flaw is obvious because he or she "just sees it" as insight, while the others don't notice at all. Codification fills this gap of communication. A smart codification strategy will seek out the best ways to tell all creative team members of ideas and knowledge.