The myth that creativity is a gift
For most of the last century, creativity has been packaged as something rare, mystical, and reserved for a few. The lone genius in the garage. The lightning bolt. The muse. Jeff and Staney DeGraff have spent forty years proving that story is wrong — and The Creative Mindset is their workbook for everyone else.
Their argument, which Aidan McCullen unpacks with them in the second part of the DeGraff trilogy, is this: creativity is a skill, not a gift. The breakthroughs that change companies and careers don’t arrive in a flash. They compound from small, observable, learnable moves anyone can practise.
What the CREATE method actually is
The book is built around a six-step acronym — and each step is sequential for a reason.
- Clarify — get the challenge right before you try to solve it. Most teams sprint to answers before they have a real question.
- Replicate — search and reapply. Steal like an artist, borrow from biology, lift solutions from outside your industry.
- Elaborate — multiply ideas through fluency, association, and constraint. Random words, de Bono’s thinking hats, brainstorming under pressure.
- Associate — make non-obvious connections. The “adaptive reasoning” your brain does naturally when you stop forcing it.
- Translate — turn the idea into a story people can carry. Storyboarding, narrative arc, the Disney method.
- Evaluate — choose well. The most underrated creative move, and the one that determines what actually ships.
This is the spine of the creative mindset Jeff and Staney teach in their courses at the University of Michigan and at the Innovatrium — and it is what the book turns into a workbook.
Why most teams confuse problem-solving with creativity
One of the most striking findings Aidan and Jeff explore is a study of school superintendents and business leaders. Asked what creativity actually means, 48% of superintendents pointed to problem-solving. Business leaders pointed to problem-articulation. The gap is the whole game.
As Jeff puts it, nobody cares about your creative idea. They care about whether you have correctly framed their problem. Borrowing the opening line of Anna Karenina — happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way — Jeff argues that broken organisations are broken for a multitude of reasons. The creative work begins with naming the right one.
From the Ritz-Carlton to the Mayo Clinic
Replication, the second move, is more subversive than it sounds. Jeff tells the story of Tom Kelley at IDEO, who was hired to fix patient satisfaction at the Mayo Clinic. His intervention? Have the doctors live at the Ritz-Carlton for a week. Then live in their own hospital beds for a week. Patient satisfaction climbed. The doctors did not invent anything new. They imported pattern recognition from outside their domain — exactly the move The Creative Mindset asks ordinary teams to make on a Tuesday.
Why evaluation is the most underrated creative move
Most people think creativity ends at “more ideas.” Jeff and Staney argue the opposite. “How you evaluate will largely determine which ideas win,” Jeff explains. They have watched billion-dollar ideas die on whiteboards because the team applied an incremental-improvement filter to a category-defining concept. Evaluation is editing. Editing is creative. And the framework you use — force-choice, matrix scoring, GE workout — decides what survives.
The takeaway: creativity is a practice
The deeper argument running through the book is that creativity, like fitness, is a daily practice. As Aristotle’s idea of neoteny suggests — and as Bezos echoed in his “Day 1” letters to Amazon shareholders — the goal is not to recover childhood, but to keep the childlike capacity to associate, wonder, and try. The CREATE method gives that practice a shape.
If you have ever told yourself you are not a creative person, The Creative Mindset is the book that politely takes that excuse away.
Listen and watch
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- 📘 The Creative Mindset by Jeff and Staney DeGraff
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About The Innovation Show
The Innovation Show is the Thinkers50-recognised podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen — keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable, and the place where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
Continue the trilogy: → Part 1: The Innovation Code · → Part 3: The Art of Change]