Creative activists' advice stems in part from a deep-rooted backlash to previous creativity theorists. These previous trends, from Edward DeBono's lateral thinking and parallel thinking to J.P. Guilford's divergent thinking, emphasized how to rewire an individual's "creative thinking." These theories are useful but limited. I'm admittedly oversimplifying them for the sake of space here, but in the 1960s and 1950s respectively they generally could not take advantage of more current evidence that shows how social creativity is.

Creativity is social. In part. Our coming up with great ideas might depend less on being a lone genius holed up in a cave-like study or lab lost in reverie—the current stream of creative activist and social psychologist thought goes—than on our shaping an optimal environment, building social networks, leveraging luck (Thank you, Jim Collins and Dr. Richard Wiseman), and organizing routines. I evangelize about these matters to my clients in meetings and my tribes at events.

"If you want to help people cultivate their creativity, don't give them more wonder." That's what one social psychologist whose work I respect recently told me. "Give them more opportunities to be connected with other people."

So here's where I question and take exception. Are wonder and being social mutually exclusive, as he assumes? Is wonder solely the province of the mythical lone genius, as he assumes? As someone accustomed to stake out his intellectual turf in the sciences, was he and are other experts ready to diminish previous theories of creativity outside this field and trend? Is there, as I think he assumed, less value in solitude, deeply felt imagination, and the workings of the individual's creative mind than in a creative person's social life and environment?

Must we choose between creative thinking and creative doing?

Are we throwing out the creative baby with the theoretical bathwater? I don't know.

 2. Back to Stupidity

Do you see how much trouble I have being productively stupid? I question a lot. But behind those questions I assume I have some deeper answers. And this is where those of us who have been working as creatives, who have been refining our métier, who have been thinking about and researching creativity for decades get into trouble. Our expertise and desire to know or appear to know traps us.

From what? From the deeply felt imagination and the nuanced mind of not-knowing that in fact does stem from hours of silence so you can hear thinking in colors as you compose and as you witness stray goldfish that flutter on your imagination's margins as you write or theorize. So you can let the present moment of language and lines (for writers) or light and lines (for artists) or logos and lines (for designers) or movement and lines (for dancers) guide you more than your assumptions. You can let the troubling questions that fascinate you guide you more than preconceived answers.

Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz knows something about this nuanced state of not-knowing. He writes,

"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time."

Andre Dubus III has written one of the most compelling and exceptionally well written stories I've read in years—the memoir Townie. It explores how he as a young boy became hell bent on becoming tough enough to plow down the neighborhood bullies, how the passion of bloody violence overcomes him through much of his young adulthood, how he takes an unlikely journey to becoming a writer, and what all of this has to do with his father Andre Dubus II—one of the twentieth century's most celebrated short story writers.

So how did he pull it off?

"I was cultivating stupidity." That might seem like an odd claim for this skilled author whose novel  A House of Sand and Fog has been an Oprah's Book Club pick and made into a film starring Ben Kingsley. Taking a cue from poet William Stafford, Dubus says he tried to be a receiving vessel, to accept anything that came, and was willing to fail.

Schwartz told me of his scientific experiments, "Much of the time I don't know what I'm doing." Of writing his first memoir, Dubus said essentially the same thing.

A creative director of an innovative advertising agency recently contacted me about speaking to his agency's members. He mentioned that in an employee review he tried to encourage the person to be more stupid. I knew what he meant, and at that moment, I knew I wanted to work with this guy.

It's that kind of stupidity I admire.

And doesn't that level of confident productive stupidity often require the opposite of what some social psychologists and productivity experts champion? Doesn't it require solitude and silence? Solitude and silence can help you excise the "stuff" that your mind has accumulated. Solitude and silence helps you empty the branded messages and signature designs and trademark styles you've constructed to present your recognizable public creative self.

Solitude and silence, even long walks and long showers, can help dismantle enough of our conscious reality to let breakthroughs emerge.

3. The Productive Stupidity Zone at the Perimeters of a Creative Field

Every creative field—be it architecture, design, dance, science, writing, consulting—and every industry has an understood circle of convention. These conventions might include principles or protocols, elements of craft or choreography.

This circle's boundaries encompass the industry's or field's accepted conventions. Most successful and extraordinary creatives and creative enterprisers understand and even master some of these conventions. They dance confidently within the circle.

And most creative professionals and professional creatives have their own personal field-circle, their own assumptions not just of what to create but of how to create it. Over years of practice, they've refined and revised this circle. Perhaps they've become maestros of such personal field-circles.