Imagine two people trying to understand the future. The first person thinks for a long time before saying anything. He doesn’t want to be wrong. He formulates a single, well-thought-out forecast about what will happen and then sticks to it. If reality changes, he often tries to explain why it was actually right. The second person does the opposite. He throws out idea after idea. Some are brilliant. Many are strange. Some are downright absurd. He changes perspectives, tries new lines of thought, and questions his own conclusions time and time again. Most of her ideas never turn out to be reality. Who will understand the future best?
The spontaneous feeling might say the first. But there is much evidence to suggest that the answer is actually the second. It sounds paradoxical. How can someone who has more wrong ideas also be more right? The answer lies in how creativity works.
Creativity produces more mistakes
One of the most common misconceptions about creativity is that creative people come up with better ideas. This is only partially true. What really characterizes creative people is that they produce significantly more ideas. And when the number of ideas increases, two things happen at the same time. First, of course, the number of bad ideas increases. More crazy ideas. More impractical ideas. More ideas that will never work.
But at the same time, something else happens. The number of perspectives increases. That’s where the real power lies. If you think just one thought about the future, it will either be right or wrong. If you think a hundred different possibilities, the situation changes completely. Suddenly you start to discover connections. You see alternative developments. You start to understand which factors can change the direction. You build a mental landscape instead of a single path. This means that even if many individual ideas are wrong, your overall understanding becomes significantly richer. Creativity is therefore not just about creating ideas. It’s about building more mental models of reality.
It almost never turns out as you planned
We’ve all heard the expression: “It almost never turns out as you planned.” There’s a lot of truth to that. The future is constantly surprising us. Technology is developing faster than expected. Consumer behavior is changing. New business models are emerging. Geopolitical events change markets. Climate change creates new conditions.
But perhaps the expression can be turned around. If you only think a single thought about the future, it almost never turns out as you imagined. But “if you think many creative thoughts, it turns out much more often as you imagined”. Not because any single thought was right, but because any of the thoughts were close to the reality that actually arose. It is a subtle but crucial difference. Creativity means that we have more wrong ideas, but at the same time fewer mistakes about how the world actually develops.
Thinking outside the box is really about the future
The expression “thinking outside the box” is used so often that it has almost become a cliché. But it actually describes something very concrete. The box is our current worldview. It consists of our experiences, our habits, our models and our assumptions. The problem is that the future almost always lies outside that box. If the future already existed within our current mental models, it would not be very new.
Every major change therefore has a strange characteristic. It starts as a thought outside the box. Then it becomes reality. And only then do we build a new box around it. Creativity is therefore less about thinking strangely and more about thinking where the future has not yet had time to become self-evident. The more mental boxes we dare to build, the greater the likelihood that any of them will actually resemble the future that eventually emerges.
Why creative people see change earlier
When people produce many different ideas, they simultaneously train their ability to detect weak signals. They see small changes before they become obvious. They see how young people use technology in new ways. They discover changes in language, culture and consumption patterns. They see behaviors that others dismiss as temporary but that later turn out to be the beginning of something much bigger.
It’s not about them being able to predict the future. It’s about their mental map containing more possible paths. When something new starts to happen, there is already a place for it in their thinking. For others, the same change feels impossible because it doesn’t fit into their current worldview.
Scenarios and backcasting expand the space of possibilities
This is where scenario planning becomes one of the most powerful tools. Many people think that scenarios are about finding the most likely future. But they are really about exploring multiple possible futures at the same time. When organizations work with scenarios, they are exercising their creative abilities. They are not asking what will happen. They are asking what could happen. That small difference changes the entire mindset. Suddenly, improbable events become possible to discuss and when they do occur, they no longer feel completely unexpected.
The same applies to backcasting. Instead of starting from today’s reality and trying to predict the future, you start in a desired future. What will the world look like in twenty years? How does the energy system work? How does consumption look? How does healthcare work? What will our cities look like? Then you work backwards and ask what steps must have been taken to get there. The interesting thing is that this method forces people to leave the limitations of today and instead explore completely new possibilities. Creativity becomes a tool for creating the future instead of just trying to guess it.
Questions shape the future
Creativity is not just about ideas. It is also about questions. The question determines which landscape the brain begins to explore. If we ask how we can sell more products, we get a certain kind of ideas. If we instead ask how people can get the same benefit with half as many products, we open up a completely new landscape of thought. If we ask how we can reduce emissions, we get an answer. If we instead ask how a society would function where emissions never occur, the entire direction of our thinking changes.
Formulating creative questions is therefore often more important than trying to find creative answers. The question determines which futures we will be able to imagine at all.
System innovation requires many futures
This is perhaps most evident in system innovation. When we try to change an entire system, such as the energy system, healthcare or transport system, it is not enough to have a single vision of the future. Systems consist of people, technology, behaviours, laws, business models and infrastructure that influence each other. If we only imagine one possible development, the entire system change risks being built on the wrong assumptions.
Therefore, the system innovator needs to be creative even before the solutions are developed. We need to imagine many different futures where different technologies dominate, where people behave differently, where consumption changes and where new values emerge. Only when we have explored many possible futures can we begin to identify the solutions that work robustly regardless of which development actually occurs. Creativity thus becomes not just a way to create innovation. It becomes a way to reduce the risk that the entire system development is based on the wrong vision of the future.
What does this mean for sustainability?
Sustainability issues are perhaps the clearest examples of why creativity is needed. If we only start from today’s consumption patterns, the future will often be a series of small improvements. Slightly more efficient transport. Slightly better materials. Slightly lower energy consumption. But if we dare to think of many different futures, completely different possibilities open up. Maybe consumption itself will change. Maybe we will move from ownership to sharing. Maybe recycling will become the norm. Maybe products will become services. Maybe the entire view of value will change.
Most of these ideas will not become reality. But some will. And we will only see those ideas if we dare to think about them before they exist.
Creativity does not reduce uncertainty
There is another paradox. Many people believe that creativity should reduce uncertainty. In fact, it does the opposite. The more perspectives we explore, the clearer it becomes how many futures are actually possible.
But at the same time, something important happens. We become less surprised. We become better prepared. We become more adaptable. We stop believing that there is only one way forward. That is perhaps the most important effect of creativity. Not to make the future predictable, but to prepare ourselves for several different futures at once.
Being more wrong to be more right
Maybe that is why creative people sometimes seem to have so many strange ideas. They are not trying to find the perfect idea. They are trying to explore the space of possibility. Each new thought is like a flashlight illuminating another part of the landscape. Most flashlights reveal nothing useful. But some do. And the more lights that come on, the better we see the terrain.
That means that creativity actually makes us have more wrong ideas. But at the same time, it makes us be less wrong about the world. This is not a contradiction. It is a consequence of the fact that perspective is always stronger than certainty.
The future is outside the box
Maybe that is why the most creative organizations rarely try to predict the future with precision. Instead, they try to imagine many different futures. They know that most of them will never happen, but they also know that the big changes almost always start as a thought that at first seems unlikely. Those who only think the probable will therefore almost always be surprised. Those who dare to think the unlikely will more often recognize the future when it comes.
And perhaps that is precisely where the greatest value of creativity lies. Not in always being right, but in being wrong about so many things that reality can finally no longer surprise you as much.
Because the more worlds you dare to imagine, the greater the probability that the future has already passed through your own thinking before it passes your reality.
