r Whe ancient Greeks believed there was no such thing as creativity. Our job, as humans, was to look at the earth and discover things about it. When we looked at light passing through water or built a boat to travel on it, we were discovering, not inventing. Shipwrights did not invent boats they were simply building inevitable forms. Everything there was to know already existed, we just hadn't realized it yet. Of course, Greek playwrights were busy ‘creating’ the first plays; tragedies, comedies and the like, but serious thinkers thought of them as documenting the human condition. It wasn't until the Renaissance, 1500 years later, that humans began to appreciate that they create knowledge, and this started us on our quest to understand creativity. One of my childhood memories is sitting on the kitchen floor with a glass of water and surrounded by knives and milk bottles. I was trying to solve one of the problems from Edward de Bono’s book on lateral thinking, A Five-day Course in Thinking. De Bono, now in his 80s, is a prolific writer with over 60 publications to his name - all aimed at making us more creative. His books pose a series of practical problems, each needing progressively greater creative intelligence. The particular problem I was trying to solve was to balance a glass of water on knives suspended from four milk bottles. It took me after 2 hours. ial | . <i : [_ A fs . | \geae | ) | eee® = — eet Steve Jobs shows the iPhone HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015987