We are living in the “age of distraction,” a phrase so pervasive a Google search for it yields nearly 600,000 results. A search for its antidote, “focus mode,” yields over 6.2 million results. People are desperate for relief from endless distraction. It’s not only our digital devices that distract us—the texture of everyday life has changed. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our era as a “liquid time.” The formal, stable, authoritative structures that defined the last century have melted away, leaving us in a state of constant, relentless change, and open loops.

The search results I cited reveal the impact interruptions and constant change have on our collective well-being. Every distraction, every change is like a stone thrown into a pond--the splash diverts our attention, the ripples that follow keep us refocusing our attention. But while distractions are a problem, the elevation and pursuit of the antidote, of “focus mode” has a shadow side. Our obsession with focusing closes us off from a vital source of creativity: useful distractions.

Your Creative DNA

Each of us has a unique way of seeing and interpreting the world—what the choreographer Twyla Tharp calls our “creative DNA”:

I believe that we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them.

—Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

Our creative DNA shapes the way we see the world and how we present it to others. It’s the framework that both supports and structures our creative work. Tharp says that it’s our creative DNA that determines “why you’re a photographer, not a writer, or why you always insert a happy ending into your story, or why all your canvases gather the most interesting material at the edges, not the center.” Your creative DNA is the foundation of your artistic identity, your voice.

Because our creative hardwiring “insinuates itself into our work” (Tharp), over time it also locks us into the perspectives, habits, and forms of expression that “work” for us, that make us feel successful and succeed in the marketplace. But creativity abhors predictability. That’s why restless artists like Picasso, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Lady Gaga regularly shed their latest enthusiasms, style, collaborators, and environments to reinvent themselves. Creativity requires us to be alert, enthusiastic, even obsessed: qualities that are difficult to sustain over long periods of time.

As the title of Tharp’s book The Creative Habit suggests, she believes creativity is a habit: both a daily routine and a mindset. She writes:

My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.

Our lives are full of random disturbances--unpredictable things that just happen and break our concentration. The dog next door barks just as I’ve got the words I’ve been looking for on the tip of my tongue and I lose my thought... I’m sketching out an idea on paper and knock over my water glass, flooding the page… What I do next is what matters most: I can react to the disruption, or I can treat it as an invitation.

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock shares an anecdote about playing with Miles Davis that beautifully illuminates this point:

I remember that we were playing “So What” and it was a really hot night—the music was on! Right in the middle of Miles’ solo, when he was playing one of his amazing solos, I played the wrong chord. Completely wrong. It sounded like a big mistake... And Miles paused for a second, then he played some notes that made my chord right, made it “correct.” Miles didn't hear it as a mistake, he heard it as something that happened, just an event. And so that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment, and he dealt with it. Since he didn't hear it as a mistake, he felt it was his responsibility to find something that fit. That taught me a very big lesson not only about music, but about life.

—Herbie Hancock, What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise

And this from Miles: “It's not the note you play that's the wrong note—it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

It’s your mindset that determines whether an interruption is just that or something else: an invitation, an inspiration, an opportunity to explore a new way of thinking. In their book Yes, And Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton explore the seven elements of improvisation. The first and most important element is the concept of “Yes, and…”:

With “Yes, and…” you don’t have to act on every idea, but you have to give every idea a chance to be acted on … these two words are ground zero to creativity and innovation.

“Yes, and…” signals your participation in the ongoing process of collaborative creation. With the word “Yes” you accept the contribution/suggestion; with “and…” you signal your intent build on ongoing work/narrative. Miles accepted Herbie’s “wrong chord” for what it was, a new direction, and built on what was happening now, not the plan that was already in the past.

The Privileged Role of Chance

Chance has a privileged role in creativity. It can be used to thwart bias, overcome the drive to imitate past solutions, and stimulate new ideas.

—David Kirsh, “The Importance of Chance and Interactivity in Creativity” (Pragmatics and Cognition, Issue 22, 2014)

Cognitive scientist David Kirsh has studied the role of chance and interactivity in creativity. Kirsch used Scrabble tiles to determine how combinations of letters stimulate creativity. It turns out that it’s easier and faster for us to evaluate ideas than generate them. For example, the random shuffling of letters surfaces word hints faster than moving around the available tiles by hand. Randomizing also helps us break patterns we didn’t know we were following. Kirsh writes:

Random generators produce candidates with larger variance than subjects can produce on their own because there are no biases or filters that limit candidates based on prior expectations of what is good. Every element and every region in a domain has equal probability of being chosen. As long as agents can decide quickly whether a candidate is interesting—once they see it—they can cash in on the variance, taking up good opportunities when they arise and ignoring the rest.

It turns out that randomizing is an effective way to generate hints—prompts that trigger a reassessment of what’s possible. As Kirsch notes: “When hints are effective, they realign thinking. Goals are changed; objects of thought are replaced.”

Another reason random events enhance creativity is that chance adds cognitive diversity. Kirsh again:

Adding cognitive diversity to a team is known to facilitate creativity. Each new person operates with a different cognitive outlook and method; hence, biases are partly washed out. Where this is not viable, adding chance may be the easiest way to diversify. In fact, incorporating chance may be even more facilitative—there are no group dynamics to hinder participants from suggesting truly wild ideas.

Random events liberate us from our fantasy that we alone control our thoughts. We do not uniquely determine the trajectory of our thought: the world around us influences, interjects, and sometimes redirects our thought.

It would be natural to assume that chance events that are somehow related to the task at hand would be more likely to generate useful results than those that are completely unrelated, but that’s not the case. Kirsh’s research suggests that “it is not randomness per se” that stimulates creative thought, but “independence.” The most effective hints come from sources that aren’t related to the problem—they come from left field. To take advantage of these hints from afar you need “a simple method of making the chance events relevant.” A deck of cards, for example.

Using Useful Distractions: Oblique Strategies

The best-known recent example of a tool designed to help make chance events relevant is the Oblique Strategies card deck created by musician, producer, and visual artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt. First published in 1975, the deck contains 100 cards designed to promote creative thinking. Each card contains a different “oblique strategy” —an enigmatic suggestion, question, or aphorism. Here are a few suggested strategies from the deck:

• Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

• Work at a different speed.

• Gardening not Architecture.

• Humanize something free of error.

• Only one element of each kind.

• Cut a vital connection.

• Are there sections? Consider transitions.

• Ask your body.

• First work alone, then work in unusual pairs.

• Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?

When you encounter a creative block, you (or you and your collaborators) each draw a random card. You must then implement the strategy you picked even if its meaning or appropriateness is unclear.

The strategies in the deck are conceptual and process oriented. In fact, some like “Change instrument roles” work to actively subvert technical mastery. Eno says that the strategies “evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

The Oblique Strategies deck has been used by Eno and musical artists such as David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay. Together they produced some of the most successful albums of the last 40 years. They’ve also been used by artists in a wide variety of other disciplines, including visual artists and even chefs. The power of the cards comes from the trust the user has in the process. To use the cards effectively, you must invest and participate in the process of making the suggestion relevant to the problem you’re grappling with at the moment.

Visit this site for a random Oblique Strategy suggestion. There are also several Oblique Strategies apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Other creative thinking tools that combine chance and suggestion include Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head, Naomi Epel’s Observation Deck: A Took Kit for Writers, John August’s Writer Emergency Pack, and Sara Jane Sloane’s book The I Ching for Writers.

The Old Pond

I want to bring this look into useful distractions to a close with a poem by the Japanese Haiku master Bashō. “The Old Pond” is one of Bashō’s most famous poems. There are hundreds of versions of the poem in English, but no consensus on the “right” way to translate Japanese Haiku poems into English. This unembellished version by the American poet Robert Hass is well suited to our discussion. Its simple syntax puts the focus on the images and the connections that develop between seemingly random events:

The old pond—
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.

The frog (the random event) doesn’t break our attention, it redirects it and ultimately heightens it by revealing the sound the water makes as it breaks, splashes, and flows.

You don’t have to have attained enlightenment to open your mind to the invitations generated by random disruptions. You just need to pause for a moment before you react to a disruption so you can listen to the invitation it presents and decide whether you want to respond “Yes, and…”