Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: How Environments Shape Innovation with Professor Jonathan Feinstein #364

In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor speaks with Professor Jonathan S. Feinstein, the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management, and one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the science of creativity. His acclaimed new book, Creativity in Large-Scale Context, explores how creative ideas don’t emerge in isolation—they evolve within complex networks of people, places, experiences, and guiding principles.

Feinstein shares why pure inspiration is rarely enough in today’s interconnected world, and how individuals and organizations can navigate vast creative systems by using “guiding conceptions” and “guiding principles.” From Virginia Woolf’s literary maps to Indigenous Australian painter Clifford Possum’s dreamings and Steve Jobs’s design insights, this conversation reframes creativity as a dynamic process that connects the individual imagination with its wider context.

Whether you’re leading innovation, designing strategy, or nurturing creative talent, you’ll learn a framework for creativity that is structured, scientific—and profoundly human.

Notable Quotes
“We create in context. Every creative act is shaped by the world we’ve built around ourselves.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“A guiding conception is your creative compass—it points to what’s exciting, even before you know what form it will take.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“You can’t connect everything; there are infinite possibilities. Guidance helps you find the fruitful paths.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“Artists are far more conceptual than we give them credit for—they’re constantly modeling ideas in their minds.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“Each of us follows our own unique path of creativity, but within a common human framework.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein

Resources and Links

Book: Creativity in Large-Scale Context – Stanford Business Books
Previous Book: The Nature of Creative Development
Website: jonathanfeinstein.com

Connect with Fredrik: Search “The Creativity Explorer” on Google or LinkedIn

Apple Podcast

Spotify Podcast

Takeaways

Creativity happens in context — Every idea is shaped by our networks of experience, people, and place.
Guiding conceptions provide vision — They define what’s worth exploring before the specific idea arrives.
Guiding principles provide structure — They help us recognize and refine the key missing piece that completes a project.
Artists and scientists share the same process — From Virginia Woolf to Albert Einstein, the most creative minds balance openness with rigor.
Context builds confidence — Mapping your influences helps you understand where new connections can emerge.

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CHAPTERS

Timestamps

- 00:00 – Introduction to Professor Jonathan Feinstein and his work at Yale
- 01:19 – Why context—not just inspiration—drives creativity
- 02:33 – How network models explain creative development
- 04:23 – Economics meets creativity: viewing ideas as systems of value
- 06:25 – From The Nature of Creative Development to Creativity in Large-Scale Context
- 08:01 – Defining “context” in the creative process
- 10:48 – Virginia Woolf and mapping the creative mind
- 14:42 – Place as context: Indigenous artist Clifford Possum and the art of mapping dreamings
- 18:19 – The need for guidance in large-scale creative systems
- 21:01 – Guiding conceptions: vision before ideas
- 24:16 – Guiding principles: Steve Jobs, Einstein, and the “missing piece”
- 26:54 – Teaching creativity at Yale: why artists and engineers think alike
- 28:54 – Creative pairs and his mathematician brother’s influence
- 31:25 – The Kandinsky cover: visualizing the network of creativity
- 32:18 – His upcoming third book and the trilogy’s big vision

TRANSCRIPT

James Taylor (00:08)

Today's guest is Jonathan S. Feinstein, the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management. And one of the thinkers redefining how we understand creativity in complex settings. His new book, Creativity in Large Scale Context, argues that in a world of sprawling social systems, cultural norms and shifting markets, pure inspiration often fails us unless it's guided. SOM Broadcast Studio (00:08) Today's guest is Jonathan. and one of the things redefining how we understand creativity in complex settings. His new book, Creativity in Large Scale Context, argues that in a world of sprawling social systems, cultural norms, and shifting markets, pure inspiration often fails us unless it's guided. James Taylor (00:33) He introduces a network model SOM Broadcast Studio (00:33) He introduces a network James Taylor (00:35) of context and tools like guiding conceptions and principles to help creative leaders navigate the thicket of possibilities. Jonathan has taught creativity for decades now, led courses at Yale that have been spotlighted in Fast Company and Business Week, and now brings rigorous economic and organizational thinking to creativity. If you're working in big systems, organizations, or trying to lead creative efforts with impact, not just ideas, then this episode is for you. SOM Broadcast Studio (00:37) and principles to help creative leaders navigate the thicket James Taylor (01:02) Jonathan, please welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast. SOM Broadcast Studio (01:05) Thank you so much, James, for that very welcoming introduction. I'm so pleased to be here. and spend a few minutes talking with you and for listeners about creativity and how it works in today's world with very large context. James Taylor (01:19) One of the first questions, I've been enjoying this book, I'm traveling at the moment, I've been enjoying this book as I've been traveling around. So one question I wanted is, in previous work you've done, you've often focused on the individuals who are doing creative work and some of the kind of processes. But in this book, you decided to take it a slightly different perspective. You kind of looked more really focused on context. So what was the thinking behind this original decision to move your work in this way? SOM Broadcast Studio (01:47) Well, I think as I began to delve deeper and deeper into the creative process, which is what I study, you just more and more begin to realize that people are navigating through their lives, through the world around them, through their context. And that is the way in which they're finding their ways to great discoveries or artistic ideas or ⁓ policy ideas that are going to change the world. So for me, it was about really try to bring those two things together, the individuals process, because we're all on our own life path and what are we learning and experiencing, and then understanding how we have to model the context within which people are moving to really understand how they make good decisions and can be inspired and creative. So it was a natural progression, I think. I would say a big challenge was how do I model that? How do we model our context? Think about your context. all the different parts, the people you know, the places you go, you're traveling right now, I'm sure you've been to hundreds of cities around the world, all the books you read, there's a lot there. So the question is, how do we organize that context ⁓ and do so in a way that's going to be productive for creative development? So I think that was a challenge. And I think the huge step for me was to understand we can use a network perspective. to understand how these contexts are organized. We self-organize our context. So we could talk more about that. It's also related, of course, to the movement of AI today, which is all about network context, actually. Those are large-scale networks, different than our human networks, I believe. But it's interesting to think about the interplay between them. James Taylor (03:33) Now often when we have guests on the show talking about creativity as a topic, the academics tend to be more from education, psychology, departments of universities, not so much actually from the economics side. think we had someone on a guest recently from the University of Chicago talking who took an economist view of looking at, I think it was called Young Masters and Old Masters, think was the. was the term that he used. And he took an economist view about why certain artists achieve success at different points in their lives. So what do you feel as someone that has the background that you have, what kind of different perspective does it give you that perhaps someone that comes at it from an education or a psychology perspective doesn't have? SOM Broadcast Studio (04:23) It's a great question and it's been one of the great sort of tension points of my own personal creative development over these years because I am trained as an economist. Economics gives us a lot of tools to think about policy and ⁓ practices around education or organizations. When I got into this, I'm going to be honest with you, my original thought, still the one that I believe in is every individual follows their own unique path and makes their own unique contribution. And they do so in a common framework, right? A common world. We're all living in this world together, but somehow we're each following our own unique path to get to where we get to. That's really what I study, where the modeling comes from. ⁓ that actually has roots very deep in economics. John Stuart Mill is someone who come to mind ⁓ and a variety of other liberal or classical liberal thinkers that we would imagine who talk a lot about how individualism is one of the principles of a free market society or economy. Freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, freedom of discussion. It's all about individuals bringing their unique perspectives into a common framework and debate. So I always knew that I had roots in economics, but as I pursued that theme, that principle for myself of individual paths, I had to go pretty far outside of standard economics. We don't, don't think we, yeah, go ahead, please. James Taylor (05:55) Yeah, I was just going say, on that, you mentioned also in the book, difference between problem finding and problem solving. I was interested when you went into the book, was there a definite problem that you were trying to solve? If you gave it a problem definition, what was the problem that the book was trying to solve? Or did you kind of go in it from a slightly different perspective? We're going to talk maybe about conceptions. And so was there a different kind of conception that you went into the book with? SOM Broadcast Studio (06:25) Well, actually I have published two books and the first book was published a while ago called The Nature of Creative Development. And then this book published two years ago, almost exactly two years ago, actually. And I would say the challenge was from the first book where I understood about these life paths that people follow and their creative development process with lots and lots of examples in that book. Some people just love that book because it's filled with examples of both famous people, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, ⁓ William Faulkner, John Maynard Keynes, but also filled with lots and lots of people I interviewed about their creative process. The challenge from that book going forward was how do I develop a formal model to help me really clarify exactly what is happening? Because trained in economics, I do believe in the power of modeling to help us understand our own thinking and also generate some predictions and ways to guide some policy. that that was the big challenge and it took some years before i was able to kind of mentally break through to the network approach my brother by the way helped a bit with that we can talk about if you like but but i would say that was the real breakthrough what's ahead the framework which is developed in this book of i'm still developing further as you said ⁓ to me just before we started this academics love to talk about their car work and their future work and for me for me it's about developing the model even further ⁓ for a third book ⁓ but that was the challenge was the formal model structure James Taylor (08:01) Now we're going to get into some of these models, some of these ways of thinking about it. You start one of the chapters in the book with this phrase, we create in context. so tell me, you talk about it in the book about how this idea of context is not being written about or researched or spoken as much about in the world of creativity. for those that don't, know, to get this word context is going to mean different things, but... In the case of this book and your work, what do you actually mean by context, the context that someone creates in? SOM Broadcast Studio (08:36) That's a great question. Context is everything that you have experienced, that you have learned, and that you have organized into structures for your own thinking process. That includes your memories, as well as problems, or solutions, or theories, or examples, ⁓ conversations. It's all part of your context, which is incredibly rich. The two things I'd say about that was the first thing is you're absolutely right. Psychologists have taken often a different approach to creativity and the external, I think about my work as where the internal, the inner world meets the external world. That's really where the action is, right? Where your own thinking, your ideas, your interests connect with the opportunities that are around you. Think about entrepreneurship, that would be a way to think about that. ⁓ And psychology of creativity maybe hasn't often been as focused on that. The other thing I would say is the new world of the large language models of AI, it's all about context. They feed into it an infinity of context, right? It's organized, I think, differently in those models, not the way we as humans organize, probably not in a way that right now is as aligned with creative potential or creative development on its own, but it is all about context. So that's another way to think about this. but insured it's everything it's everything you've got and how do you organize it James Taylor (10:02) One of examples you give and you can put throughout the book, I think it's four or five key individuals you talk about. And one of the ones, for me, the one that resonated the most was Virginia Woolf. Someone that lives, I live in Hampstead in North London, Bloomsbury is very close to where I live. And so she was part of the Bloomsbury group, Bloomsbury set. So in the case of her, there was a lot about Virginia Woolf, I didn't really know so much about in terms of her background and kind context that you describe in the book, and actually there's some wonderful maps where you kind of just lay out some of the context. So for someone to get their understanding of this idea of context, talk to us about some of the context in the case of Virginia Woolf and how this informed the creative work that she did. SOM Broadcast Studio (10:48) Yes, she's a wonderful example I've studied for years. I do love the visual maps. Anybody can do this. You can develop a visual map of your own context. It could be anywhere from a few dozen elements showing the big breakdown. For example, her in her case, doing a simple schematic, I had her reading on one side, all the people she knew, and then places just as a general breakdown. Then you go down to the details. Who are the people you know, right? The family, the friends. the teachers feet the peers of the colleagues the children lots of different people celebrities you might know about ⁓ you could break that down as far as you want to go some of the visual diagrams i did in the book have a few hundred elements actually virginia wolf just to give you an idea about that thinking about her reading for a minute that we could talk a bit about her family i estimate i did some personal workers i estimated by by the time she was a young adult she had read at least two thousand books and probably a lot more she was a book reviewer she made her living for years as a book reviewer we know a lot about that also because a lot of the books she've read as a young person came from her father's library he would actually bring books to her that she would read and she also wrote a lot in her journals and other places about lists of books that she had read It's an encyclopedic knowledge of literature that she had, Victorian literature of course, but other cultures, Russian, Italian, French. She loved ancient Greek. She learned ancient Greek. was one of the challenges, intellectual challenges she set herself. And of course, the Blue's Berry Group also brought a lot of more current work to her attention. If you looked at her, you know, if you look at Virginia Woolf's, we don't have to talk all about her. Of course, people can read the book or read other things about her, but. Her mother, her father, those are two critical elements for her own creative development. Not so unusual, I think, for a lot of us, our family is important. Virginia Woolf's mother died when she was 13. I think it was arguably the most important event of her life. Her mother had been the center of her universe as a child and left a huge gaping hole when she died. In fact, her great work to the lighthouse is really a about her mother, the central character, Mrs. Ramsey, is modeled on her mother. And in the middle of that book, ⁓ Mrs. Ramsey dies. And you really then in the last part of the book see the other characters trying to, I think, sort of pick up the pieces after the mother has died. Her mother was super important. And then her father, she had a very contentious kind of love-hate relationship. She talked about how one minute she'd be arguing with him in her head, and the next minute revered him for his scholarship. ⁓ He was super important too because for her he represented the old world, the old order. And she talked about how that was such a stifling, rigid, very masculine, male-dominated world. And she wanted to break out of that. So you put those two things together and that is the gist of what became her guiding conception, which we could talk about. But... ⁓ You have to understand to understand someone's creative development. You have to understand as much as you can about their context. And then the Bloomsbury group and all the people she knew there. ⁓ Those were all the things that fed into what she eventually created and not just all at once over probably 10 years or 20 years. Luckily with her, her diary, her journals, her letters, her essays, we know more about her. thinking her development than we do unfortunately for some other people where they might not have left as much material for us. James Taylor (14:42) And something you talk about in her, the context for her, but also actually for some of the other individuals, creative individuals you talk about is place. Place is a context, how different places, different points in their life, how that can have a pretty profound impact on their creativity. We had a guest recently, a professor from the UK, who was talking about biophilia, that places themselves have their own creative, you know, the Romans would call it the genius loci, the places that have their own creative genius, and how this feeds into our creativity as well. When you were doing the work, so we have the books, what they're reading, the people that they're spending their time with, things that they're thinking about there as well, was there any in particular that had a sense where that actually place had a key impact? It was a key context in how they arrived at the work that they did. SOM Broadcast Studio (15:30) Yeah, that's again a great question. And if you've looked at the book, one of the people I do highlight in the book is an Indigenous Australian artist. His name is Clifford Possum. I spent quite a bit of time both in Australia, but then also studying the Indigenous art movement there, which has been so phenomenal. It's all about place for him. His ⁓ context is laid out in somewhat more detailed ⁓ diagram in the book. But one whole piece of it is place. his dreamings as we call them which were places that he would thought of himself as the custodian of those places for his group and they're often tied to what you think of as totems or sacred creatures from the dreaming he's his name was possum so of course a possum was one of them but many many others water dreamings lightning all all kinds of things honey ants at he had an encyclopedic knowledge of place as many of the indigenous people did and actually his big thrust forward for him his guiding conception was it was a time when the indigenous people were trying to sort of claim back their rights to some of the land in australia that they felt they also were entitled to and he had his father also important him as adopted father had been a ⁓ guide for tourists and clifford i think was well aware of maps western maps that we used to identify places and he thought I'm going to show our title to land. I'm paraphrasing, but this is what we think of. We're going to show our title to the land by not drawing Western maps, but by drawing maps that show the dreamings that center around any particular place and showing our knowledge and our cultural depth of tradition of these places through these dreamings. He actually jumped up the whole sense of the indigenous art there at that moment because people had been just doing They take a dreaming and draw a painting of a dreaming. He said, no, we're going to center on a place and show every dreaming that's going on around that place as a way to establish in a sense that this is our claim to this place. James Taylor (17:43) lovely. I love that you said that the map is not the territory about how there's different, move things around. The other obviously there's the other writers that written in the past about context and the importance and the impact upon context upon someone's creative process. But probably the big, I guess, jump away you're kind of taking it in a different place is this idea of guidance. So we should explain, you talk about different two different main types of guidance. So we should explain what does guidance mean in relation to someone's creativity? And then maybe we can just go a little bit deeper into like the two main types of guidance you explained in the book. SOM Broadcast Studio (18:19) If you're trying to create in a very large scale, rich context that has sort of too many possibilities, too many places you can go, then I think to make your way forward in a fruitful way to something that's going to be productive that you're going to be happy with or that's going to have impact, you're going to need some guidance. You can't just try things randomly because there's an infinity of possibilities to try. It's like a combinatoric problem, right? We think of creativity. as making new connections, as connecting elements together that have not previously been connected or related. That happens all the time. Artists do it all the time, but scientists or problem solvers do it all the time, because if you solve a problem creatively, you are right there connecting a problem with a new solution, and that is a creative connection. To make those creative connections, you can't just do it at random. There's too many. So you use guidance to find your way forward. And I think a key understanding, Virginia Woolf being a great example, is that you don't need to hit on the exact creative idea at the first moment. You start first with a guiding conception which says, in a more general way, this is like my vision or my dream or my theme. This is where I'm going to look. These are the kinds of interconnections that I think might be fruitful. And I'm going to give myself a chance to just say in a general way what they are. and then I'll begin to explore in depth. One thing that's really important about a guiding conception in that sense is a lot of people out in the world, I think they get very anxious and they think I have to have a great idea right now and I have to jump to the great idea right now. I don't have time to fool around with intermediate things. That's not how people really create. People create by following a path and a key part of the path is earlier. I like to think of it as sort of behind the scenes. creativity, you know, form your vision, your creative vision, your guiding conception earlier, and then you work on developing it. And that development could take time. Virginia Woolf formed a wonderful guiding conception in a short story she wrote called The Mark on the Wall in 1917. She spent two and a half years exploring that conception with short stories, actually. And finally, two and a half years later, She hit on a way to develop it creatively and that is what led into her great modernist literary period including Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway to the lighthouse. It was two and a half years of experimentation. So, Guiding Conceptions. James Taylor (21:01) She was kind of feeling her way a little bit on this. was just trying to, it was maybe difficult to put into words initially at that stage, but she was just, there was a sense, as we would say today, there was a vibe. But she was trying to feel out what that was and what is that conception of what I'm trying to do. SOM Broadcast Studio (21:21) Yeah, definitely not fully flushed out at that time. In the book, I've got that. I talk quite a bit about it's beautiful. Regarding conception is itself beautiful. But at the same time, she has a little note when she wrote it. This is frustrating, essentially. I don't know what to do with this. So even for her at that time, she thought, well, I've got the conception. But now what am I going to do next? The guiding conception, one of the exercises I do in my class is ask students to work out their own guiding conception. With organizations, I've done that as well. ⁓ People maybe aren't used to doing that. I think of it as give yourself the freedom to just daydream a little bit and think about what would be great to explore, the kind of thing to create if I could create it. Don't force yourself right this minute to have the idea. Just think more generally, what's exciting? I think students love it. think people feel sort of liberated by it. Sometimes I have to push them because sometimes they're a little too narrow. I think a guiding conception should have enough breadth that you're going to be able to explore it for a year or two to find your way to what's going to work, right? So there's a little bit of an artfulness to what it looks like. James Taylor (22:35) Before we move on to the other type of guidance you talk about, as I was reading the book, I was reading the book, reading a few chapters, and then I would watch a movie on this flight. One of the movies I was watching was called very different. It was called The Materialist or Materialist with Dakota Johnson. It's a story of a New York City matchmaker who's matchmaking all these people in finance. As I'm reading it, I'm seeing some of the connections and ⁓ the guiding conception which he talks about. finding that perfect partner. And I guess if you think about it, in a bigger sense, creativity is finding that relationship, that person you're be with the rest of your life or a child or as well. And she said one of these kind of guiding conceptions which she gave to her would be clients was, you don't wanna just find someone that you're gonna fall in love with. And this was her expression. You wanna find someone who you're gonna be happy and willing to... to change each other's diapers when you're 80 years old. And I thought that was because many of these clients were coming to them with the, which we'll talk about now, the kind of principles. We want them to be this height, this income level, this weight, whether they would want to be doing these things, going very in the detail. And she was trying to like pull them back a little bit to like say, okay, this is maybe going to feel a little bit uncomfortable for you. It's not an immediate tick box thing, but this is in your case. SOM Broadcast Studio (23:34) if James Taylor (24:01) This is a guiding conception. You want someone that at 80 years old, you're gonna be spending time with them in maybe ways that you're not gonna be spending time with them in when you're 30s. ⁓ Which kind of brings me to this idea of your other side of guidance. we have conception. And then have the other one is principles. SOM Broadcast Studio (24:16) That's a what, yeah. That's a wonderful example because of course finding a life partner is a creative connection, isn't it? And it's a great example too because people don't always understand what is the best way to form a guiding conception. We trip ourselves up sometimes. In the world of creativity, I think sometimes just wanting to be more too specific and not being ourselves freedom to explore more broadly. Also, that's about your own experiential learning. By learning more broadly, you can form a great guiding conception that ties some different parts of the world together. And in a way, she's trying to do that, right? Extend somebody's thinking. Yeah, the other kind of guidance is called a guiding principle. Lots of examples in the book. Steve Jobs was an incredible with his design principles. was a master at using them. He was very strict with them. He made great creative connections with them. There's a story about his team was struggling with the design of a computer and he went out one weekend went to a shopping mall walked into the appliance section and saw a Cuisinart and he thought wow the shape of that Cuisinart the base of it is just perfect Brings it back to his team and says this is your this is going to guide you forward to get the shape We want for this computer beautiful creative connection Albert Einstein, the principle of relativity, is a guiding principle. Again, he was very strict with it, far more than a lot of other people, and he was incredibly creative with it. Just to give it a nutshell what a simple version of the model is, your guiding conception, once you form it, kind of generates seed project ideas. It'll generate little clusters of possibilities, little nubbles that you can go and explore and see if they work. Even if you get a seed that's going to work, a guiding principle will help you see if you think it's going to be consistent with your principles. But then a guiding principle is really great at helping you go out into this huge, rich context and find the critical missing piece that will make the project work. So the simplest way, the guiding conception might spawn a seed of two elements, and the guiding principle might help you find the key third element to make it all come together and work. ⁓ Steve Jobs finding the Cuisinart's a great example. One I give in talks is Shel Silverstein's wonderful children's book called The Missing Piece, where the whole story's about someone trying to find a missing piece. They work together and I think to be a great creative, if we look at them, great creative people, they usually have both of them working together and that's how they're able to create. James Taylor (26:54) And I would imagine when you teach at Yale and you've been doing this creativity course for over 20 years now, I would imagine this approach to thinking about creativity, which is quite a top-down approach, would resonate very well with those who come from a world of engineering or the sciences, because it has a little bit more of that feeling of the pedagogy of something that's happening. It feels less... ⁓ you know, something just happens by chance, I guess. There is actually a thought, there is a process that's going on here. And it helps someone think about how they layer these, as you say, conceptions and guidance together. SOM Broadcast Studio (27:36) Yeah, actually I will tell you that the artistically minded students often generate the most wonderful guiding conceptions. Something I've learned across my career is that artists are far more conceptual about what they're doing that sometimes we give them credit for. I think sometimes they don't want to say that they're like that. Picasso didn't really want to tell you all the thinking he was doing. But we know from something written by his mistress early on, she said, her comment was, He's thinking about his art all the time from the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep at night. ⁓ And she may or may not have been happy about that, but that's what he was doing. So I think actually the artists also do it. I will say as well though, as we model it as a path, of course it is top down and also bottom up because as you have new experiences, they trigger an evolution of your guiding conception and they trigger your ability to find these key missing pieces. So it is a very rich process and we don't want to underestimate how complex or rich it is. But we also, I think it's great to make progress in frameworks for understanding what the process is. And it also opens up creativity to so many people in the world who might be a little anxious about being creative. They're not intuitively doing these things. And it's really just wonderful for me, rewarding to teach people about it and see them be able to use it. James Taylor (28:54) And before we start to finish up, you mentioned something a little bit earlier about your brother and his impact upon your work as well. We often have guests on the show that talk about this idea of creative pairs or creative pairings, someone that's different but complimentary to the work they do. They push each other. Yesterday I was talking to an audience, I was talking about Linus Pauling and the Nobel Prize winner. was talking about ⁓ many people believe the second Nobel Prize he won or he's awarded should be jointly awarded to him and his wife, Ava, because her contribution was different and they combined each other. So tell me with your brother, what did he bring to your thinking on this area? SOM Broadcast Studio (29:31) Well, my brother has pushed me ⁓ in my life, definitely. He's a mathematician. So he loves the math part of things. And I'm a little bit on the, you know, I do both things. I love the conceptual work. I love the great writers and artists, but I also love the math and the formal modeling. And actually our father died about 11 years ago now. And my brother and I had not actually been talking that much. We've had our own issues. After our father died, for whatever reason, it brought us closer together. and we started talking regularly. talk to him right now pretty much every week on the phone. And I was trying to work on this next step for this book and kind of stuck. And he was so excited about some modeling he was doing. He really inspired me to kind of go back and say, yeah, I can do this. I do have a model. Let me just push it a little further. And then when I did that, wham, it worked out. So I give him lot of credit for that. He's been an inspiration in that regard. Maybe unwittingly, he has his own thing going on, right? But we need those inspirations around us. People can be so important for us. When we get stuck or when we need a different perspective, that's where we can get it from. James Taylor (30:46) I'm also interested on, for those who don't have a copy of book yet, on the front cover, there is ⁓ a beautiful artwork, which it kind of, feels like it has the feel of the book in some ways. obviously it's Kandinsky, the great artist Kandinsky. I would love to know, first of all, how did you get the rights to be able to use that painting? Cause that's a pretty like amazing thing to have on the front cover. And why did you use this painting? obviously the book is in the form of words and thoughts, but you obviously were very thoughtful as to why you chose that particular piece of art to be on the front cover of the book. SOM Broadcast Studio (31:25) well i i gave a guiding conception if you will about what i wanted on the cover but there's actually ⁓ book designer we hired at stanford university press did this book stanford business books they worked with him and he's the one that identified that are the image and and got it for us so i give him a huge amount of credit i did work with them then on some of the details but i think it came out beautifully the the production is beautiful so i give them a lot of credit for that James Taylor (31:52) And as we mentioned earlier, academics, you're often thinking, you know, the book takes a year, however long, much more than that to do the research for it. But whenever I talk to writers, always almost more excited about the next thing that they're working on. Usually the thing that they're researching, maybe it's not been written at this point. So where do you intend to go next with this area? Is it going to be a completely new area within creativity or are you working on a completely different field? SOM Broadcast Studio (32:18) Well, I do want to complete a third book to have a trilogy, kind of like the Twilight Saga. I'm going to have a trilogy of three books. ⁓ That's the goal, if I can get it done. It's going to continue with this. This book, as you said, a very, it's kind of a snapshot of a key phase of the creative process, forming a guiding conception, using the guiding principle to complete a project. I really want to go back and look at the life paths and how people build up. to get to the point where they could actually form these guiding structures. And I think about that a little bit in terms of certain elements stand out for you, become salient, whether because you learned about them from a very charismatic teacher or it was a moment in your life when you were open or just something very exciting. So I'm working now on this process of how people build up exciting elements that they eventually bring together to form the guiding conception. and then some of the iteration around that process. So I'm excited to do it. And again, my ultimate vision is to show a world in which each individual follows their own unique path to whatever contribution they make. But it's in a world in which we're all in the same common framework. And so I can see the different people. We can see them each following their own path. And in a way, that's a vision of how our society could work. James Taylor (33:42) Where is the best place for people to go if they want to learn more about your work, your research, your other books we've spoken about as well? Where should they go? We can explain that. SOM Broadcast Studio (33:51) Yeah, these books are sold on Amazon in the US, but also around the world. ⁓ Stanford University Press also sells the book. I have a website, which you can quickly pick on my name, JonathanFeinstein.com. ⁓ If anyone's really interested, they can always send me an email to my Yale email. And I do respond if it's something that's thoughtful and interesting for a dialogue, of course. James Taylor (34:14) Absolutely, well, Jonathan, thanks so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast. And thank you for writing this book, Creativity in Large Scale Context is out now. We're gonna have a link here if you'll go into the show notes. Jonathan, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast. SOM Broadcast Studio (34:30) Thank you so much, James, for the invitation and the wonderful interview discussion we just had. Thank you very much.

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