Combinatorial Imagination

Role

Combinatorial imagination is what Steve Jobs was pointing to when he said that creativity is just connecting things — a description that sounds simple but conceals the extraordinary range of perceptual, cognitive, and knowledge prerequisites that productive creative combination requires. The combinatorial space of possible idea connections expands factorially with the number of domains one knows, meaning that each new domain added to one's knowledge base creates a larger new combinatorial space than all previous domains combined — which is why the truly creative generalist, despite knowing less than the specialist in any given domain, has access to a vastly larger creative possibility space. Most people underestimate their own combinatorial imagination capacity not because they lack it but because they have never systematically explored what their knowledge base makes possible when its elements are deliberately recombined.