The source of innovation — as a lawyer, as a business person, or as a designer — is creative thinking.

One of the reasons I was willing and remain committed to writing about law and creativity here at Geniocity is the purpose of this site as Carolyn Jack, its founder, has made clear to me from the beginning: it’s intended to show how innovation works across professions and disciplines normally segregated from one another so that people in those disciplines and fields can learn from one another. Innovation requires a remarkably agile mind — a creative mind — and so anyone wanting to innovate should look to the thinking of creative people no matter where they find them. Businesses should look to artists. Artists should look to game designers. Game designers should look to lawyers. Lawyers should look to fiction writers . . .

Again: no matter what you do — law, business, education, etc. — you should pursue innovation by seeking ideas from people whose job it is to innovate. As Fast Company reports, that’s also precisely the advice Roger Martin gives to businesses:

[T]he dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is traveling the country, throwing down the gauntlet to companies who hope to analyze and strategize their way out of a recession by bringing in armies of management consultants. You’ll get what you pay for, he warns, and it won’t be innovation. “The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies,” he says. “You can’t send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems.”

The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it’s unproductive. “No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning,” he says.

The answer? Bring in the folks whose job it is to imagine the future, and who are experts in intuitive thinking.

As Martin points out, even scientific progress starts with hypotheses; it doesn’t merely apply the known. Which, interestingly, is precisely the point evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson made in the New York Times this week:

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.

[S]cience is usually presented as a body of knowledge — facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.

One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science — as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote — creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance,” where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier — this peering into the unknown — is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.

The second misconception that comes from this “facts, facts, facts” method of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical “creep”; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. (This raises the interesting question of when speculation is more likely to generate productive lines of enquiry than deductive creep. I don’t know the answer — I’d have to speculate.)

Being effective at anything requires innovation to address an ever changing world. It’s true in law. My students arrive in law school wanting to be told the answers law provides. I hope by the time they leave that what they’ve learned are not answers but, rather, ways to creatively reach answers to questions no one can anticipate they will face.

In other words, the qualities required by effective lawyers are the same qualities  – as Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, tells Guy Kawasaki — required by effective designers.  Both great designers and great lawyers lawyers have an enormous depth and breadth of knowledge, an ability to connect that knowledge to human lives and human hearts, desire, and persistence:

The artistic talent required is more of an enabler at the end of rational and emotional analysis as well as strategic conceptualization. Therefore, it is vital to learn and study as much as possible especially about business, technology and human nature. In the end, there are flavors in design which are more esthetic—see New York Times “Style Magazine”—but design is only relevant when it improves human lives by appealing both to the mind and the heart. Finally, a young person with the right talents needs to have infinite desire and never give up. I apply a simple test with young students: smash a teapot into pieces and then hand out the glue. Those who rebuild the teapot won’t make it, those who create phantasy animals and spaceships will.

So next time you are looking to innovate (and you always should be), look to creative people to help you do it.