The 3 Types of Creativity (And Which One Is Actually Yours)

You've probably had this thought at some point: "I'm not really a creative person." Usually it comes right after watching someone else paint, or pitch a business idea, or plate up a meal that looks nothing like the recipe. But that thought rests on a mistake almost everyone makes: treating creativity like a single skill you either have or don't, rather than a set of different mental moves that show up in wildly different places.

Once you know what those moves actually are, "I'm not creative" stops making sense as a sentence. You're either using one of them without noticing, or you're using the wrong one for the problem in front of you.

What creativity actually is

Psychologist J.P. Guilford, whose 1950s research effectively founded the study of creative thinking, split it into two working parts: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is generating options — as many as you can, without judging them yet. Convergent thinking is narrowing those options down to the one that actually works.

Picture a cluttered desk. Divergent thinking is tipping every folder, receipt and half-finished notebook out onto it, so everything is visible at once. Convergent thinking is the bit afterwards — sorting that pile into what's useful, what's bin, and what goes back in the drawer. You need both. A desk that's permanently tipped out is chaos. A desk that's never tipped out in the first place never had anything interesting on it to sort.

Creativity, in other words, isn't one gear. It's switching between two.

The three types of creativity, according to the person who actually mapped them

The most useful breakdown of creativity doesn't come from a listicle — it comes from Margaret Boden, a British cognitive scientist at the University of Sussex, who spent decades studying how creative ideas are actually produced. In her book The Creative Mind, she argued there are three distinct types, and they're not equally rare.

Think of each type as a different way of treating a recipe you already know.

1. Combinational creativity

This is taking two ideas that already exist, that have never been put together before, and combining them. Nothing new is invented — the newness is in the pairing. It's your gran's chutney recipe next to the curry you had on holiday, mashed into one dish nobody's made before.

This is the most common type by a wide margin, and the one you're most likely already doing without noticing. The Beatles combining rock, folk and classical influences into songs nobody had heard the like of. Fusion cuisine — Heston Blumenthal folding chemistry into a Sunday roast. A business that takes an existing product (a taxi) and an existing technology (a phone app) and puts them together into something new. None of these invented a new ingredient. They combined familiar ones in a way nobody had tried.

2. Exploratory creativity

This is what happens once you know a recipe cold and start testing every variable inside it, without breaking the recipe itself. More chilli. Less time in the oven. A different cut of meat. You're not questioning whether it should be a roast dinner — you're finding out exactly how far "roast dinner" can bend before it isn't one any more.

Einstein's early work sits here — testing the edges of Newtonian physics using its own rules, before he broke them. So does most good design: an architect who takes a known structural approach and pushes it to its limits within a single style, or Wassily Kandinsky testing how far he could strip a painting down before it stopped reading as a painting at all. Boden calls the space you're exploring a "conceptual space" — a fancy way of describing the boundaries of the thing you already know, and exploratory creativity is finding out exactly where those boundaries actually sit, rather than assuming.

3. Transformational creativity

This is the rare one. Instead of testing the edges of the recipe, you throw out the rule that says it has to be a recipe at all. Boden describes this as changing the "conceptual space" itself, so that ideas which were previously impossible within the old rules suddenly become possible.

Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA's double-helix structure — building substantially on Rosalind Franklin's X-ray crystallography work — didn't refine an existing theory of heredity. It changed what a theory of heredity was allowed to look like. Tim Berners-Lee didn't improve an existing network protocol when he invented the World Wide Web; he changed what a network was for. This is the type people usually mean when they say "genius", and it's genuinely rare — most working creativity, including most of what earns a living, is combinational or exploratory.

Can you be more than one type?

Yes — and most people are, depending on what they're working on. You might be almost entirely combinational at work, pulling together other people's frameworks into a plan nobody else quite thought to make, and exploratory in a hobby, pushing a familiar skill further each time you practise it. Very few people live permanently in transformational territory, and that's not a failure. It's the least common type precisely because most problems don't need it. Most days, you need to combine what's already there, or test what a known idea can do — not reinvent the category.

This matters because it changes what you should actually be trying to get better at. If you keep aiming for a transformational, world-changing idea when the job in front of you just needs two existing things put together well, you'll feel stuck for no reason.

Getting the idea out of your head before it's gone

None of the three types above are worth much if the idea evaporates before you act on it. This is the bit most creativity advice skips, and it's the bit I actually care about: a good idea you don't capture is functionally identical to no idea at all.

You don't need a system that tells you how to be more creative. You need a system that catches what you're already generating, so combinational and exploratory thinking — which happen constantly, often while you're doing something else entirely — don't get lost between the shower and your desk. That's the entire logic behind writing ideas down the moment they land, rather than trusting you'll remember the good version of them later. You won't. Nobody does.

Practically, that means three things: write the idea down the second it arrives rather than "later", keep one place for it rather than scattered across apps and napkins, and separate the capturing from the deciding — don't force yourself to judge an idea's worth in the same moment you're catching it. Judging kills half your ideas before they've had a chance to be useful. Catch first, sort later, the same way the desk gets tipped out before it gets sorted.

This isn't a small thing for the UK specifically. The creative industries make up roughly 5% of the UK's entire economic output and around 7% of all jobs, according to a 2025 House of Commons Library briefing — a sizeable chunk of the country is, quite literally, paid to have and use ideas like the ones above. Whatever type you lean on most, it's doing real economic work, not just decorating your evenings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is creativity something you're born with, or can it be learned?

Both play a role, but the learnable part is bigger than most people assume. Combinational and exploratory creativity in particular respond well to deliberate practice — the more raw material (skills, references, other people's ideas) you feed in, the more combinations and edges you have available to work with. Transformational creativity is rarer and harder to force on demand, but it still tends to follow years of exploratory work in a field, not a bolt from nowhere.

Why does it matter which type you're using?

Because each one needs a different condition to happen. Combinational creativity needs exposure to varied ideas you can pair up. Exploratory creativity needs deep, repeated practice inside one area. Transformational creativity needs both of those first, plus a willingness to break a rule you've fully understood. Chasing the wrong condition for the type of thinking you're actually trying to do is why "just be more creative" advice tends to go nowhere.

Giving your ideas somewhere to land

Whichever type you lean on, the same problem tends to show up eventually: plenty of ideas, no reliable place to catch them before they're gone. A Priority Pad gives the combinational and exploratory sides of your thinking somewhere concrete to go each week, so an idea worth acting on doesn't quietly disappear before Tuesday.