Discussed this with my wife on the drive back from the SXSW film fest in Austin the weekend.
Not quite on topic, but closely related as we discussed creativity. While she saw it as out of the box thinking, I (as at least a somewhat creative person) started explaining my views in a bit more detail.
In short, I think there are straight line thinkers who see one route, or maybe a few, from A to point Z.
A creative person sees a lot (as Ian mentions) and starts rolling through hundreds or thousands of options mentally, looking for ways an existing idea fits a new situation, by taking an old idea from somewhere else, but either twisting it or adding one new thing necessitated by current circumstance to make it a new idea.
In golf, it might be seeing the basic qualities of a green site, thinking of other greens that would basically fit that well (such as narrow greens on a narrow site) and then adapting that, tweaking it, whatever to this new situation.
Thinking of Copperhead, since it was played last week, Packard saw rounded tees, and even more stylistic bunkers shapes, and came away with stylized free form tee shapes, which was pretty radical thinking.
Somewhere back in time, Mac and others took the natural shapes of sand blow outs and stylized them into more formal bunkers required.
The list goes on, but again, I think creativity is the thought process of examining far more options than most folks would consider, seeing certain relationships (sort of how like Warrant Buffet "sees" how to make money, and putting them together.
So many here think there is "one best" routing for every site, which I doubt, but I don't doubt that if you see a great routing, on a tough site, that there are 10-25 discarded preliminary routings to get there. So, maybe that old "perspiration is 90% of inspiration" saying is true.
BTW, Mike Young is right. Some of my most ingenious ideas were technical, and nothing you guys would probably mention here. Most recent was at La Costa, where the water veered away from the natural swale across the fw, etc. Joe Lee had built a green in the drainage flow. The creative idea was to put a grass bunker left of the green (which Lee never used) which doubled as a flood overflow channel to keep the fw dry.
20 years ago in Myrtle Beach, on a flat site, I put a lake in the low point, not particularly creative, and had in the past connected 2 lakes with deep lines to make them essentially work as one. But, I had never connected a whole series of lakes, but figured is should work, and thus connected the entire string of lakes at that low elevation. That allowed me to build fairways near grade, whereas the other courses spent 200K of their 300-400K earthmoving quantity simply raising fairways. So, I turned an earthmoving/drainage problem into a budget saving design opportunity.
In many ways, I don't think you can teach creativity. Back in landscape school, we started with 50 students, and 12 graduated. Those who didn't really have the passion and personality for design dropped out. Most had been taught the basics and went from not drawing well to nice, but not inspired drawings and designs. Of the 12 that finished, there was a definite ranking of hot shots and lesser talents. In the end, 10 of us are running our own design firms, and two are park directors or related jobs, and those were the two we all knew were least creative.
I will go back and read MY "Architects as Genius" piece. I suspect we will be more in line in our thinking than not.