The Importance of Iteration

Building iteration into your process is essential for tapping into true creativity – driving innovation, collaboration and meaningful change.

Cyclicality is an organizing principal of the world we inhabit. Motion and change, coming and going, expansion and contraction. Our actions leave trails as we spiral round and round, by necessity overlapping where we’ve been before in order to get to somewhere new.

There is a chemical reaction thought to be the origin of all life in the universe, where the chemicals produce more and more of themselves through a feedback process called autocatalysis. It’s called the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, in case you were wondering. Recreated in a petri dish, this reaction creates a spontaneous formation of rotating concentric circles, scrolls and spirals. Similarly, self-organizing spirals are found in the propagation of signals along the nerves inside our bodies, as well as in the formation of most galaxies in outer space.

Beauty and order our of chaos.

The production of truly creative work involves iteration, because the creative process is a kind of Möbius strip, where the output eventually becomes part of the input.

Iterate. Iterate again.