Creativity Is the Hidden Engine of Engineering

Not long ago, I reconnected with a long-time friend, Zack Jordan. Over the years, our conversations have spanned very different worlds — mine at the intersection of neuroscience, statistics, and computer science, and his across story authorship, book publishing, rapid startup prototyping, and software engineering. (He’s an incredible published author — check out his work here.)

In one of our recent conversations, we found ourselves circling a theme that cuts across both our domains: the foundational role of creativity in engineering.

Creativity as the Root of Abstraction

Without creativity, abstraction becomes nearly impossible — and abstraction is the beating heart of engineering. Abstraction is the ability to cut through the noise, to see the underlying distributions, waves, or patterns that shape the surface chaos. It’s the spark that allows an engineer to glimpse an idea inside complexity.

For me, this echoes my early fascination with neuroscience. Sensory inputs — each with their own distributions and thresholds — sum together over time to form perception. Out of fragments, clarity emerges. That’s not just math or statistics. It’s emergence. It’s gestalt: the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

The Gift of Pattern Recognition

Zack has a rare talent for spotting patterns in unexpected places. He draws connections across ideas that at first glance have nothing in common. That resonates with me deeply, because whether it’s numbers, probabilities, or raw data, somewhere inside the noise lies the structure of an idea — an insight waiting to be uncovered.

This pattern-seeking instinct is hardly limited to neuroscience. You see it everywhere:

• In product design and UX flows.
• In the architecture of systems.
• In networks of human interaction.

Nature itself offers endless examples, from Fibonacci spirals to the golden ratio. These structures remind us that patterns are not just academic — they are universal.

Creativity as Engineering’s North Star

Engineering is often taught as a discipline of precision and logic. And yes, it is. But the spark — the thing that makes new systems, models, and products possible — is creativity. It’s the courage to step back from the data, squint at the noise, and say: I think I see something here.

That, to me, is where engineering becomes art.