Personality and Change – Is our Personality Really Fixed? An ABCD approach to thinking about how we can change

May 25, 2020 By jbandwk in dynamic environments, goals, thinking components Tags: change, habit formation, habits, personality change

Dynamic personalities. Source: Davidturnswood via Wikimedia Commons

Changing times evoke questions about change. What prompts us to change? How fixed, really, is our “personality”?

The way that we initially respond to these questions may be shaped by our views of personality itself. Do we see personality from a mostly top-down perspective? From a top-down perspective, we think of personality as someone’s general predisposition to act and feel in certain ways, that then guides, filters, and funnels the types of situations and interactions (“states”) they are likely to experience.

Or do we, instead, think of personality in a largely bottom-up way? From a bottom-up perspective, we think of personality as the accumulated average of how someone tends to behave and feel across varied situations and interactions – a summary of the many experiential “states” they have transitioned through. We can think of personality from a top-down “encompassing” perspective (the trait summarizes and overarches many states) or from a bottom-up “emerging” perspective (the trait emerges from an accumulation of states).

Two Perspectives on Personality. Source: Wilma Koutstaal, adapted from Figure 2 of Sosnowska et al. (2019).

But, what if neither the bottom-up nor the top-down perspective entirely captures what we mean by “personality” and so both can be true, to varying extents? Encountering day-to-day situations that invite us to change (e.g., changes in our life circumstances, unexpected obstacles or setbacks, new opportunities) may – depending on how often we encounter such situations, how we respond to them, and on our own and other’s reactions – cumulatively lead to personality change. As pictured below, this is the iterative and more contextually-anchored perspective that is suggested by one recent Personality Change Model. Note how dynamic and iterative the change model is. Note, too, how it’s not only our individual selves, such as our predispositions, goals, or abilities, but also our physical, sociocultural, and interpersonal environments that, together, can promote personality change.

A Personality Change Model. Source: Wilma Koutstaal, adapted from Figure 1 of Wrzus & Roberts (2017).

What are we considering when we talk of “personality”?

Personality is, in part, about how we typically tend to behave – for example, whether we are most often talkative or are usually quiet, or whether we are likely to jump at the opportunity to explore new ideas and new ways of doing things or, instead, are more prone to stick to the tried-and-true approach we’ve used many times before.

But personality is not just about how we are likely to behave or to act. It is also about how we generally tend to feel, for example, are we usually upbeat, hopeful, and optimistic, or not, and how stable our feelings typically are, or how volatile. Personality is also about what we usually find pleasant, fun and rewarding (or not), and what motivates us, keeping us going and trying again and again.

One helpful way of thinking of the different dimensions that all contribute to personality, and what its components are, is what has been called the ABCD framework:

A = affect (what and how we feel, or emotion/mood)

B = behavior (what and how we act or do things)

C = cognition (what and how we think)

D = desire (what and how we want things; what we try to bring about, or to prevent)

So, what about changing our personality?

In the past several years, views about personality have themselves been changing. Rather than seeing personality as for the most part stable and constant, many researchers now take a more dynamic view of personality that emphasizes both continuity or constancy and change.

For example, across our lives, one factor contributing to changes in personality is alterations in our social roles and responsibilities. Indeed, many studies have found that, as individuals move from later adolescence into adulthood, their personality characteristics gradually become more adaptive and appropriate to their new situation such as new work responsibilities or new personal relationships. New roles bring with them different goals, and new ways of thinking and responding. If repeatedly experienced, these new ways of thinking and responding may become habitual or “trait-like” – as pictured in the Personality Change Model.

But what about other sorts of life-related events, such as engaging in a new type of training or intervention? Could these also significantly change someone’s personality?

The answer seems to be yes. One recent large-scale summary of many different studies measured personality before and after various sorts of interventions. The systematic meta-analysis – including more than 200 studies, and more than 20,000 participants – showed that personality traits can, indeed, change after different types of change interventions, such as an 18-hour course helping undergraduates learn to better understand and deal with their own and others’ emotions. The alterations in personality traits also appeared to be comparatively long-lasting – with changes still apparent after time periods of six months, and one or more years after the intervention.

So what personality characteristics changed? The largest and most consistently observed changes were found in emotional stability. Significant changes were also found for extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and blended combinations of traits. Changes in “openness to experience” – broadly encompassing one’s tendency to flexibly explore novel ideas and experiences – were also observed, for some but not all of the different ways of assessing change.

By adopting a view of personality that is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes, and as something that emerges over time, and with repeated experience, change may emerge if we change our environment or our goals and the many experiential “states” we cumulatively inhabit over time. By actually taking a first step into the desired new direction such as being more open or more conscientious – and then another step, and another, and another – new ways of thinking, acting, and feeling will be repeatedly experienced, and may become habitual or trait-like. We may indeed deeply change ourselves, and in a positive, lasting way.

References

Nelis, D., Kotsou, I., Quoidbach, J., Hansenne, M., Weytens, F., Dupuis, P., & Mikolajczak, M. (2011). Increasing emotional competence improves psychological and physical well-being, social relationships, and employability. Emotion, 11, 354–366.

Roberts, B. W. et al. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143, 117–141.

Sosnowska, J., Kuppens, P., De Fruyt, F., & Hofmans, J. (2019). A dynamic systems approach to personality: The Personality Dynamics (PersDyn) model. Personality and Individual Differences, 144, 11–18.

Wilt, J., & Revelle, W. (2015). Affect, behaviour, cognition and desire in the Big Five: An analysis of item content and structure. European Journal of Personality, 29, 478–497.

Wrzus, C., & Roberts, B. W. (2017). Processes of personality development in adulthood: The TESSERA framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21, 253–277.

It’s Up to You: Choice Catalyzes Curiosity. Giving ourselves choices expands our exploratory curiosity

January 4, 2020 By jbandwk in exploration, goals, idea landscapes Tags: autonomy, choice, curiosity, intrinsic motivation

Choice point! Source: P. L. Chadwick via Wikimedia Commons

Do you sometimes find yourself procrastinating, backing yourself into a tight corner of time pressure, so that you think or feel that you don’t really have a choice of which way to proceed? Are you framing your next steps as beyond your control, or as pre-determined – even by your own past choices? And might that be curbing your curiosity and creative exploration?

When is a choice yours, and when does it feel like yours? And why does it matter?

Choosing versus not choosing: A scenario

Suppose that you’ve been invited to take part in a research study. The study will take place entirely online and in it you will be asked to respond to a few brief personality questionnaires, to watch a video of a classic TED talk, and to answer some questions about how you felt about the video. Suppose, too, that you are told that you will be able to choose which one of three videos you’d like to watch, and beforehand are given the opportunity to read a short description of each of the videos. The three videos are “The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance,” “The power of vulnerability,” and “The history of our world in 18 minutes.”

Now suppose that one of your friends (say “Marcie”) also has been invited to take part in a research study. The study seems to be the same one you’ve been asked to participate in, except that, rather than being given a choice of which one of the three videos she’d like to watch, Marcie is simply assigned to watch one of them, and before she watches it, she is given a short description of that video to read.

Afterwards, you and Marcie are asked some questions about the topic of the video you had just watched, for example, “Finding out more about the topic would be an opportunity to grow and learn,” and “I would enjoy learning about aspects of the topic that are unfamiliar to me.” You are also asked to indicate your level of interest in the video, and the extent to which you plan to seek out more information on the topic.

Let’s imagine, too, that both you and Marcie watched the same video, say, “The power of vulnerability.” Would it have made a difference that you were able to choose which video you watched? What about Marcie, who wasn’t given any options, but was simply assigned to watch that video? How might you feel differently from Marcie about the topic of the video, and why?

In a recent study, two researchers in Australia teamed up to ask – and empirically examine – these very questions. They hypothesized that the participants given a choice would show greater curiosity. In a sample of 154 mature-aged university students (average age of 35), this is precisely what they found. Compared with participants given no choice, participants who were given a choice regarding which of the videos they watched were more curious about the topic of the video, expressed greater interest in the topic, and were more likely to plan to obtain more information about the topic. These effects of choice versus no choice on exploratory curiosity and interest were found even when comparing participants who had watched the same video.

Why would this be?

Circumstances in our environment (e.g., the imminence of project deadlines) can either promote, or undermine, a sense of our own autonomy. When we feel autonomous, we fully endorse our actions with our whole self, and feel that we are responsible for our action. The sense of being autonomous can be contrasted with a feeling of being controlled.

Being provided the opportunity to choose is strongly associated with an increased sense of autonomy, and has been found to enhance intrinsic motivation. For example, in a classic study, undergraduate participants were either assigned three specific puzzles to work on, or were allowed to select which three puzzles, out of a larger set of six, they preferred to work on. Those in the no-choice group were given a designated amount of time for each puzzle, but those in the choice-group were allowed to indicate the amount of time they wished to allot to working on each one. When later given the opportunity to continue working on other (matched) puzzles, participants in the choice-group continued to problem-solve for longer. The choice-group participants were also more willing to return to the lab to do additional puzzle solving than were participants who had been given less control over their behavior.

Being given the opportunity to make a choice, even when the choice is small or minor, appears to benefit learning, and to be itself rewarding. Indeed, there is evidence for increased activity in reward-related processing brain regions of the reward network after free choice.

It’s true that choice may not be welcome under all circumstances. Sometimes there can be just too many options so that we can experience “choice overload,” especially if, for example, the choices are complex so it can be too difficult to work through them all, or we’re really not sure of what we want. Choice, whether autonomous or controlled, always occurs within a broader context and can sometimes have paradoxical or detrimental effects. Yet the ability to make real choices is fundamental to our sense of agency and autonomy – and agency and autonomy are the bedrock for creative exploration of all kinds.

To think about

Are you giving yourself enough opportunity for the sorts of real choices that could prove to be curiosity-boosting?
Could you change how you’re thinking about one of your creative or problem-solving choices to be more fully autonomous and experience more agency?
Could giving yourself (and others) freedom to make even minor, seemingly inconsequential, choices cumulatively catch and catalyze your curiosity?

References

Chernev, A., Böckenholt, U., & Goodman, J. (2015). Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25, 333–358.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1987). The support of autonomy and the control of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1024–1037.

Leotti, L. A., Iyengar, S. S., & Ochsner, K. N. (2010). Born to choose: The origins and value of the need for control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 457–463.

Madan, S., Nanakdewa, K., Savani, K., & Markus, H. R. (2019). The paradoxical consequences of choice: Often good for the individual, perhaps less so for society? Current Directions in Psychological Science, published online Dec. 12, 2019.

Schutte, N. S., & Malouff, J. M. (2019). Increasing curiosity through autonomy of choice. Motivation and Emotion, 43, 563–570.

Wulf, G., Iwatsuki, T., Machin, B., Kellogg, J., Copeland, C. & Lewthwaite, R. (2018). Lassoing skill through learner choice. Journal of Motor Behavior, 50, 285–292.

Zuckerman, M., Porac, J., Lathin, D., Smith, R., & Deci, E. L. (1978). On the importance of self-determination for intrinsically-motivated behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4, 443–446.

What’s Your Problem? Innovating by Self-Imposing Constraints: Using deliberately chosen constraints to reshape your creative problems

December 1, 2019 By jbandwk in creative constraints, exploration, General, goals Tags: constraints, design brief, innovation, problem-finding

Giving challenges new shape! Source: Andrew Butko via Wikimedia Commons.

Asking someone, “What’s your problem?” can seem like a confrontational challenge. It’s like saying, “So, tell me: What’s irking you? What is it that’s nagging you or getting under your skin, unsettling you?”

Yet problems are rarely so tightly and completely spelled out that there is no room for creativity in how we define the problem. Because solutions and problems mutually inform one another, when posed in the right spirit, asking “What’s your problem” could be a well-timed, well-meaning, and well-informed impetus to exploring opportunities for new and creative solutions. “What’s your problem?” can be a welcome invitation to creative thinking and creative problem finding.

In the many worlds in which we are called on to make things – design, engineering, art, education, everyday living – there is often an important difference between how a problem is presented to us, and what the problem really is (or could be). Problems as presented are not problems fully and clearly defined.

But how do we get from the oftentimes muddy, vague, or indeterminate way a problem is presented – a presentation that may even subtly miss or misconstrue the vital nub of the issue – to a more clearly and precisely defined problem that more fully squares with the real issues at hand?

Getting particular about problem particulars

Although much research in design and engineering has focused on strategies for solving problems, fewer studies have focused on the earlier stages of problem exploration or problem discovery. Still, there are some notable hints, including some new cues based on a recent study that took a fresh tack to addressing this question.

Let’s take a closer look at the findings from that recent study, led by a team of four researchers in industrial design, mechanical engineering, and psychology at Iowa State University and the University of Michigan.

The researchers started by pulling together two independent sources of publicly available data. On the one side, they drew upon an existing database of presented problems relating to product design. On the other side, delving into the records of a number of crowd-sourced design competitions and documents on award-winning designs, they compiled a set of discovered problems and solutions. Then they systematically compared what was first given, in the presented problem, with how the problem was further unearthed (“dis-covered”) by different design teams.

Take their example of a challenge to design a “next generation” outdoor playground. The “presented problem” might state a number of requirements, say, that the playground system must be modular, allowing the user to adjust the playground equipment to different sites and to modify the configuration to permit a wider and more varied set of experiences. Other presented requirements might be that the playground equipment must be independently accessible by children in wheelchairs, and must be visually appealing in both urban and natural settings.

Given this design brief, one team identified and imposed some of their own particular constraints. They decided that the playground should be especially intended for children between the ages of 6 to 12 years, and should take inspiration from the ways in which children of those ages are interested in relating to, and competing with, their friends during play. Rather than modular structures, they thought of their system as involving “constellations” that could be readily re-configured into new challenging and inviting groupings and shapes.

Across a wide array of design challenges and specific proposed responses to those challenges, the researchers extracted 32 different “problem exploration patterns” or sorts of self-generated constraints. Each type of constraint was a method that designers and innovative teams used to move from a comparatively vague or underspecified design problem to something more specific and definite that the designing team could better creatively imaginatively and concretely grapple with. Sometimes it involved broadening the setting of the problem, at other times narrowing it. Sometimes it involved redefining the desired outcome, at other times adding secondary functions, or describing conditions in the natural environment.

The researchers then compared how many voluntarily added constraints a given design included. They also looked at whether each design – incorporating from only one to six different problem explorations patterns – was selected as a finalist, was chosen as a semifinalist, or was not selected at all.

So, did adding constraints boost creativity?

Let’s look at the picture of their findings below.

Self-imposed constraints and innovation prize-winning. Source: Adapted from Figure 9 of Studer et al. (2018) by W Koutstaal, with raw counts changed to percentages within each group.

The green and yellow bars represent projects that were chosen as finalists and semifinalists respectively; gray bars represent projects that were not selected as prizeworthy.

We can see that all of the projects that earned a finalist prize had more than one deliberately added constraint. Indeed, more than half of all the finalist-winning projects incorporated 3 or 4 self-generated constraints (32% and 26% respectively). Additionally, about 22% of the finalist-winning projects had 5 or 6 voluntarily applied constraints.

The simple take-away: Design teams that found several different ways to deliberately spell out their own constraints for the problem they had been given were more likely to develop prize-winning solutions. The constraints they chose to impose on the initially provided problem could be related to any of several aspects – the setting, the goals, limitations, and/or stakeholders. But rather than rigidly confining the designers into a narrow idea space, by adding their own constraints to the problem, and changing the shape of the problem they were solving, the designers were freed to generate innovative solutions that might otherwise have been beyond their reach.

Reference

Studer, J. A., Daly, S. R., McKilligan, S., & Seifert, C. M. (2018). Evidence of problem exploration in creative designs. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 32, 415–430.

Can Walking Together Help Creatively Synchronize Our Goals? Getting in step to generate diverse creative ideas.

November 3, 2019 By jbandwk in goals, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: cooperation, creativity, negotiation, trust, walking

Side-by-side moving forward! Source: Jason Zhang via Wikimedia Commons

We know that walking is good for many things. Brief periods of walking – say 20 to 30 minutes – can lift us into a more positive mood (Ekkekakis et al., 2000), and reduce both our subjective feelings of stress and physiological indicators of stress (such as salivary cortisol, or the concentrations of cortisol in our saliva, Gidlow et al., 2016). Short interludes of walking can also enhance how readily we find and generate diverse creative ideas (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014).

But might the benefits of walking spill-over to our interactions with other people who are walking with us? Might walking with someone – including someone we are currently in a dispute with or otherwise at odds with – help us get past stubborn road blocks in our thinking or obdurant obstacles to our onward dialogue? Could we call on the simple activity of “taking a walk together” to assist us in our struggling efforts to negotiate toward the goals that we, and our walking partner, may have? Can walking together help us resolve conflicts with another person?

Three researchers at Columbia University (Webb et al., 2017) recently teamed up to spell out some of the reasons we might expect walking together to have just such a welcome and positive spill-over effect with a walking partner. Corralling together findings and theories from several different research areas, they outlined at least three such reasons.

(1) When walking alongside another person we often, even without our awareness, align our rhythm and pacing with that of the other person, leading to a synchrony of our steps and stride. Synchrony and the mirroring of each others’ gestures and actions is associated with interpersonal coordination. In turn, such “motor synchrony” may promote a sense of positive emotional rapport and affiliation or emotional closeness with another. (For a review, see Keller et al. 2014).

(2) Walking side-by-side with another person, in joint (parallel) movement through space, carries with it a sense of cooperation rather than of confrontation, and so opens the path to the creative generation of a more integrative solution, that is, a solution that gives each party more of what she or he wants (e.g., Carnevale & Isen, 1986). During such joint movement through space, we and our partner also are jointly attending to a similar external environment, with such joint attention associated with shared interest. Indeed, research has shown that instructions that encouraged participants to walk in synchrony as a group (“walking in step” compared with walking normally) resulted in participants behaving more cooperatively in a subsequent (apparently unrelated) context designed to assess their expectations of cooperation by their counterparts (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009).

(3) Walking carries with it a concrete (physically real!) dynamic sense of forward motion, of moving forward in time and space. This fundamental physical sense of forward locomotion might echo – and evoke – a cognitive-motivational sense of a readiness to move forward and to get past obstacles, or to move from the “current state” to a “new state” (e.g., Webb 2015).

Using motion to get past commotion?

At a broader conceptual level, there is increasing evidence for the interconnectedness of different forms of cognition, emotion, and motor behavior – with perceived and enacted “alignments” on one level, such as that of motor synchrony, carrying over, and influencing alignments with our thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, attitudes, and emotions (Keller et al., 2014).

Although not a “magic bullet,” taking a walk with someone to creatively hash through some thorny issues may well be worth a try.

References

Ekkekakis, P., Hall, E. E., VanLanduyt, L. M., & Petruzzello, S. J. (2000). Walking in (affective) circles: Can short walks enhance affect? Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 23, 245–275.

Gidlow, C. J. et al. (2016). Where to put your best foot forward: Psycho-physiological responses to walking in natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 22–29.

Keller, P. E., Novembre, G., & Hove, M. J. (2014). Rhythm in joint action: Psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms for real-time interpersonal coordination. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, 369, 20130394, 1–12.

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 1142–1152.

Webb, C. E., Rossignac-Milon, M., & Higgins, E. T. (2017). Stepping forward together: Could walking facilitate interpersonal conflict resolution? American Psychologist, 72, 374–385.

Wiltermuth, S. S., & Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and cooperation. Psychological Science, 20, 1–5.

Where do flexibly new creative options come from? Dopamine helps us walk the flexibility-fluency tightrope

April 7, 2019 By jbandwk in exploration, General, goals Tags: creativity, dopamine, line drawing, mental flexibility

Navigating the flexibility-stability tightrope . . . Source: Adam Jones via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine that you’re trying to think of alternative ways to creatively address a thorny problem. What’s your best approach?

Should you place your bets on idea quantity: simply spouting and pouring forth with as many ideas as you can, hoping that in the fast flood of your ideas, among the many rather mundane ideas and a few silly ones, there may be one or two insightful gems that will illuminate your way forward? Or should you, from the outset, more closely channel and focus your idea generation efforts, placing your bets on idea quality: telling yourself that it’s not just any ideas that you’re looking for, but that you’re looking to find creative ideas, ideas that are novel, inventive, ingenious, innovative…?

The proposed answers to this question – should you place greater emphasis on the quantity versus quality of ideas generated – have varied across time, and labs, in part because idea quantity and quality are clearly associated with one another. For example, there is often a positive correlation between the number of ideas that people generate and both the originality of their ideas and the variety (or flexibility) of their ideas. And it is often the case that later generated ideas are more creative than earlier ones.

A different approach

A team of eight researchers in the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford recently tackled the issue of the fluency (quantity) versus uniqueness (quality) of responses from a very different approach. They set their sights on the question of what might be the biological basis of varied responses, choosing to focus particularly on the neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine (especially the dopaminergic nigrostriatal network) has long been implicated in creativity and cognitive flexibility, but direct evidence for how dopamine influences fluency and flexibility has so far been lacking.

Aiming to ask the question in a way that was minimally influenced by differences in individual’s background knowledge or learning, the Oxford research team adopted a markedly simple visual-spatial task. Participants were shown a 23″ touchscreen computer screen. On the screen were two small red circles, one directly above the other, with the two circles vertically separated by about 8 inches. Participants were told to “Draw as many different paths as you can from the bottom red circle to the top red circle in 4 minutes.’’

These direct and simple task instructions allowed for fine-grained quantitative assessments of how many paths the participants drew (a measure of quantity or fluency) and how varied they chose to make each of their paths (a measure of quality, originality, or uniqueness).

Equally important, the simple task also allowed testing with participants who have known deficits in dopaminergic function – that is, individuals with Parkinson’s Disease. The researchers could test patients both when they were on medications to supplement their dopaminergic function (referred to as being in an “on” state) and when temporarily off those medications following an overnight abstention from their medication (referred to as being in an “off” state). The researchers could then assess how participants performed the task depending on the level of dopamine present.

To further probe the effects of dopamine on the fluency of responses versus variation (uniqueness) of responses the researchers also tested a group of older adults, both when the participants were only given a placebo pill (control condition), and when they were administered a drug that is known to enhance D2 dopaminergic function (cabergoline, experimental condition). Like for the individuals with Parkinson’s Disease, the researchers could then assess how participants performed the task depending on the level of dopamine present.

Examples of participants’ responses to the drawing task

Example 1: Non-fluent & Non-unique

Source: Ang et al. (2018).

In the image above, there are relatively few paths from the bottom red dot to the top red dot, and the paths mostly look the same. All of the drawn paths are slightly curved outward, either to the right or to the left, but otherwise essentially follow the same trajectory.

Example 2: Fluent & Unique

Source: Ang et al. (2018).

In example 2, there are a large number of paths from the bottom red dot to the top red dot, and the drawn paths take many different trajectories, sometimes looping and swirling this way or that way, with some taking quite varied curved paths and others more direct or smooth-cornered paths.

So, what did they find?

Across each of three studies, with different age and participant groups, the findings were the same: Increased availability of dopamine increased the fluency (quantity) of responding (that is, the number of lines drawn) compared to the control conditions. This was observed both for individuals with Parkinson’s disease tested when “on” their dopamine-promoting medication (compared to when they were off their medication), and in older adults tested after being administered cabergoline (compared to being given placebo).

But this was not the only finding. Although dopamine, overall, decreased the uniqueness of the responses, for any given number of responses, the uniqueness of responding was also higher at that same level of fluency. So: dopamine strongly bolstered the quantity of responding, and also the uniqueness of responding. Stated differently, dopamine shifted the trade-off line between fluency and uniqueness, so that participants were more unique for a given level of fluency.

The researchers also carefully considered possible confounding factors and designed additional experiments to examine them. For example, could it be that dopamine influenced not the ability to simply think of (generate) different options, but rather the ability to plan them, or the ability to actually make the movements needed?

The researchers were able to show that the effects of dopamine really were on the process of generating different options rather than following through on a planned action or making the movement. For example, when the iPad display showed many different end points, rather than only one, and the participant only had to choose one of the end points, then there was little influence of dopamine status on performance. Other findings showed that the differences were not due to the contribution of motor tremor, and also not due to differences in drawing speed (which can influence the movements of individuals with Parkinson’s disease).

The results of this study nicely converge with those of another recent study, from a research team in Israel, that compared the creative performance of 27 individuals with Parkinson’s Disease, when “on” their dopaminergic therapy with the creative performance of 27 control participants, matched on age and years of education. In agreement with the Oxford team’s drawing-task findings, the Parkinson’s Disease group outperformed the control group in both the fluency (number) and the quality of their creative responses on a visual task that required interpreting the meanings of lines. This bolstering of creative visual responses was significantly greater in a subset of the participants with Parkinson’s Disease who were receiving a higher daily dose of dopaminergic-supplement (higher L-dopa equivalent daily dose) compared with a lower dose.

What does this all mean?

The line-drawing study shows that the neurotransmitter dopamine is an important modulator of how we flexibly self-generate or autonomously produce varied options for our behavior. The research provides direct evidence – based on convergent and analytically-careful experimental methods with both patient groups and healthy controls – for the important role of dopamine in how we imaginatively and flexibly generate new opportunities for action.

The exact mechanisms by which higher levels of dopamine might lead to increased creativity remain to be tested. One possible mechanism relates to how availability of the neurotransmitter dopamine (especially in the striatal brain system affected in Parkinson’s disease) boosts our tendencies to seek out novelty. Novelty-seeking is an important contributor to creativity and creative flexibility. Novelty-seeking is also an important aspect of enduring personality traits related to creativity, such as openness to experience. Increased dopamine is also known to be associated with good feelings or positive affect, such as how we may feel when we are unexpectedly or unpredictably given a small gift.

To be more creative, should we all, then, be looking to find ways of increasing dopamine, perhaps through engaging in these or other “happiness-boosting” activities?

The answer to this is likely neither a simple “yes,” nor a simple “no,” but rather – as for many questions about behavior and the brain – “it depends.”

A certain level of flexibility is good and often desirable. But too much flexibility can lead us to be distractible, taking away our ability to concentrate or persist in our goals. Whether bolstering our flexibility will also boost our creativity depends on our starting or baseline level of flexibility. It’s all a delicate balancing act, a tightrope between being aptly flexible and being appropriately persistent or stable.

References

Ang, Y.-S., Manohar, S., Plant, O., Kienast, A., Le Heron, C., Muhammed, K., Hu, M., & Husain, M. (2018). Dopamine modulates option generation for behavior. Current Biology, 28, 1561–1569.

Boot, N., Baas, M., van Gaal, S., Cools, R., & De Dreu, C.K.W. (2017). Creative cognition and dopaminergic modulation of fronto-striatal networks: Integrative review and research agenda. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 78, 13–23.

Faust-Socher, A., Kenett, Y. N., Cohen, O. S., Hassin-Baer, S., & Inzelberg, R. (2014). Enhanced creative thinking under dopaminergic therapy in Parkinson Disease. Annals of Neurology, 75, 935–942.

What keeps us going creatively when the going gets tough? The motivational value of both long-term and short-term goals

November 11, 2018 By jbandwk in associative cuing, creative constraints, goals Tags: creativity, goal hierarchy, goal network, insight, motivation, resilience

Taking our goals in stride . . . Source: Yftaheco via Wikimedia Commons

Many of our important projects and goals require extended effort – effort stretched out over long periods of time, from months, to years, or even decades. What keeps us going on these projects, pursuing our long-term goals, even when, in the short-term, the road ahead seems riddled with bumps and potholes, steep hills to climb, or unanticipated setbacks? you are embarking on an ambitious new creative project – say you want to launch your first solo artist exhibit of paintings or sculptures, or your first interactive video+sound installation, or to publish a substantial written work such as a novel, or an extended theoretical or historical analysis. Should you set yourself highly specific and concrete attainable goals for each day, or for each week?

But we have many aspirations and hopes – should you be able to tell yourself just why this project is the one you should be taking on right now? Should you ask yourself what it means for you, or why you’re taking on this big project rather than another one?

There is no single easy answer to these questions. Most of our goals do not exist on their own, in isolation from other goals, and we can think of our goals in several different ways, each of which can help us with different aspects of our thinking and motivation. Still, there are some pointers and guidance that research has uncovered.

Let’s look at two common ways of thinking about our goals, and the benefits and possible drawbacks of each. We’ll draw first on the insights from a team of three researchers at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, and then on findings from recent work by researchers working in Canada, at the University of Waterloo.

Goals as hierarchies, or trees

One way we can think about our goals is as trees or structured hierarchies of interconnected aims, with some goals being highly overarching or “superordinate” and others being more narrow, specific, or subordinate “stepping stones” (routes) to other goals. Superordinate goals often capture the meaning or importance of what we are doing, that is, why we seek to do what we do. They are often closely linked to our values, or our very broadest aims that span many different contexts or circumstances across our lives and steer our attention, feelings, and choices. Subordinate goals often delineate the specific methods we need to take to reach a given goal, that is, how we can achieve the desired aim.

So, if we reflect on why we want to launch a new large creative project, we may bring to mind our deep-seated beliefs about why we think creativity is an important or core value for us, such as that we believe we should try to help ourselves and others experience – and make – surprising and beneficial forms of newness in the world.

Some of the ways that bringing to mind our superordinate goals can shape and benefit our thinking and motivation, are pictured below.

Hierarchical goal processes. Source: drawn from Hochli, Brugger, & Messner (2018, Figure 2)

Thinking about our values and our sense of who we are, could strengthen our sense of the meaning and the importance of what we are doing. Bringing our superordinate goals to mind could also foster a steadying sense of patience – no great creative work of art or science or culture was accomplished without forgoing some shorter-term rewards that loomed alluringly large and attractive in the moment. It also may encourage us to stay resilient and flexible because we realize that any one concrete shortcoming, any one specific setback, is only that – one among many situations and circumstances.

These may be some of the cognitive and motivational processes that lead to the often-observed beneficial buffering effects of the social-psychological intervention, called “values affirmation” or “self affirmation.” In values affirmation, individuals under chronic stress or stereotype threat are asked to think about and write about their core values.

Values affirmation has been found to counteract the harmful effects of negative stereotypes on cognitive performance measures, academic outcomes, and health behaviors. Especially relevant here, values affirmation has also been found to bolster verbal insight problem solving and also boosts nonverbal insight problem solving and abstract relational reasoning. Several interrelated mechanisms have been proposed to undergird these benefits, including increased resilience, constructively orienting to errors, and regulating negative emotions while staying attuned to big-picture goals.

But does thinking about our goals as hierarchies, ranked by how important they are to us, capture everything we need? What might it leave out or lead us to overlook?

Goals as networks, or interconnected maps

The importance of a goal is not the only characteristic of our goals that we may want to consider. Exclusively taking a strictly hierarchical picture of our goals, based on their importance, may make it difficult to see other significant interrelations between them. For this reason, it may also be valuable to think of our goals as forming a network, or an interconnected map. In this network, goals that are closely related to one another would appear next to each other, and goals that are important to us would have more connections than other goals.

Schematic network model of goals. Source: Wilma Koutstaal

Take the goal of doing well as a student. Some of a student’s goals will relate to the courses and coursework she has, when each assignment is due, how complex the assignments are, and how much uncertainty she has about the time and effort required to complete them. Other goals of the student will focus on her relationships with family, peers, or roommates and activities she engages in with them. In addition, the student may have goals related to leisure, volunteer work, sports activities, or other extracurriculars; and also her daily living arrangements relating to shopping, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, etc.

Thinking of your varied and various goals in this way, and placing them next-to-next in an association-based networked map, may call your attention to subtle or nonobvious interconnections that you hadn’t noticed before. Indeed, researchers have suggested that this way of picturing our goals may be especially beneficial for sparking what they call “integrative” creative thinking. This form of thinking draws heavily on associative processes, and may be a form of creativity that involves especially frequent and repeated shifts between divergent and convergent creative processes.

To test this goal-network idea in relation to integrative creative thinking, the researchers asked 191 undergraduate students to complete a paper-and-pencil booklet visualizing their goals for university success. The students were randomly assigned to sketch out their goals for succeeding at university in one of three ways:

(1) using a hierarchical map – with a clear ordering structure, where the higher-order goals are superior to, and encompass, the lower-order ones, and where lower-order goals may be the means to achieve higher-order goals

(2) using an interconnected network – with goals that are closely related to one another forming clusters, and goals that are more important having more connections

(3) using a series of steps – with goals organized along a timeline, such that achieving a goal at a later point in time depends on achieving goals at earlier points in time.

To test the students’ “integrative” creativity, they were challenged with a creative story re-writing task. In the story re-writing task, students first read a short summary of the fairytale about Snow White, and then were asked “using their wildest imagination” to rewrite the story – developing an entirely new version of the story. Four raters, blind to the participant’s condition, rated the creativity of the stories.

As they had hypothesized, the goal-network approach gave the greatest boost to creativity. The goal-network group showed the highest amount of integrative creativity on the story re-writing task. Other analyses suggested that this boost did not seem to come about because of differences in the number of goals generated for the different goal-mapping groups or other factors.

What should we make of all this? Some questions to think about…

We must not draw strong conclusions about creative processes from any one empirical study or any one theoretical perspective on the nature of goals. Still, there are reasons to think that there are benefits to both thinking of our goals in terms of our values and a hierarchy of their importance, as well as in terms of how our many goals interrelate with each other.

Putting together these recent exploratory forays into how we can and do think about our goals, seems to give rise to many new questions:

How often are we aware of the ways in which we are picturing our goals? If we find ourselves “creatively stuck” (or otherwise stuck in our thinking) can we intentionally prompt ourselves to try adopting a different model of our goals to propel ourselves forward both cognitively and motivationally?
What type of goal model do you most often assume when thinking about your aims and aspirations?How do your different ways of picturing your goals shape or channel your creative processes?
How might you change the structure, or content, of how you think about your goals to more strongly foster your patience and persistence when the road ahead looks steep, or steeped in uncertainty?
If you were asked to draw three different network maps of your goals, each showing different interrelations, or different vantage points on your goals, what goals would appear as important in each of the different networks?
Are there any goals that are no longer “really yours” – that have become disjoined from other goals, or replaced, or merged into new aims?
What are your “F.I.R.S.T” goals — For the long-term, Individualized, Recurring,Superordinate, and Thematic?

References

Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–371.

Creswell, J. D., Dutcher, J. M., Klein, W. M. P., Harris, P. R., & Levine, J. M. (2013). Self-affirmation improves problem-solving under stress. PLoS ONE, 8, Article e62593, 1–7.

Höchli, B., Brügger, A., & Messner, C. (2018). How focusing on superordinate goals motivates broad, long-term goal pursuit: A theoretical perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 1879, 1–14.

Kung, F. Y. H., & Scholer, A. A. (2018). A network model of goals boosts convergent creativity performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 1910, 1–12.

Wen, M-C., Butler, L. T., & Koutstaal, W. (2013). Improving insight and non-insight problem solving with brief interventions. British Journal of Psychology, 104, 97–118.

What’s your metaphor for creative change?

April 15, 2018 By jbandwk in goals, idea landscapes, productive mistakes Tags: creativity, entrepreneurs, fixation, pivot, sunk costs

The gracefully powerful pivot.: Source: Matt Duboff via Wikimedia Commons

Embarking on an ambitious new creative endeavor is fraught with perils. But so is being too doggedly persistent.

Given what we see “out there” –– should we persist in the direction our project has been taking? Or is it time to switch-up the direction of our efforts, pivotingto a different focus?

—> For more see: Mastering the Creative Pivot.

Pivoting in our creative endeavors involves shifting the direction of our efforts and attention. Source: Wilma Koutstaal

Chasing creativity in the workplace –– what’s ambiguity got to do with it?

December 30, 2017 By jbandwk in exploration, goals Tags: ambiguity, proactive creativity, responsive creativity, workplace

Source: Loliloli via Wikimedia Commons

Creative ideas sometimes emerge because someone directly and explicitly asks us to come up with a new idea. It could be we’re asked to help solve a pesky problem, or to generate suggestions for how to make the most of a recently discovered opportunity. At other times, creative ideas have a more spontaneous birth –– they emerge impromptu and are freely volunteered, though no one explicitly called for them.

Creativity of the first “directly requested” kind reflects what a researcher, back in 2001, called “responsive creativity.” This occurs when people are directly challenged, required, or otherwise externally tasked with coming up with ideas to address the requirements of a situation. For example, an organized focus group or a planned brainstorming session would mostly lead to responsive creativity.

Creativity of the second kind reflects a more “proactive creativity.” This could be when suggestions for an innovative process or a new procedure are volunteered, from someone’s own internal initiative and observations, without any direct external prompting.

Two kinds of creativity — at work

Responsive and proactive creativity can strongly shape our own and our collective welfare, whether it be at home, at play, or at work. But what factors foster and fuel each of them?

—> For more, see Wilma’s Psychology Today blog post here: Ambiguity at Work: Friend, Foe, or a Bit of Both?

What’s Your Innovation Mindset? Gaining new creative traction through changing how we think

October 31, 2017 By jbandwk in exploration, goals, teams Tags: entrepreneurs, initiative, mindset, small business

Market vendors in Niamtougou, Togo
Source: Grete Howard via Wikimedia Commons

Are there different routes to learning how to be more innovative and entrepreneurial? And, which might you expect would work best:

teaching good business skills, such as accounting and marketing, or
being taught to adopt an adaptively flexible, opportunity-seeking mindset?

To answer these questions, an international team of researchers from the U.S. World Bank and universities in Singapore and Germany compared the effects of two different multi-week training interventions on the business performance of some 1500 small business enterprises in Togo, West Africa.

—> For more see Wilma’s Psychology Today blog post.

Where is your sweet spot for coming up with good creative ideas?

September 21, 2017 By jbandwk in detail stepping, exploration, goals Tags: constraints, Goldilocks, intrinsic motivation

Finding your creativity sweet spot. Source: W. Koutstaal

Imagine that you have just been invited to take part in an online experiment in which you will be asked to generate as many creative ideas as possible.

Imagine, too, that you are given the opportunity to first read the instructions for the creative challenge you will be set, and that you can choose between one of two sets of instructions, A or B.

Both versions outline your responsibilities. Version A says you’ll be asked to take part in “an idea-generating task involving various commonly found household items” such as “a 14-inch nonstick-cooking pan or wooden door stoppers.” Version B is slightly more general, saying that you’ll be asked to take part in “an idea-generating task involving household items” such as “cooking pans and door stoppers.”

You are also told that exactly 25% of the responses will be reviewed (Version A) or, instead, that some –– no percentage specified –– will be reviewed (Version B). Additionally, you are told “You will receive your compensation within 48 hours of completing this task, in your PayPal account” (Version A) or “You will receive your compensation within 2 days” (Version B).

Which of the two versions of the instructions do you prefer: Version A or Version B? Do you think you’d be likely to come up with more creative ideas if given Version A or if given Version B? Why?

On testing it out see: “Finding and Making Sweet Spots in your Creative Process.”

Hang in there! Creative persistence pays off big!

March 5, 2017 By jbandwk in control dialing, exploration, goals Tags: inspiration, perseverance, sketch comedy

Source: U.S. Navy photo by Senior Chief Mass Communication Specialist Gary Ward via Wikimedia Common

How do you feel during those moments when you are being most creative? Do you confidently and surely know, in the moment, that creative ideas are emerging and forming in your mind? Is there a smooth, easy, and ready flow of your ideas? Or is your creative process rather more bumpy and uneven? Is it more akin to moving –– in small stuttering spurts and starts –– down a pot-hole filled country lane than to gracefully gliding along in a canoe?

What are your assumptions about how the creative idea generation process “should” feel? How do you know if you should persist in your search for inspiration, or if you’d best turn your mind and efforts to other things?

For recent recent research seeking to answer these questions, see WK’s Psychology Today post, “The Under-Recognized Inspirational Value of Persistence.”

Getting your creative pacing right

December 8, 2016 By jbandwk in creative constraints, goals, idea landscapes Tags: architecture, deadlines, milestones, open goals

Mountain bikers descending a ridge in the steep hills of the English Lake District.
Source: Mick Garratt via Wikimedia Commons.

What pacing best allows your creative process the space and freedom it needs?

What is the pace of your creative projects? When starting a new project, do you dive in right from the start, intensively working on it? Is there a steep climb in your efforts followed by a lull, during which you direct your efforts elsewhere? Then is it back uphill again as the next project milestone approaches? Or do you take a slow-but-steady approach, regularly working on the project until it’s done and the deadline arrives?

What might be some of the benefits of an intense start, followed by a lull, when working on a creative project?

For more see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-innovating-minds/201612/deadlines-and-the-pacing-creative-projects

Of Puppies, Play, and the Pursuit of Creative Insights

October 4, 2016 By jbandwk in associative cuing, detail stepping, goals Tags: analogy, creative habits, innovation, play

Puppy is to dog, as colt is to . . . .
Source: Jonathan Kriz via Wikimedia Commons

Awakening our creativity with a few simple words. . . .

How much do you think creativity is something enduring and permanent that remains constant across time, that is, you either have it or you don’t? Or how much do you think creativity depends on the situation or context you are in, and so fluctuates up and down?

This is the topic of Wilma’s latest Psychology Today blog post. For more please see.

How You Think of Creativity Matters! — What are your creativity assumptions?

July 5, 2016 By jbandwk in exploration, goals Tags: beliefs, creativity

Source: Marco Consani via Wikimedia Commons

What sorts of moves are possible when catching a Frisbee? And how might our beliefs about flexibility and improvisation limit what we see as attainable?

Beliefs are powerful shapers of who we are, and of the aims, small or big, that we strive to realize in our lives.

Some of our beliefs are familiar to us: they are clear, we know we have them, they come readily to mind, and are easily expressed. But not all of our beliefs are so familiar. Some of our beliefs have a more implicit existence. They are intricately interwoven with our experiences and what we have inferred or assumed, sometimes with little or no conscious awareness.

Where do our beliefs about creativity and the creative process reside on this continuum of explicit versus implicit beliefs? What do we hold to be true about how new insights and new ways of acting come to be? Do we think of creativity as something that is fixed and stable and “trait-like” — such that we either have it, or we don’t? Or do we see creativity as something that can be learned, developed, and improved with practice, guidance, or experience?

For more on creativity beliefs, including some research findings see Wilma’s July Psychology Today post.

Step this way — innovating with virtual reality

June 6, 2016 By jbandwk in detail stepping, exploration, goals Tags: Cadillac, General Motors, goal synergy, virtual reality, VR

Sometimes the concepts of detail stepping and goal synergy can seem somewhat abstract. We thought we’d try to make them concrete through a recent example.

You’ve decided you’d like to check out and test drive the latest Cadillac. So you head to your local Cadillac dealer. Except, that when you get to the lot, there’s no car there and you’re asked to take a seat and don a virtual reality headset. The dealer walks you through virtual options as you vividly explore now one interior/exterior and now another.

So goes a new retail strategy soon to be rolled out in some Cadillac dealerships. Dealers will have the option of one of 5 levels of “reality”— spanning from fully real-world on the lot inventory to entirely virtual vehicles (except for test-drive and service-loaner cars).

This goal synergistic approach doesn’t undermine existing advantages of Cadillac’s many dealerships situated in larger towns and cities. There’s less need for excessive inventory management and logistics. Car buying becomes a more customized, flexible, individual experience, especially suitable to luxury brands.

To think about:

Something that seems like a roadblock—could it be a stepping stone?
Might you mix and match possibilities—blend the real and virtual where appropriate?
Why not pilot test—try out on a smaller scale first?
Can this invoke a mutually reinforcing innovation cycle where using virtual reality in one context spurs new innovations in virtual reality itself?

Insights into the creative process: A Q&A with illustrator/writer Mike Lowery

June 1, 2016 By jbandwk in control dialing, detail stepping, General, goals Tags: creative process, Doodle Adventures, illustration, Mike Lowery

The lines between author and reader are maybe not as sharply drawn as they used to be. Book 1 of Mike Lowery’s Doodle Adventures is a great example. “You draw the story!” the book’s cover tells us. And so we do…

But what’s the story behind the story?

Just as Lowery asks his young readers to pledge to “finish this book to get our heroes home safe at the end,” I asked him to pledge to freely improvise answering questions about his own creative journeys.

Each of the 8 questions I posed to him draw upon the science-based way of thinking about innovative thought and action that we develop in Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. You can find the Q & A here.

When to go with the tried & true and when to reach out for something new?

March 1, 2016 By jbandwk in dynamic environments, exploration, goals Tags: flexibility, novel reachings, priming, search, stability, tradeoffs, wise repeatings

Congratulations! You’ve just won a prize: $2,000 to go on a weekend trip for two. There is a catch, though. You need to decide where you want to go, and who would go with you, in just one hour.

A simple answer might be to travel to the place you went last year for a short time. You know a perfect spot to stay, you know your way around well, and the scenery, climate, and the food were superb.

But wait! This is an unprecedented opportunity for you to take a leap in a different, never-before-explored direction. It beckons you with unexpected and unfamiliar sights, sounds, and sensations.

What to do?

Should we “dwell” or should we “roam”?

Even though you’ve never previously faced this particular — and imaginary — scenario, you’ve encountered many like it in different guises. We face this dilemma all of the time. We regularly have to “scout out” different options, within time and financial or other limits, choosing whether to delve more deeply into what we already know or instead to jump across into unfamiliar territory.

—>For more see Wilma’s Psychology Today post “When to go and when to stay: Creativity needs both ‘novel reachings’ and ‘wise repeatings.’”

Salt and sharing

January 9, 2016 By jbandwk in creative constraints, exploration, goals, teams Tags: active design, Dattner Architects, infrastructure, New York City, public design, WXY Architecture + Urban Design

Situated on the Lower Manhattan waterfront, near Hudson River Park, the new Spring Street Salt Shed can hold up to 5,000 tons of de-icing road salt.

But it’s no ordinary “shed.”

Taking inspiration from the crystalline form of salt itself, the 69-foot tall building evokes other analogies. As David W. Dunlap of The New York Times describes it: “Folded, creased, dimpled and chamfered, its windowless, enigmatic facade is like a monumental work of origami.”

A macro shot of salt crystals taken in the Natural History Museum of Vienna. Source: w?odi via Wikimedia

And it doesn’t stand alone.

Partnered with a five-story, 425,000-square-foot New York City Department of Sanitation garage, also designed by Dattner Architects with WXY Architecture + Urban Design, the two buildings share more than proximity.

The buildings share a palpable sense of responsibility for their role in their neighborhoods. Let us count (some of) the ways:

the garage has a sound-blocking curtain wall for noise reduction
to stay in tune with surrounding buildings, the garage’s height was kept low, retaining the character of the neighborhood
topped with a “green roof” the LEED-certified garage offers, along with energy and environmental benefits, visual pleasure for those who overlook it from nearby buildings
along the street, the Salt Shed’s walls gently taper in, providing ample pedestrian space
inside, too, there’s consideration for multiple stakeholders as the garage includes a gym for employees and a central staircase invites them to opt to take the stairs rather than energy-intensive elevators (it’s part of the NYC Active Design program)
from a broader perspective, the integration of important utility buildings throughout the city reduces undue burdens on any one area, while also minimizing vehicle miles, with corresponding improvements in air quality

Similarly, how could your next creative project synergistically incorporate the values of “sharing” across a range of dimensions and constraints: aesthetics, sustainability, health and well-being, efficiency, collective responsibility and “neighborliness”? . . .

Creative change in a century-old company: A video case study

December 19, 2015 By jbandwk in exploration, goals, making and finding, productive mistakes Tags: absorptive capacity, aims in view, business models, change, goal tuning, Haim Mendelson, supply chain, The Fung Group

We invite you to watch an insightful 60-minute video of Stanford professor Haim Mendelson talking with Dr. Leonard Lane of the Fung Group. The Fung Group traces its origins back more than 100 years, and has successfully embraced changes of many shapes and kinds.

As you listen to their conversation on business model innovations across time, consider how these three concepts might work in tandem:

(1) Aims in view/goal tuning (Innovating Minds, pages 212 – 231).

How does the Fung Group’s three-year (non-rolling) plan allow for a longer-term view and provide for crucial “temporal slack,” with room to experiment and gather feedback?

(2) Motivating exploration and purposefully learning to vary (Innovating Minds, pages 146 – 159).

How does the Fung Group’s new “Explorium” facilitate prototyping and making/finding?

(3) Absorptive capacity (Innovating Minds, pages 181 – 188).

How does the Fung Group’s “70/30 rule” have implications for learning, experimentation, and how they extend what they know—and can do?

How do we (really) keep our creative momentum?

December 2, 2015 By jbandwk in detail stepping, goals, teams Tags: abstraction, creativity, design, iteration

We often like to simplify things but — let’s face it — creativity is a messy business. It’s filled with trial and error, trying this and trying that. It reaches across time (minutes, hours, weeks or months, sometimes years) and space. It’s rife with unpredictable spurts forward and sudden stops or detours as unforeseen obstacles loom on the horizon. How then can we ever see “inside creativity” — peering into this dynamically changing thinking-making process to learn what works well, and what doesn’t?

One promising approach is to generate a sort of “creative micro-world” —setting out a creative challenge that can be taken up in a somewhat limited period of time (say a few hours), with specific constraints and goals. Then the entire thinking-making process of creative designers or engineers can be observed (perhaps videotaped and audiotaped). The designers might also be asked to “think aloud” — telling us, moment by moment, what they’re thinking, what problem they’re facing, what options they see, or what next steps they’re mentally testing out (or ruling out). . . .

For more please see WK’s Psychology Today post “Inside Creativity: Charting Innovation as it Happens.”

What’s your creative destination?

November 15, 2015 By jbandwk in detail stepping, goals, making and finding Tags: design thinking, IBM, Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang

In launching any new endeavor, much depends on how creatively and flexibly we spell out—and interpret—our shorter and longer-term aims. This is a crucial process that tests our imagination, inquisitiveness, and purposefulness. It’s a process that we explore throughout our book, Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change.

Here we offer an essential starting point—flexible problem definition—for discovering your creative destination, illustrated by two recent examples.

Example 1: IBM’s efforts to incorporate more design thinking

From The New York Times: “At a course in New York recently, a group of IBM managers were given pads and felt-tip pens and told to sketch designs for “the thing that holds flowers on a table” in two minutes. The results, predictably, were vases of different sizes and shapes.

Next, they were given two minutes to design ‘a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.’ In Round 2, the ideas included wall placements, a rotating flower pot run by solar power and a software app for displaying images of flowers on a home TV screen.”

Example 2: Jeanne Gang, of Studio Gang architects, on goals and values

From a talk by architect Jeanne Gang: “It’s about balancing and trying to find out what the question really is of a project. So if we were doing something that seemed like something that didn’t automatically or obviously have a social approach, we would try to pair it with something else. It’s about designing your own projects. What do you want the project to be about? . . .

It’s always a dilemma, it’s always something that you have to work at trying to create, to make a project more than what you are given on a brief. Because if you just took the brief at face value, then you wouldn’t be contributing . . . . Some projects are very hard to re-engineer in terms of their brief and others lend themselves to it well. That’s really the creative process right there, I think, for me.”

What do we learn from these two examples? We see that it’s not just the clarity of our objectives that matters. It’s also: How expansive should our “goal net” be, and what’s our “net” letting in—or keeping out? How does our destination intersect with our longer-term values and aims in view?

Sources:

Steve Lohr, “IBM’s Design-Centered Strategy to Set Free the Squares.” The New York Times, November 14, 2015

Jeanne Gang, “Expeditions in the Contemporary City.” Talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, February 12, 2015.

New ways of listening

October 25, 2015 By jbandwk in dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes Tags: Concert Window, John Fullbright, Kate Davis, Sofar Sounds, The Bugle Boy

How can we creatively enhance our musical experiences? Are there ways we can make spaces for more intimate close listening—benefiting both performers and audiences?

One new worldwide movement is known as Sofar (Songs From A Room) Sounds. Originating about 5 years ago in London, Sofar Sounds describes their intimate living room concerts like this:

“We ask that 100% of your attention is given to the music. That means no talking/texting during the performances. We strive to create an environment where music is respected. Come on time and stay until the end.”

Here is how singer-songwriter Kate Davis tells it:

“I’ve had qualms with ‘performances’ before, within many genre types. Sometimes performances can be circus-y. Calculated. Emotionally reserved. Perhaps even a situation where the audience feels alienated. . . . However, my main intention is to communicate, share my art, and offer some kind of message. . . . With an experience like Sofar Sounds, the opportunities for sharing and communication are endless. You sit right in front of someone who is listening to your every word, feeling your every harmonic move, and thus truly committing themselves to your musical moment.”

And then, taking a slightly different approach, there’s The Bugle Boy with its 80-seat listening room, in La Grange, Texas. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, The Bugle Boy offers:

“a space where you go to listen. Talking is not permitted during a performance. A Listening Room environment creates the best and most intimate experience that an artist can share with an attentive audience. It’s like having a personal, live concert in your own living room!”

Creatively enhancing our musical experiences can take other new forms. The Bugle Boy partners with the online performance provider Concert Window. Self-described as “passionate about bringing live music online, in a way that helps musicians, venues, and fans,” Concert Window uses contemporary digital technology to re-present intimate live music into our own “living room” listening spaces.

Singer-songwriter John Fullbright recently playing at The Bugle Boy—and more broadly shared via Concert Window—epitomizes these new/old ways of experiencing music:

“Goal tuning” at Apple, Inc.

October 13, 2015 By jbandwk in creative constraints, goals, making and finding Tags: Apple, goal tuning, iMac

How do Apple’s major products relate to one another in a logical and practical way? And how does Apple seek to ensure compelling functions for each of their devices, large and small?

In a recent interview Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, spelled out a deceptively simple logic for how Apple’s products all work together—almost like a set of inter-nested Russian dolls:

“The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook.”

Following the logic through, the function of the iMac desktop computer must then be to surpass the roles of its smaller siblings: “Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because of its capabilities,” said Schiller.

How might we think of this approach in terms of what we, in Innovating Minds, call goal tuning?

The Five Interrelated Components of Goal Tuning

Clearly, it’s an example of goal synergy—purposefully pursuing multiple goals as interconnected. The addition of new players such as the Apple Watch and the iPad Pro are instances of “goal making/goal finding” and “goal updating” as the new products emerged, in part, from concrete insights gained from using the other devices. Their approach also helps with knowing which future and long-term goals should be endorsed (and articulated).

—> For additional background

Steven Levy, “The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs,” Backchannel

“Ever-Renewing Goals and Keeping Our Aims in View,” in Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change, pages 212—231

Cycling Change

July 11, 2015 By jbandwk in exploration, goals, making and finding Tags: bicycles, car-free, city planning, experimentation, Netherlands, social change

According to a recent article in The Guardian, more than one-quarter of trips in the Netherlands are made by bicycle (this rises to 38% in Amsterdam) versus only 2% in the UK. Yet, this wasn’t always so in Holland, especially in the 1970s—how did such a change come about?

As we read the article, we learn that the change was driven and carried by both bottom up and top down factors. Parents in neighborhoods were galvanized into action by the large number of child injuries and deaths caused by the influx, increasing dominance, and unquestioned prerogative of car traffic. The introduction of car-free Sundays in Amsterdam (a form of experiential variation) concretely reminded residents of what it had been like before the reign of the car.

Some obstacles to promoting the use of bicycles on city streets were not as unbudgeable as expected (e.g., even early on there was police receptivity and cooperation). External events and circumstances also played along, including steeply rising gas prices during the 1970s energy crisis. There was, too, a prescient recognition of the cumulative adverse health effects of air pollution from automobiles.

City-wide experimentation yielded new insights and provided crucial data. A pioneer city in the Netherlands tested the idea of a single bike route coursing through the city. Disappointing results from this approach prompted another city to successfully explore a more varied and networked multiple set of bike paths.

Even once new bicycle paths and infrastructure for cyclists were successfully implemented, change called for other changes—how to find spaces to park so many bicycles, the need for wider lanes to accommodate the increased number of cyclists, etc.

Change takes many forms. Sometimes we edge forward, sometimes we leap forward and at other times we need to step back. As we observe in Innovating Minds (page 171), “Change in organizations [and society] may concurrently arise from multiple sources, ranging from the planned to the emergent and from the internally to the externally driven: ‘In most organizations, transformations will occur through a variety of logics.’ ”

—> The quotation on the many logics of change is found on page 67 of: Orlikowski, W. J. (1996). Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective. Information Systems Research, 7, 63–92.

The Magic of “Inside Out”

July 4, 2015 By jbandwk in control dialing, detail stepping, dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes, teams Tags: caricature, emotions, forgetting, Inside Out, memory, Pixar

If you’ve just seen, or are about to see, the magically profound and profoundly magical Pixar film “Inside Out,” here are a few questions we invite you to think about:

What might it mean to have a control console in your head?
Fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust… each is so identifiable and tangibly distinct, so affectionately near yet far. Why is caricaturing these emotions so helpful?
If memories aren’t really little crystal-ball-like orbs, what are they?
If we touch a memory (recall it), how and why do we modify it?
In order to grow and meet changing circumstances, how important is it to forget (or to re-characterize) our past?
How can all of our emotions work better together as team players—integrating and tempering each other, in ongoing interplay with our changing goals?
If you could add to the console team other emotions, beyond the five, what would they be, and why?

Creativity at play

February 12, 2015 By jbandwk in dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: brand visibility, games, humor, improvisation, marketing, play, social media

We recently encountered this insightful piece on new types of social media marketing. The newly emerging form of marketing invites online interactively engaged play between marketers and consumers. One of the differences with this novel approach is that it is not predominantly top-down, attempting to fully foresee and plan; rather, it places greater reliance on a more open-ended, risk-laden process itself, akin to improvising.

It got us to thinking about play and creativity.

As we observe in Innovating Minds:

“Play provides us with brief times in-between that encourage a “re-set” or refreshing of our mental landscapes and a release of tension and an invitation to participation. Humor and creativity are significantly positively associated with one another, in part reflecting shared characteristics such as risk taking, insight, cognitive flexibility with mild positive affect, and surprise. Playful imaginative exploration—including in virtual online environments—may provide an impetus for creativity and act as a space that can welcome and sustain ambiguity and may stimulate nonroutine abstract learning in teams and organizations.”

Or to quote organizational theorist and professor James G. March:

“A strict insistence on purpose, consistency, and rationality limits our ability to find new purposes. Play relaxes that insistence to allow us to act ‘unintelligently’ or ‘irrationally,’ or ‘foolishly’ to explore alternative ideas of possible purposes and alternative concepts of behavioral consistency. And it does this while maintaining our basic commitment to the necessity of intelligence.”

Goal-guided behavior is not incompatible with spontaneity. The creative process, under some circumstances, can itself be seen as a deep interweaving of the thoughts of multiple individuals in different roles. Play and learning can be emergent ambiguity-laden processes which can evoke a form of meaning-making/meaning guided turn-taking to which each participant contributes questions as well as answers. Oftentimes, we make and find meaning as we go.

—> See:

John A. Deighton & Leora Kornfeld. (2014). Beyond Bedlam: How Consumers and Brands Alike Are Playing the Web. GfK Marketing Intelligence Review, 6, no. 2, pp. 28–33.

James G. March (1976). The technology of foolishness. In March, J. G. & Olsen, J. P. (Eds., pp. 69–81). Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.

Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, David J. Glew, & Chockalingam Viswesvaran, (2012). A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 27, pp. 155–190.

Noel Murray, Harish Sujan, Edward R. Hirt, & Mita Sujan (1990). The influence of mood on categorization: A cognitive flexibility interpretation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, pp. 411–425.

Are you prompting yourself to be creative?

January 14, 2015 By jbandwk in associative cuing, control dialing, goals, idea landscapes Tags: boosting creativity, creativity goals, verb generation, word association

A recent large-scale experimental study used a simple computer task. In this task, college students are presented with a noun on a computer screen and asked to say a verb that could be associated with that noun. For example, the noun “dog” could be paired with a verb such as “bark” or with the less expected “rescue.”

This task was done for many different nouns and under two different conditions. In one condition participants were asked simply to produce the first word that comes to mind. In the second condition they were specifically asked to “think creatively.”

The experiment revealed that the prompt or instruction to be more creative made a significant difference in three ways:

(1) If we are specifically asked or cued to be creative we give responses that are less predictable, less conventional, and more creative. Setting the explicit goal of being creative enables us to be more creative.

(2) When we are under no specific goal to think creatively we tend to provide responses that are fast and efficient but that are less creative.

(3) The extent to which the students were more creative when prompted was significantly correlated with being more creative at types of drawing and story writing too, even after taking into account individual differences in on-the-spot problem solving and personality factors such as openness to experience. This suggests that creativity isn’t a single ever-present ability but is something we can boost in response to particular contexts and goals.

—> For the full text of the experiment see:

Ranjani Prabhakaran, Adam E. Green & Jeremy R. Gray (2014). Thin slices of creativity: Using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition. Behavior Research Methods, 46, pp. 641-659.

Looking in, looking out: Spontaneous cognition, intention, and creativity

January 3, 2015 By jbandwk in control dialing, dynamic brains, goals, making and finding Tags: brain networks, creative processes, default mode network, executive control network, external attention, internal attention, spontaneity

At this time of year, many of us may find our thoughts turned inward, reflecting on what we have experienced and achieved in the past year, and our goals and aspirations for the upcoming year. This underscores an important distinction in our thinking between inner-directed attention, and outer-directed attention, and their interplay.

When our attention is directed externally, whether intentionally or not, we are responding to, and interpreting, stimuli or events outside of ourselves, with information coming in to us from the external world through our senses. When, though, our attention is directed internally, we draw on our own memory and knowledge, reliving past experiences, and imaginatively anticipating future events using what we already know.

In many situations, our internally directed cognition and our externally directed cognition compete with one another. Think of the times we may drift into reverie during a long talk or while overhearing an extended conversation—only to find ourselves unable to capture what was said just moments before. Or, conversely, think of what happens when we’re trying to recall an uncommon word or an unfamiliar name, and we might close our eyes or avert our glance, as we try to fully turn our attention inward and block out external distractions.

This competition is also often observed in brain imaging studies. An interconnected set of brain regions (often referred to as the “default mode network”) is strongly activated when we turn our attention inward. A different set is often activated (for example, in what has been called the “executive control network”) when we are purposefully responding to externally presented words, objects, or sounds. When activation in one set of brain regions goes up, activation in the other set goes down and vice versa.

But do internally directed and externally directed thinking always compete with each other? What would it mean for creativity and imagination if they could, instead, cooperate?

A growing number of studies show that during creative or imaginative activities, when we are partially thinking in spontaneous or automatic ways, there can be a more cooperative relationship between internal and external thinking.

What might this mean for our creative processes? During our creative endeavors, we need to exert some deliberate guidance, but not be too rigid and unrelenting a “controller,” weaving in with our guidance and goals, and then loosening control before we weave in again. In the longer-term, developing effortless ease in parts of our creative process may lead to conditions that promote even more discoveries because there’s a powerful blending of the spontaneous and the intended, and of our internally and our externally directed thinking.

—> For a recent and comprehensive review on the relationship between externally and internally directed cognition in the brain see:

Matthew L. Dixon, Kieran C.R. Fox, & Kalina Christoff (2014). A framework for understanding the relationship between externally and internally directed cognition. Neuropsychologia, 62, pp. 321-330.

Oh no, my cow just fell over—but I can reboot

October 13, 2014 By jbandwk in detail stepping, goals, thinking components Tags: analogy, imagination, metaphor, translation

Suppose you need to translate technological computer terms, such as “browser” or “cache” or even “crash” into another language in which such technological terms are absent? How literal can you be—or is metaphor what is needed?

How do we convey meaning effectively when the cultural building blocks are so different?

Take this imaginative approach:

“Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. ‘Crash’ became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying) . . . In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, ‘cached pages’ became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer ‘windows’ became ‘eyes.’”

The translation project is also a great example of goal synergy: “As well as bringing the linguistically excluded online, localisation may keep small languages alive.”

Analogies and metaphors are part and parcel of our communicative repertoire and we can use them more or less purposively, and more or less creatively. Metaphors and analogies are not curlicues—they are enmeshed in how we think. They are not mere ripples on the surface but currents that move the stream—and us—forward.

As we observe in our book Innovating Minds, analogies:

“are clearly important in the generation of our ideas but they can also serve several other functions in fostering positive creative change and development. Analogies enable us to use what we already know in order to better understand or grasp something that is novel or less familiar. In one study of new product development projects, 6 of 16 people interviewed explicitly noted that analogies helped to promote communication between team members, designers, and engineers during new product development. Two of the interviewees even stated that enhanced communication was the most important aspect of the analogy in the given project. The communicative and explanatory functions of analogies may prove especially pivotal in bridging between teams and individuals with quite disparate backgrounds, task priorities, and thought processes.”

innovatingminds4change

some of the latest thinking on innovation, creativity, and mental agility

Category Archives: goals

Personality and Change – Is our Personality Really Fixed? An ABCD approach to thinking about how we can change

It’s Up to You: Choice Catalyzes Curiosity. Giving ourselves choices expands our exploratory curiosity

What’s Your Problem? Innovating by Self-Imposing Constraints: Using deliberately chosen constraints to reshape your creative problems

Can Walking Together Help Creatively Synchronize Our Goals? Getting in step to generate diverse creative ideas.

Where do flexibly new creative options come from? Dopamine helps us walk the flexibility-fluency tightrope

What keeps us going creatively when the going gets tough? The motivational value of both long-term and short-term goals

What’s your metaphor for creative change?

Chasing creativity in the workplace –– what’s ambiguity got to do with it?

What’s Your Innovation Mindset? Gaining new creative traction through changing how we think

Where is your sweet spot for coming up with good creative ideas?

Hang in there! Creative persistence pays off big!

Getting your creative pacing right

Of Puppies, Play, and the Pursuit of Creative Insights

How You Think of Creativity Matters! — What are your creativity assumptions?

Step this way — innovating with virtual reality

Insights into the creative process: A Q&A with illustrator/writer Mike Lowery

When to go with the tried & true and when to reach out for something new?

Salt and sharing

Creative change in a century-old company: A video case study

How do we (really) keep our creative momentum?

What’s your creative destination?

New ways of listening

“Goal tuning” at Apple, Inc.

The Magic of “Inside Out”

Are you prompting yourself to be creative?

Looking in, looking out: Spontaneous cognition, intention, and creativity

Oh no, my cow just fell over—but I can reboot