Category Archives: idea landscapes

The breakthrough power of bridging from novelty to the known

April 4, 2021 By in exploration, General, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , ,
The breakthrough power of bridging from novelty to the known

How do we move within and across the spaces of ideas, to discover new possibilities? Should we leap into unexplored territory, or loop within and around what we know well? 

This is the classic choice in idea search between exploration and exploitation. Exploratory search is characterized by searching in novel and unfamiliar idea spaces, on the outer frontiers of what is known.  In contrast, exploitative search involves seeking within and around relatively familiar ideas, delving deeper into what’s already apparently known or understood.  

Exploration is characterized as decidedly risky, but it can lead to radical breakthrough innovations and revolutionary discoveries.  Exploitation, instead, leads to what seem to be more incremental (step-by-step) discoveries that are less impactful, and do not so sharply upturn or up-heave the idea/making landscape of a field or industry.   

But is this depiction of how breakthrough innovations come about fully accurate?  Or does it simplify a process that is more nuanced, iterative, and unfolding?

Re-evaluating the exploration vs. exploitation dichotomy

To address this question, two researchers at Harvard Business School turned to a very large database of possible innovations – more than 1.5 million U.S. patent applications, spanning some 30 years and more than 2,500 companies.  From within this dataset  they focused especially on those patents that were applied for in the year 2005.  To differentiate the patents that involved “breakthrough” inventions, they used a measure of how often the 2005 patent was itself cited (referenced) in later patents within the same technological class. The 4,743 patents that had a high level of forward citations (the top 5% of forward citations) were classified as “breakthroughs” and were compared with 69,499 non-breakthrough patents.  

Then, to gain a fuller and richer picture of the process leading up to successful innovations, the researchers specifically looked at all patent applications, not only those that were successful or granted patents. This provided information about what the firm was attempting to do, the technological information/know-how that the firms were using at that time, and how the firms believed their approach built upon and was different from prior patents (known as “prior-art citations”) in the same technology class.  

The researchers combined these data with other indices of the firm’s patents and related patents to create a new measure of how close the sought-for patent was to already-known technology.  This new measure, which they called “technological focal proximity” would have a value near one when the invention was very close to the previous theoretical knowledge of the firm, but would approach zero as the content of the patent application diverged very far away from the firm’s existing knowledge.

So what did they discover?

The process leading up to all of the patent applications, whether breakthrough or non-breakthrough, initially started at a point where the firms had comparatively less knowledge or expertise (average value of the “technological focal proximity” slightly below .20).  This suggests that innovation starts with a period of exploration, in a knowledge or idea space that is quite far away from the firm’s prior knowledge. 

The breakthrough vs. nonbreakthrough inventions also showed different knowledge trajectories. Charting the firms’ “technological focal proximity” to the patent applications over the 30 years prior to the application showed breakthrough and non-breakthrough inventions followed different trajectories.  Their trajectories were also non-overlapping.  This meshes nicely with the well-accepted notion that the search processes behind breakthrough versus non-breakthrough inventions are significantly different. 

Crucially, however, especially in the 10 years immediately prior to the application for the patent, the breakthrough patents were closer to the firm’s technological competence than were the non-breakthrough patents.  Surprisingly, and contrary to the conventional exploration-exploitation dichotomy, breakthrough patents were not farther away from the firm’s knowledge or competencies at any point across the 30 years.  

Indeed, breakthrough inventions were especially likely to emerge in those firms that, in the 5 to 10 years leading up to the patent application, concentrated their research and search efforts in the technological and knowledge neighborhood nearby to that of the invention.  As ideas and know-how within and surrounding the “promising find” are more deeply delved into and connected, the ideas/processes/materials that were once novel and unfamiliar become increasingly understood and familiar.  

Stated simply:  The story behind breakthrough innovations, then, is not only one of exploration, or only exploitation, but of both.  Although the learning and searching process for both breakthrough and non-breakthrough discoveries started out as exploratory, firms that transitioned to an increasingly concentrated exploitation search in once-unfamiliar idea territory were significantly more likely to produce breakthrough inventions.   

To think about

We’re remarkably adept at the mental act of categorizing things.  It is both a unique strength – and an often-encountered downfall – of the human mind.  

The strength of such categorizations, in dealing with one another and with our world, comes from how they allow us to notice and name what otherwise we might have missed.  Categorization can change our ways of interacting, responding, and forming effective working models of the world in our heads.  

The downfall of such categorizations is that we start to take these lines that we have drawn in the mental sands of our minds, as lines that are really out there, as sharp demarcations and solid boundaries that exist in the world outside our head.  We take (mis-take) conceptually created and mentally postulated lines for lines that are real.

Perhaps there are parallels here to another distinction often made with regard to the process of generating creative ideas:  that between flexibility (when we move across and between different domains or perspectives) and persistence (dwelling, staying with one domain or perspective to deeply mine and intermesh ideas).  Both flexibility and persistence are necessary.  Neither alone is sufficient.  For breakthrough inventions – or for everyday creatively adaptive problem solving – we need both flexibility and persistence, both exploration and exploitation.  And transitions between each. 

To deeply and meaningfully innovate, we need both leaps, and loops, in our idea spaces.

References

March, J. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2, 71–87. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2.1.71

Nijstad, B. A., De Dreu, C. K. W., Rietzschel, E. F., & Baas, M. (2010).  The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence. European Review of Social Psychology, 21, 34–77. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10463281003765323?journalCode=pers20

Sarnecka, D. K., & Pisano, G. P. (2020). The evolutionary nature of breakthrough innovation: Reevaluating the exploration vs. exploitation dichotomy.  Harvard Business School, Working Paper 21-071. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-evolutionary-nature-of-breakthrough-innovation

Wu, Y., & Koutstaal, W. (2020).  Charting the contributions of cognitive flexibility to creativity: Self-guided transitions as a process-based index of creativity-related adaptivity.  PLOS ONE, 15(6): e0234473. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234473

Image Source: Karsten Knöfler via Wikimedia Commons

Creative Imagination: Inside and Outside the Head

January 13, 2021 By in exploration, General, idea landscapes, productive mistakes Tags: , ,
Creative Imagination: Inside and Outside the Head

When we are asked what we mean by “imagination,” what springs immediately to mind may be thoughts such as that of a small child creating vivid imaginary worlds peopled by one or more imaginary playmates, or of someone (young or older) who loves to engage in pretend or role play.  Or we may think of someone we know who can (almost magically) take seemingly unrelated ideas (characters, objects) and creatively interweave them together into a compelling story or picture.

Each of these are, indeed, clear examples of imagination.  But they’re all examples of only one sort.  They’re all bundled together under a more specific heading that a recent process-based exploration of imagination would call “expressive imagination.”  This form of expressive imagination – typified by such creative activities as storytelling, role-playing, and day-dreaming – emerges in a largely bottom-up way from an individual’s personal prior experiences and existing mental representations.  It’s imagination that springs from “inside the head.”

But there is another form of imagination, equally valued and valuable.  

Rather than emerging primarily from within an individual’s internal world of memory and mental concepts, creative imagination can also be focused outward, on the external world.  With an intense outward gaze, it is quietly on the lookout for patterns, relations, or connections in the external world.  Peering outward, this form of imagination – sometimes called “instrumental imagination” – often is purposefully directed toward specific problems.  

Let’s look at a recent research study that exemplifies how we might use both these forms of imagination.

The setting

The story begins in an interactive exhibit at a museum, variously visited by individuals, families, or groups. Set off in its own room is a large multi-touch tabletop, with glowing lights and wooden blocks of various sorts.  As we enter, we’re told to imagine that we are electrical engineers trying to help “fictional scientists in an uncharted aquatic cave teeming with never-before-documented species of bioluminescent fish.”  We can design and build glowing fishing lures using different colored LEDs.  If assembled correctly, a virtual circuit (a circuit with the correct ratio of resistors, batteries, and LEDs) will glow, attracting the fish out of the cave, allowing the scientists to identify and catalog them.  Each museum visitor can choose which of the many fish to try to lure into the light, and, although each visitor can see and talk with the others, each visitor’s block-assembling actions do not affect the actions of other co-visitors at the table. 

Some museum-goers start interacting with the blocks and, through experimentation and trial-and-error or experimentation in combination with prior learning, they find a way to configure the blocks successfully.  There’s a sudden bright glow and a fish emerges from the darkness of the cave toward the light for everyone to see.  But other museum-goers have trouble finding a configuration of the blocks that will work. They try this and that, and that and that, without success.  What happens then?  What happens when it seems that failure is facing us?

This was exactly the question the researchers of the exhibit wanted to answer.  When failure seemed to be looming large and the way forward was not clear, what patterns of interaction –with the blocks or of the museum visitors with each other – could help get over the hurdle that obstructed them?  What actions would impel them forward, enabling them to transition from unproductive, frustrating, and unfruitful attempts, to a productive and successful approach?

To answer this question, the researchers videotaped visitors’ interactions at the tabletop using three unobtrusive cameras and an audio recording.  (A sign outside the room indicated when videotaping was taking place, so participants could choose to enter during recording or enter at a different time.)  The actions of 3,546 participants were recorded, leading to more than 47,000 separate actions.  But that presented its own challenge:  What to do with that massive amount of data?  How could it tell us anything about which actions led from frustratingly unproductive to rewardingly productive search and experimentation?

Finding patterns

And here is where the research team put together some powerful pattern-detecting methods.  First, they developed a systematic way to keep track of all of the circuits that each visitor made.  For example, if a visitor arrived at the table and made a complex circuit with many components that did not work, but it was their first attempt at that type of circuit, and no one else at the table had tried anything like it, it would be coded as “CNUO” (complex, not-working, unique for them, and original to the table). If another visitor arrived, and made a simple 3-component circuit that worked, and it was the first time they had made it, but it followed the same configuration as that of another visitor who was at the table during the same time, this would be coded as “SWUE” (simple, working, unique for them, and an echo of someone else’s circuit).  

This coding scheme allowed the researchers to develop what is called a “Hidden Markov Model” (HMM) to predict when a visitor was likely to move from an unproductive circuit-making state (when they were making a circuit that did not work) to a productive one.  Using this model, they could tell that once a visitor reached a productive state (with one working circuit), they most often continued to generate other circuits that were also working.  But if a visitor instead transitioned from a productive state to an unproductive state, they very rarely returned to a productive state.  That is, if a visitor fell into an unproductive state, they tended to remain there, until leaving the exhibit.  

But still, a few visitors did go back to making productive circuits.  What was different about the visitors who did get over the hurdle, from the many others who never managed to get unstuck?

Getting past the hurdle of failure

To answer this, the researchers first used the Markov Model to create a list of all the participants who moved from a sequence of three or more unproductive circuits – suggesting a sustained and persistent exploration of the problem – to a productive one.  Out of all 3,546 participants, only 204 participants (less than 6% of all participants) showed this pattern of getting across the hurdle from a series of unsuccessful attempts to a successful one.  

Next the researchers zoomed in on 22 such instances, all from one day of the visitors’ interactions.  They now applied another more detailed and contextually-enriched coding scheme to capture exactly what participants were doing at each point.

What they found is that in the great majority of cases, leaps forward came after a “stuck-in-a-rut” visitor stopped to watch how other visitors at the table were configuring their blocks (75% of the instances) or in which the “stuck-in-a-rut” visitor actually interacted with others at the table (53% of the instances).  

That is, the move toward success came when the visitors who were stuck switched, at least temporarily, from simply working in parallel or alongside other visitors on the task to a more mutual or collaborative approach.  These two types of actions (“boundary spanning perception” and “boundary spanning action”) were also often coupled with other forms of interaction, such as asking for clarification or making suggestions. 

So, a key and substantial contributor to the transition from unproductive exploration and tinkering to productive exploration was the spontaneous collaborative interaction that occurred between visitors, who were often strangers to one another.

Creatively finding patterns

Seeing and documenting this across-visitor pattern required the imaginative combination of two externally focused forms of pattern detection.  First, creation and development of the “Hidden Markov Model” enabled the researchers to selectively identify, and flag for further study, those few promising instances – from the millions of events across thousands of visitors – in which museum-goers at the tabletop transitioned from a sustained unproductive state to a productive state.  Second, the researchers needed to create, and apply, a systematic coding system of the types of interactions that visitors could engage in.  And then, the visitors themselves tell us something important about different types of imagination as well.

To creatively understand our world, we clearly need everything that internally generated expressive imagination can give us.  But, equally, we need instrumental or pattern-focused imagination, coupled with collaborative interaction and feedback, to empower us to better chart and comprehend both our world, and each other.  We need creative imagination – inside and outside our heads.  

References

Feng, Z., Logan, S., Cupchik, G., Ritterfeld, U., & Gaffin, D. (2017). A cross-cultural exploration of imagination as a process-based concept. Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousnesss in Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice, 37, 69–94.

Tissenbaum, M. (2020).  I see what you did there! Divergent collaboration and learner transitions from unproductive to productive states in open-ended inquiry.  Computers & Education, 145, 103739.

Tissenbaum, M., Berland, M., & Lyons, L. (2017). DCLM framework: Understanding collaboration in open-ended tabletop learning environments. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 12, 35–64.

Image source: Archivo Agencia Brasil via Wikimedia Commons

Team-to-Team Innovation Learning in Science

March 29, 2020 By in dynamic environments, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , ,

New forms of mirroring to advance research. Source: Frans90245 via Wikimedia Commons

 

Many of us may have read the somewhat disheartening news about the frequency with which important new and breakthrough findings in the social and life sciences have turned out to be difficult for other researchers to replicate.  It’s even been given it’s own moniker:  “The replication crisis.”

A host of different factors may contribute to failures to replicate, but here let’s take a look at a novel approach to the challenge of replicating important complex and technologically advanced discoveries in biology.

Something new, something old, something borrowed…

At first blush the new approach seems remarkably simple. The new approach is to require the primary research team to be “shadowed” or “mirrored” by a second smaller team of independent experts.  The primary funded biological research group (for shorthand, let’s call them Team A) that is seeking to make cutting-edge discoveries is to be closely followed by the independent group of experts (Team B).  Team B is explicitly tasked with the primary goal of replicating the findings of Team A.

But there is a key and important twist:  Rather than waiting many months or years before Team A makes and publishes its discoveries and methods, Team A must – from the very beginning – share its innermost thoughts and workings with Team B.

No longer can Team A quietly work in secret, jealously shielding its latest experimental or conceptual breakthroughs from all possible competitors.  Instead, from the very outset of launching the research project and throughout the time of the project, Team A must openly share all of its ongoing findings and developing methods with its mirror team, Team B.  And that’s not all.  Team B is given all of the money, equipment, samples, and other resources it needs to be able to go off, on its own, and independently replicate what Team A has found.

So now Team A, for example, invites the mirror team members to come and closely watch them while they work through their protocols.  Team A shares with Team B its minor triumphs, its mini-successes, and its day-to-day failures or missteps.  Sometimes Team A also videotapes themselves as they go through a complicated protocol.  Step-by-step in the video they show Team B what they are doing, describing in painstaking detail each minor step or turn in the procedure.

But wait!  Why adopt what looks like such a “copycat” approach?  Isn’t it wasteful?  What’s to be gained from such extensive, intensive – and expensive – mirroring of one research team’s efforts by a second research team?

Why adopt a mirroring approach?

This innovative mirroring approach helps to tackle many of the pesky, persistent, and problematic obstacles standing in the way of one research lab being enabled to fully and faithfully replicate the complex biological and technological research methods and procedures of another lab.

Even when we earnestly try to communicate exactly what we’re doing, we may make assumptions or leave out important steps so that we don’t clearly communicate with each other.  Sometimes we’re not even aware that small details could make a large difference.  For example, in one case the reduced viability of an organism in a shadow lab was due to a difference of 2 degrees Celsius in the ambient lab temperature, whereas the Team A lab had a more constantly controlled temperature.  In other cases, how vigorously cells were washed, or using a slightly different size of a pipette tip, led to unpredictable changes in the results for Team A versus Team B.

The primary-plus-mirror teams arrangement has now been in progress for over three years.  Both Team A and Team B have been funded by the Biological Technologies Office of DARPA – the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency.  The team-to-team innovation tracking arrangement has uncovered many “how-to” lessons that can benefit nearly all scientific and technological teams in their ongoing creative search and experimentation.

Yet, although the Team A plus Team B structure is quite new to complex biological research, it is not new to more traditional forms of engineering or electronics.  Here a processs of “independent validation and verification” has been part and parcel of research for decades.  Take NASA for example.  A separate “independent validation and verification” facility has long been an integral part of NASA — with more than 300 employees specifically tasked with independently testing and giving a “thumbs up” (or thumbs down) to the computer code and components for satellites developed by other NASA teams.  The same is true for teams working in electronics.  But, until recently, it has not been been true for research in complex biological and biological-engineering sciences.

Thinking together in physical space

Why is it sometimes important for teams or individuals to actually meet in the same physical space or to watch and hear the step-by-step videotapes of a lab procedure?

Some clues can be found in an earlier integrative review – fittingly titled “distance matters” – by two researchers who, for decades, researched the thinking, working, and social processes of teams “co-located” in space and time versus teams connected by various modes of technology.  Based on their findings, the researchers pointed to several advantages of individuals being together in the same space, or being co-located as they work on a complex problem.  To highlight three of these advantages:

(1) Rapid feedback:  If someone has misunderstood or misinterpreted something, or glossed over an important detail, if they are physically together in the same place, Team B could “pipe up” to ask for elaboration or a re-statement of the points, right then and there.

(2) Multiple communication channels:  Written verbal or text-based descriptions or diagrams are invariably abstractions.  They emphasize some aspects and details, but omit others. Working in person and side-by-side allows team members to perceive and interpret many richly informative, often nuanced, visual, auditory, and social interactional cues such as facial expressions, gestures, and body posture, that are not readily conveyed in words.  This may include implicit cues that we may not even know we are using – and may perhaps be especially true for well-practiced routine laboratory procedures that have become a form of “muscle memory”.

(3) Shared spatial layout and spatial referencing: By observing and experiencing a methodological procedure step-by-step and in-person, Team B is in “the same space” as Team A.  From there, Team B can see many small yet crucial details of how – exactly – a specimen or instrument is moved or placed, and the direction of a researcher’s gaze or gestures can quickly and easily identify what is meant, again with a level of rich precision that can be difficult to fully convey using words or static diagrams.

There have been recent calls in the behavioral and life sciences to study behavior in the “real world” – in dynamic, complex, richly multi-modal contexts – rather than in the “sterile” highly controlled environment of the experimental laboratory.  At first, it might seem that the mirror-team approach  – with its borrowed from engineering “independent validation and verification” steps – is directly contrary to, or incongruent with, this movement toward scientific discovery tied to the “real world” and “the life of behavior.”

But, looked at slightly differently, it can be seen as, perhaps, a confirmation and validation of this recent turn.  Scientific research, too, needs to be studied as a complex form of embodied behavior in a dynamically changing context, with the scientist’s brain in a scientist’s body, contingent on context (space) and history (time).  Seen from this perspective, the mirror-team approach may itself be a way of stepping away from “automatized and sterilized” approaches to studying behavior and studying biological phenomena.  It may be a welcome and needed step toward recognizing how we, as human scientists, act on and in the world.

References

Gomez-Marin, A., & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2019).  The life of behavior.  Neuron, 104, 25–36.

Olson, G., and Olson, J. (2000).  Distance matters.  Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 139–178.

Raphael, M. P., Sheehan, P. E., & Vora, G. J. (2020). A controlled trial for reproducibility.  Nature, 579, 190–192.

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

January 4, 2020 By in exploration, goals, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

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.

 

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

November 3, 2019 By in goals, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , ,

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.

What Drives Play and the Motivation of Playing Just to Play? Joys of play we share with some young little creatures

September 18, 2019 By in dynamic environments, exploration, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

Who’s there? Source: Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons

 

Doing something for the sheer joy and playfulness of it – just because it is fun and feels good in and of itself – is a key impetus behind many of our creative and life projects.

But what, really, is this elusively powerful driver of our playful activity?  How does the urge to play arise? What’s happening differently in our minds-brains-bodies when our urge to play is burning bright and strong, compared to when it’s gone, or has diminished to a mere dull flicker?

How might we study play and begin to piece together parts of these deep puzzles?  Although there are many places we could look, a team of ingenious behavioral neuroscience researchers recently rigged together a new way to let us peer into brains and bodies at play, of interacting creatures small, and large.  But before we take a closer look at their animal study, and their findings, we first need to take a small detour, into the surprisingly complex playworld of hide-and-seek.

Let’s play hide-and-seek

Playing hide-and-seek is complicated.  To sometimes assume the role of the one who is hiding, but at other times to take on the role of the seeker, draws on a surprisingly large and complex array of cognitive, social, motivational, and physical skills.

For example, if a child is playing the role of the hider she must remain quiet and hidden even while the seeker closely approaches her or passes nearby her hiding place, inhibiting any urges to move, burst into giggles, or otherwise reveal her hidden presence.  When playing the role of the seeker, the child must wait and fully and loudly count out the required time, keeping her eyes closed or her back turned, and not peeking while her playmates steathily find and slide into their hiding places.  Other flexible perspective-taking abilities are also needed.  For example, the hiding child needs to know that just because she can see the seeker, it does not necessarily mean that the seeker can also see her.

Some of this complexity is revealed by the age at which young children first begin to fully succeed at the game.  A laboratory-based study conducted by researchers from Canada and Italy found that only a few 3-year-olds could successfully play hide-and-seek, but children who were a little older, including most 4-year-olds and nearly all 5-year-olds, were adept at the game.  The mistakes the youngest children made were often ones of not alternating the role of hider and seeker (for example, telling the experimenter to hide, but then also themselves hiding) or not really “hiding” (as in telling the experimenter where he or she was going to hide, not trying to hide from view, or not remaining physically hidden, or not remaining quiet).  The children’s skill at playing hide-and-seek was strongly positively correlated with another ability related to understanding another person’s perspective and knowledge – that of keeping a secret.

Given this complexity – and the clear challenges the game poses to young human children – could other creatures really learn to play hide-and-seek?  And, if they could, might this provide some insights into the deep motivational and rewarding origins of play?

Small creatures with big play urges

Behavioral neuroscience researchers have known for some time that young adolescent male laboratory rats are eager and enthusiastic playmates.  They jump into lots of rough-and-tumble play with their adolescent peers, and joyfully engage in all sorts of hand-and-finger chasing and tickling exploits with their human handlers.  But what are the neural underpinnings of the drive to play in these small young creatures?  And could such play urges extend to more complex and rule-based games requiring them to take on different roles at different times, such as those in hide-and-seek?

To begin to examine the neural correlates of these small furry creatures’ big motivation to play researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Humboldt University in Berlin devised a novel two-player rat-and-human hide-and-seek game.

Placed around a large nearly 100-square-foot (5 x 6m2) dimly lit lab room were several smaller hiding places (two transparent and two opaque boxes), three large human-size “cardboard” hiding places, and a shoebox-sized “start box” with a remote cable-controlled opening mechanism.

At three weeks of age, each animal individually began a five-to-ten-day familiarization with the room and with the experimenter – starting with lots of gentle handling, touching, and carrying, and later more vigorous and energetic tickling and hand games.  Next, the rats were successively first trained to either hide or to seek.  Crucially, throughout the training the animals only ever received “social play rewards” – touching, and hand games and playful interactions with the experimenter. No food or other tangible rewards were offered.

In “seek” trials, the experimenter closed the lid of the start box, and hid at one of the larger hiding places.  In “hide” trials, the experimenter left the start box open, and the experimenter assumed a very still posture next to the start box, and began counting out loud. When the experimenter hid, the sounds made while she moved to her chosen hiding place were masked with white noise. There were also multiple decoy “cables” to each of the possible hiding places so the animals could not simply follow the cable that provided the hidden experimenter remote control for opening of the start box.

Of the six animals initially trained by one experimenter, all six learned to seek, and five learned both to hide and to successfully switch between the hiding and seeking roles.  Of four additional animals, trained by a different experimenter in the same setting, all four learned to seek, hide, and also to switch roles.

But, you may ask:  What did the animals actually learn?  Were they really playing the game?  Did the animals actually enjoy the game?  Were they actually playing just for the fun and joy of it?

Play, laughing at play, and let’s play more please!

Many aspects of the animals’ activity suggested that they had really learned something about “hiding and seeking” and had developed some appropriate game-playing strategies.  For example, when the experimenter hid in random (non-predictable) locations from one trial to the next, the rats took longer to find the experimenter than when the experimenter consistently hid in one location across a series of five trials.

In such consistent trials, the animals searched for the experimenter increasingly quickly and directly – making a beeline toward where she was hidden with scarcely a pause – showing that they remembered where the experimenter had hidden on the previous several trials.  Also, when they were the hiders (but not as seekers), the animals showed a clear and significant preference for the opaque and cardboard boxes over the transparent “see-through” boxes.

In the wild, rats are most active during the night and so most of their play will occur in darkness.  Rather than a visual cue to signal that they want to play, such as a puppy’s “play bow” or a monkey’s “open mouth,” adolescent rats of the type the researchers studied (the Long-Evans hooded strain) give a variety of different vocal chirps or calls. These calls are ultrasonic vocalizations at a frequency of close to 50 kHz, and are emitted during social play with peers, and during other positive affective states, such as when they are being “tickled” by human handlers.

Such “calls to play” or play signals are especially frequent in juvenile or adolescent rats. The chirping calls, and their specific timing – such as anticipatory calls given just before launching a playful nape attack or chase – seem to help maintain a playful mood or motivation, and to promote cooperative play.

A close look at the vocalizations of the rats during the researchers’ hide-and-seek sessions showed that, for both seek and hide trials, the animals’ calls (all of which were inaudible to the experimenter but visible on the Audacity recordings) sharply increased at those times when the rats were enthusiastically darting away from the start box.  There were also many such calls during the tickling and finger-chase-play interactions with the experimenter but fewer when the animals were quietly choosing where to “hide” and also during their hiding time.

The timing and patterns of the animals’ chirping calls suggested that the animals were indeed enjoying the hide-and-seek game.

And – like young toddlers who often exclaim “do it again, do it again!” or “more, more!” when they love the playful motions or sounds that their parents or adults are making – so the adolescent rats often seemed to want to prolong the hiding portion of the game, darting away from the experimenter to a new “hiding place” even when they’d clearly been found out in their hiding place. These and other behavioral indicators, such as their quick and lively search, and springy “joy jumps,” all converged in an impression that this was all good fun.

Motivational and reward systems in the brain

What, then, was happening in the brains of these small creatures as they enthusiastically played this complex socially-interactive rule-based game?  To find out, the researchers focused their attention on a region at the front of the brain – the medial prefrontal cortex – known to be involved in social play and reward-based play motivation in rats.  After the animals had learned the hide-and-seek game, the experimenters implanted electrodes (tetrodes) in the medial prefrontal cortex of five of the anesthetized animals.  Then, after they’d recovered from the surgery and were again happily playing hide-and-seek, the researchers tracked the patterns and changes in the firing activity of individual neurons as the rats now took on the role of the seeker, and then that of the hider.

The electrode recordings revealed that the patterns of brain cell firing differed markedly depending on specific timepoints and the animals’ particular role in the game.  Firing of neurons increased strongly in nearly 30% of the 177 neurons the researchers were able to record from at the timepoint when the start box lid was closed – the environmental signal that the rat was, on the next trial, to be in the “seeker” role.

Analyses of the patterns of firing showed that some clusters of neurons were mostly active during the seeking phase of the game.  Other groups of neurons were most active during hiding.  Still other clusters of neurons were especially active during the brief periods of intense experimenter-rat interaction (touching and hand games) that ended each seeking or hiding trial.

The play-to-play hypothesis

Despite the central role that play and play-like activities have in our own lives and those of other animals, probing and fully charting out the complex social, cognitive, motivational, and neurobiological bases of such activitites in many animals has been challenging.  There has been extensive research on some sorts of play in a few species – for example, play fighting has been much studied in adolescent rats, but many other types of play, such as object play, have been less often studied.

The initial findings reported by the Berlin-based researchers – using a creatively ingenious playful format that gives small creatures the opportunity to themselves make choices about where and how they will hide, or where and how they will seek out a hidden playmate – open new opportunities and challenges for researchers of play.  Their findings suggest that by using experimental procedures that give other animals more room for choice, and more room for play, we might be able to learn much more about what “drives play” and the motivation of playing just to play.  Hide-and-seek anyone?

To think about

  • The particular strain of rats used in the hide-and-seek study (Long-Evans) has, in other research, been characterized as typically “bold” or exploratory rather than shy and reticent (e.g., they quickly raise themselves up on their hind legs to look about them, and move more quickly into the center of an exposed field).  Would comparatively “shy” rats also learn the hide-and-seek game and learn to quickly switch their roles between hiding and seeking?
  • In this study, adolescent playful rats learned to play hide-and-seek with the human experimenter. Would older rats also successfully learn the two different roles required during hiding and seeking? Could they enjoy the game as much as the younger animals?  Or could the game be changed in ways that would increase their playfulness and playful enjoyment?
  • We often learn from watching others.  How much could younger or older animals learn by observing other animals in the game?
  • Why do we so often focus on extrinsic rewards in thinking about what moves us, rather than also intrinsic rewards, such as our desire for play?
  • A recent report on “the power of play” in the clinical journal Pediatrics affirmed, “Play is not frivolous; it is brain building” (p. 5).  Much of the evidence for substantial brain changes related to the opportunities for play has been found using juvenile rats.  For example, rats that were denied the opportunity to play as pups (kept in sparse cages without any toys) were less adept problem-solvers later and showed markedly impaired (immature) medial prefrontal cortex development.  Why do we tend to downplay the many social and health-promoting roles of play, not only for children but also for youth and adults of all ages?  What playful counter-moves can we let loose, hoist, or heave against such heavy anti-play sentiment?

References

Bell, H. C., McCaffrey, D. R., Forgie, M. L., Kolb, B., & Pellis, S. M. (2009). The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in the play fighting of rats.  Behavioral Neuroscience, 123, 1158–1168.

Panksepp, J., & Burgdorf, J. (2003). “Laughing” rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?  Physiology & Behavior, 79, 533–547.

Pellis, S. M., Pellis, V. C., Pelletier, A., & Leca J-B. (2019). Is play a behavior system, and, if so, what kind?  Behavioural Processes, 160, 1–9.

Peskin, J., & Ardino, V. (2003). Representing the mental world in children’s social behavior: Playing hide-and-seek and keeping a secret.  Social Development, 12, 496–512.

Reinhold, A. S., Sanguinetti-Scheck, J. I., Hartmann, K., & Brecht, M. (2019). Behavioral and neural correlates of hide-and-seek in rats. Science, 365(Sept. 13), 1180–1183.

Weiss, A., & Neuringer, A. (2012).  Reinforced variability enhances object exploration in shy and bold rats.  Physiology & Behavior, 107, 451–457.

Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018).  The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142, 1–16.

 

 

Combatting the creative barrier of precrastination: Bringing time onto your side in the creative process

June 13, 2019 By in General, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , , ,

When to decide? Source: WomEOS via Wikimedia Commons

Postponing a decision or an action – putting it off until a later time or a different day – is sometimes both wise and necessary.  Despite this, we all know that sometimes we postpone too long; we put off making a needed decision, or taking a required action, repeatedly, over and over.  Tomorrow, we say, tomorrow, I’ll do that tomorrow.  Or later, I’ll decide.  And this postponing postponing can land us in the troubled ensnaring deeps of procrastination, where we rob ourselves of the needed time to fully and thoughtfully realize our creative aims or other goals.

Yet – painful and ensnaring as procrastination can be, had you ever thought that we might be prone to an opposite form of time-based error:  when we make decisions or take actions too soon, over-hastily and immediately, before we should?

Precrastination:  It’s a thing

Although we’re all familiar with procrastination, research has uncovered that in many situations we may engage in a form of “precrastination”– getting something done quickly just to get it done – that can be surprisingly contrary to “good sense.”

First discovered in research looking at the decisions that people made in a simple weight-carrying task, the researchers couldn’t quite believe what they observed.

In their first experiments, participants in a long lab room were asked to carry one of two plastic beach buckets to a platform farther down the room from them.  The two buckets were placed by the researchers in positions such as those shown in the diagram below.

The bucket carrying task. Source: Koutstaal, adapted from Rosenbaum et al. (2014).

Participants were instructed to pick up one of the two orange buckets (pictured with orange dots) and to carry it to the platform at the end (grey dots).  They were asked to walk down the room without stopping and to “do whatever seemed easier” – either to pick up and carry the left orange bucket to the left platform with their left hand, or to pick up and carry the right orange bucket to the right platform with their right hand.  Each of the orange buckets was situated such that its handle was upright and readily grasped.

The researchers had anticipated that participants would choose to pick up the bucket that was closest to the platform, so that they’d need to carry the bucket forward the shortest distance.

But this was not what they found.

Instead, participants most often picked up the first bucket that they passed (regardless of whether it was on their left hand or their right hand) – and so they ended up having to carry the bucket farther.

It wasn’t that participants didn’t know how heavy the buckets were.  All participants were given the opportunity to lift the buckets at the start of the experiment, so they knew how heavy they were (empty, or filled with 3.5 pounds or even 7 pounds of pennies in different experiments). They also took part in 16 different trials with the buckets in 16 different arrangements.  Still, this pattern, of most often choosing to pick up the first bucket they passed and therefore having to lug the bucket a longer distance, was repeatedly found.

Why did participants most often choose to pick up the bucket that they first approached, rather than the one farther down the room, so that they ended up carrying the bucket farther than was necessary?

Asked by the experimenters after they had completed all of the trials, the participants nearly always gave the same answer, saying something to the effect of, “I wanted to get the task done as soon as I could.”  They gave this reason when, in fact, the task would require the same amount of time regardless of whether they picked up the first and closest bucket after they started (then having to carry it farther) or picked up the second bucket (then having to carry it a shorter distance).

But then:  Why would participants feel that they were getting the task done sooner?  Hastening to complete one part or subgoal of their task – that of grabbing and lifting the bucket – seemed to make completion of the full task closer.  Grasping and lifting the first or nearer bucket also allowed the participants to clear their working memory of that subpart of their overall task.

Remembering to do an upcoming task (what is called “prospective memory”) is mentally demanding.  It seemed that the relief of clearing from working memory even the small subtask of picking up one of two objects was sufficiently attractive (throwing off a small mental load) that it offset the additional physical effort required to carry the picked-up object a farther distance.  Participants precrastinated even though it cost them greater physical effort.

But if there were noticeably greater cognitive demands linked to the carrying task then a different outcome was observed. When, in a new experiment, participants were instead asked to carry cups filled with water that could be easily spilled, and were asked to prevent any spilling (placing high demands on their attention), then participants rarely chose to pick up the nearest object.  Now participants most often chose to pick up the farther cup, minimizing the amount of cognitive effort they needed to expend to carry the brim-full cup with minimal spillage to the final platform.

Deferring decisions in creative endeavors

In more complex creative endeavors it can be challenging to wait, and to defer taking a decision on how a subtask should be completed, because deferring a decision feels like we’re not making progress.  Yet – as data from both self-reports of creative individuals and an in-depth case study of a musical composer suggest – deferring a creative decision (that is, avoiding precrastination) can sometimes allow us to take in new knowledge, expanding our creative problem-solving mindset, and, in turn open the opportunity for a new influx of creative ideas.

Let’s take a closer look at the in-depth case study of a professional Finnish composer (let’s call him Composer Z) creating a novel musical composition.

Early on, Composer Z had a broad sense of what his new extended musical piece should be, but his central creative idea was still vague and fuzzy.  It did not offer him straightforward guidance in the many immediate compositional decisions he needed to make.  Yet despite his uncertainty and despite deferring more global or overarching decisions, Composer Z did not stop working entirely.

Rather, “leaving an increasing number of empty bars in the score along with unanswered problems,” Composer Z moved ahead to different parts of the musical score, as he “persistently invented and experimented with his musical materials; he tested, associated, theorised, juxtaposed, applied and developed his ideas into new situations” (p. 224).  All the while he was continuously trying to relate what he was now learning to what he already had learned about the evolving musical piece, and trying to use it to further clarify (learn, see, feel) where he wanted it to go in the future. “The composer learned as he composed and composed more as he learned more.” (p. 224)

After this extended process of deferred decisions, Composer Z suddenly reached a critical point where his working and writing changed.  Rather than hesitation and confused and fragmented moves, his creative working now became highly fluent.  He made quick and effortless decisions, that seemed to him “surprisingly intuitive.”  These were not arbitrary choices, but appeared to be – from a music analysis point of view – “logical deductions based on nearly all the composer’s actions from the very beginning of the process” (p. 224).

Putting it all together

In your creative process and innovative endeavors, do you allow yourself (and your team) to engage in “purposeful decision deferral” – as Composer Z permitted himself to do during the creation of a new and challengingly innovative work – so as to avoid early stage commitments that are poorly grounded in your understanding of what a project could be?  Are you (sometimes) too eager simply to “do” subtasks, rather than to “fulfill them” (that is, “fully fill” them, with all the new understanding and knowledge that you will have gained by deferral)?

Purposeful decision deferral is not an excuse to “do nothing.”  Deferring the moment of decision is, rather, a way to gain a welcome window of time during which we can further explore and experiment with adjacent or alternative aspects of a problem space.  Purposeful decision deferral – that is the opposite of precrastination – is a way to give ourselves (and our mind/brain) time to reconfigure how we’re thinking, and time to inadvertently and often indirectly learn more about what our creative problem (really) needs.  Yet it’s tricky:  if we’re not fully attuned to where we are in our thinking/experimenting/exploring, purposeful decision deferral could be protracted beyond what is needed, to become the troubled ensnaring deeps of procrastination.

To think about

  • If you’re feeling a sense of urgency to get something done, where is that urgency coming from –is it real? Is it something that you’re generating – out of habit? Out of a wish to keep your mind and thinking space uncluttered? Or out of a desire for that “small burst of positive reward” you feel when you (mentally, or physically) check another item off of your to-do list?
  • If one of the reasons that you precrastinate is that you find it rewarding that something is “just done” (now scratched off your to-do list), could you change your take on what is rewarding and instead find rewarding experience in a different way, for example, finding reward in being thorough, thoughtful, and creative?
  • Are you assuming that you have to work on a project in a set order, from beginning to end?Could you switch it up a little and work on a different part of your project so as to let new information in, and give yourself some more room for further experimentation and exploration?
  • In your past creative endeavors have you more often regretted postponing doing something (procrastination) or doing something too hastily, without sufficient forethought or integrated understanding (precrastination)?
  • On the to-and-fro swing of a creative endeavor, when should you give yourself an extra push, and when should you let yourself glide, absorbing more of where and how you are, in your experience or creative endeavor?

References

Cohen, J. R., & Ferrari, J. R. (2010). Take some time to think this over: The relation between rumination, indecision, and creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 22, 68–73.

Fournier, L. R. et al. (2019). Which task will we choose first? Precrastination and cognitive load in task ordering. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81, 489–503.

Pohjannoro, U. (2016). Capitalising on intuition and reflection: Making sense of a composer’s creative process. Musicae Scientiae, 20, 207–234.

Rosenbaum, D. A. et al. (2019). Sooner rather than later: Precrastination rather than procrastination. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28, 229–233.

Rosenbaum, D. A., Gong, L., & Potts, C. A. (2014). Pre-crastination: Hastening subgoal completion at the expense of extra physical effort. Psychological Science, 25, 1487–1496.

 

 

The Unique Value of Perspective-Taking: Innovative uses of technology to see how toddlers creatively explore the world

December 18, 2018 By in dynamic brains, exploration, idea landscapes Tags: , ,

What can we learn through seeing the world from a child’s point of view? Source: Matthias Süßen via Wikimedia Commons

 

Learning new words by a toddler is not a simple matter.  They hear unfamiliar words uttered in a cluttered, complex, dynamically changing scene. How are they to know, from the vast number of options, just what it is that an unfamiliar word is supposed to point toward?

Yet, despite the myriad number of potentially “pointed-to” alternatives, learning new words is something that many toddlers do surprisingly well.  Not too long after they utter their first few words, most toddlers begin to acquire new words at an astounding rate, hungrily absorbing them like a tiny purpose-built learning-machine.

How does the toddler accomplish this remarkable word-learning feat? It’s a long-standing puzzle that many cognitive and developmental scientists have taken up. The immense number of possibilities seem so potentially overwhelming that it may even seem that some sort of specialized language-based wizardry must kick in to propel the toddler’s remarkable spurt of word learning.

Bringing in some technological magic – to capture another point of view

Would it be easier to understand this mysterious language spurt if we could somehow get closer to the child’s point of view?  What if we were able to see the world as it appears from the toddler’s own unique perspective – as seen from their specific child-size bodies, their particular opportunities for action (with their smaller fingers, hands, and arms), and their more limited chances for moving about.  What might we learn?

An innovative way to get closer to the child’s perspective on the world is to ask the child to wear a mini “head camera.”  Embedded low on the toddler’s forehead, in a custom-made soft headband, is a mini head camera.  The head camera now can track what – from the child’s particular vantage point – is “out there” for the toddler to see, touch, or reach.

One team of developmental researchers in a pioneering study using such a head camera uncovered a finding that sharply spurred the team’s curiosity. The team found that the child’s play world – when discovered through the head-band camera – was highly dynamic and changing. Many objects remained in view only for seconds or split seconds, before disappearing.  But interspersed among all the rapidly moving images that formed the usual turbulent “visual diet” of the active toddler, there were occasional brief moments of a different sort.

Every once in a while, despite the constant variation and dynamic changes and tremendous clutter of objects closely surrounding the child, there were occasional moments during which “there was just one object stably dominating the head camera image, being much larger in visual size because it was closer and un-occluded” (p. 179).

Make us some novel objects to play with!

The researchers wondered: “Are these periods of stable, clean, nearly one-object views optimal sensory moments for the early learning of object names?” (p. 179)  Could there be something especially important about these rare moments when an object looms large and alone and dominates a toddler’s point of view?

To try to answer this question about stable one-object views, the researchers themselves first enlisted the creative help of an artist adept in making novel objects from hardened clay.  To ensure that the children had not already encountered any of the objects, they wanted to conduct the experiment with purposively-constructed novel objects, so every child would be equally unfamiliar with the objects.

The artist created six novel objects, each with a unique shape and texture.  These novel objects were then painted, either blue, red, or green, two objects for each color, forming two sets of three differently-colored objects.  And then each object was randomly paired with one novel name:  zeebee, tema, dodi, habble, wawa, and mapoo.

Next, parents and their toddlers (at a mean age of 20 months) were invited to a play session in the research lab.  They were asked to sit across from one another at a small white table, in a white room, with a white floor. The parent was told the names of the six novel objects, and the objects were placed in small boxes. On the side of each box, was a picture of the object, and a reminder of the object’s name.

Parents were instructed to encourage their toddler to interact with the clay objects in as natural a way as possible.  Parent and toddler then engaged in play with the objects over four toy play periods; each play period lasted just under two minutes, and each set of three toys was used twice.

The instructions did not tell the parents to try to teach their child the names of the objects, and parents were not told that their toddlers’ ability to remember the names of the objects would later be tested.  All of the play period was video and audio recorded.

After the play periods, the toddlers were given a surprise memory test for the names of the novel objects.  The experimenter entered the room, holding high a tray with three of the objects, each of a different color, one on the right, one to the left, and one in the middle. Looking steadfastly into the infant’s eyes (as confirmed by a later review of the video), and never at the objects on the tray so as not to unintentionally guide the child to the answer, the experimenter said, “Show me the ___!  Get the __!”  The experimenter then moved the tray forward for the infant to select the object.  This test was completed twice for each of the six object names, each time with different distractors.  The toddlers correctly reached for the novel objects more than would be expected by chance, with a few of the toddlers even learning all six novel names.

Looming visually large and alone

Now the researchers looked back at the videos of the play periods between the toddlers and their parents.  And they found a clear answer to their question.  In precisely those moments when parents named a novel object for their child, the child’s head-camera video revealed that the object loomed large and centered in the child’s visual field.And the more this was true, the more likely it was that the toddler later showed that they remembered the name of the object.  So: the more that the object filled the center of the child’s viewpoint at the moment of the parent’s naming (e.g., “zeebee”), the more likely the child was to correctly choose the “zeebee” from the tray.

These results show that, at least in this miniature table-top “play world,” parents most often chose to name unfamiliar objects at precisely those moments when their child was already visually attending– and often also touching– an object. And the more strongly the child’s visual attention was centrally and predominantly focused on that object, the more likely the child was to later recognize that name.

Once we get closer to the child’s perspective, at least a little of the mystery of how children so adeptly learn to correctly map words to the intended parts of the world is dispelled.  It turns out that, at these moments of naming, rather than there being a teeming multitude of competing items to which the unfamiliar label might apply, there is often only a single object in central view.

Perspective-taking and another developmental mystery

Concretely and specifically trying to see the world through a young child’s eyes may help to explain another developmental mystery – that is also closely connected to exploration.  Why do toddlers learn to walk? Why do children move from a form of locomotion that they have fully mastered and even become experts at – that of crawling – and embark on the decidedly difficult (and not infrequently painful) task of learning to walk?

A partial explanation may be that what they can seewhen they walk (rather than crawl) is very different.  Data from a head-mounted eye-tracker worn by fifteen 13-month old children who were still crawling as their primary form of locomotion compared with fifteen 13-month old children who had begun to walk, revealed many differences.  For crawlers, the “scene camera” revealed that on about 25% of their “steps” the only thing in view was the floor.  Lifting their heads while crawling was an awkward, gravity-defying move.  Compared to crawlers, walkers could see many more enticing toys, and could see their caregiver’s face twice as often.

It may, in part, be the tantalizing promise of getting to see and to experience more – a world that is richer, more varied, more social, and more extended – that motivates the young infant to stand up and begin to walk.

By literally and concretely trying to see “what’s in view” for a child, we can begin to understand how children creatively explore and learn about the world.  The transition from crawling to walking is a developmental “cusp” that completely changes the options and opportunities open to the child.

What “cusps,” akin to those that confront the toddler who is first learning to walk, might we, as adults, be over-cautiously stepping back from – and so needlessly limiting much of our view?  How can we be encouraged to reorient our own perspective to explore the farther reaches of what we can’t even now see?

References

Kretch, K.S., Franchak, J.M., & Adolph, K.E. (2014). Crawling and walking infants see the world differently. Child Development, 85, 1503–1518.

Pereira, A. F., Smith, L. B., & Yu, C. (2014). A bottom-up view of toddler word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 21, 178–185.

Smith, L. B., Yu, C., & Pereira, A. F. (2011). Not your mother’s view: The dynamics of toddler visual experience. Developmental Science, 14, 9–17.

Play, Playfulness, and Permission: When and why do we give ourselves a go-ahead to play?

October 7, 2018 By in exploration, General, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , ,

 

Into the play . . . Source: cjuneau via Wikimedia Commons

Is playfulness available on demand?

Suppose that you have just been asked to engage in a small task of some sort – say making some toy animals out of Lego blocks for a new children’s window display in a hospital.  Imagine that you’ve been given several mixed assortments of six Lego bricks, and the coordinator of the display has also made an example of the sort of thing she has in mind:  perhaps a small duck.  She sets the sample toy in front of you, and then gives you some further instructions.

Imagine that she says to you,

“I would now like you to build five LEGO ducks out of these sets. You can rebuild the prototype you see on the table or just build any duck or duck-like creature you like – that is up to you. The only thing that is really important for us and this experiment is that you do it in a non-playful manner. Please find a way of doing it, so that it feels not playful at all.”

How would you feel? What thoughts, images, or feelings would come to mind as you set about making the requested Lego ducks?  Would you start to feel pressured and tense, a bit keyed up, narrowing your focus, giving yourself some “straight talk” about getting down to business (come on… let’s focus now!) or would you begin to wonder: What did she mean about being non-playful?  Am I supposed to be efficient here?  Does she want me to make lots of those same ducks?  Exactly the same?  Just copy them and get on with it?

Now imagine instead that there’s a second coordinator of the new window display.  She comes into the room, just as the first coordinator is leaving, and thinks that maybe you’ve not yet been given any guidance on what the task is.  So, not knowing what you’ve just been told, she walks across to you, smiling, and says,

“I would now like you to build five LEGO ducks out of these sets. You can rebuild the prototype you see on the table or just build any duck or duck-like creature you like – that is up to you. The only thing that is really important for us and this experiment is that you do this as playfully as you can. Please find a way of doing it, so that it feels playful and nothing but playful.”

Imagine that these were the only instructions you had received.  How would you feel?  What thoughts, memories, feelings would spring to mind?  How do you do something playfully? Can we simply be asked to take on a playful approach?

Is playfulness an “experiential stance” that can be called up on demand? 

Setting out to explore these questions, two researchers from Denmark asked 22 young adults to take part in precisely these playful versus nonplayful Lego duck-building exercises. Then, right after they finished making their Lego ducks, the researchers asked each participant to take part in an in-depth video recorded interview in which each duck-builder was asked to freely and fully describe what they had experienced as the exercise unfolded.

Looking through detailed transcriptions of the interviews, the researchers coded if – and also when – each participant spoke of different experiential aspects, such as their perceptions, or their actions, memories, feelings, or changes in the focus of their attention.

Most of the participants spoke about how they consciously asked themselves about the meaningof the task.  In the playful condition, many mentioned that the requirement to be playful meant that they were set free to do whatever they wanted to do.  They had time and space to creatively make something inspired by their own ideas and intuitions, rather than something that was already spelled out for them.

When they actually starting making the ducks, the participants in the playful condition often took a “let’s just mess about with this” sort of attitude, reminding themselves that “it’s not a competition,” fiddling with the pieces to see what might come about, and even sometimes making animals other than ducks. They spoke of how they liked the look and the soft satisfying sound the bricks as they firmly nestled into place, and of feelings of pleasure and surprise when they looked at what they’d made.

The stark opposite was true for the non-playful condition.  Now most participants reported feeling pressed and pressured.  They felt they were pressured by time – they had to be efficient, to work as quickly as possible, often just by repeatedly copying the prototype duck – and also by concerns about evaluation, worrying if they were they making what was expected, in “the right way,” and if they were being sufficiently systematic and focused. They were more likely to notice a feeling of tedium or boredom, of not being asked to use their imagination, and just needing to produce the toys in the same way, so there shouldn’t (and wouldn’t) be any surprises along the way.  They’d even admonish themselves, “Come on… make ducks!”

Overall, 19 of the 22 participants said they were successfully able to take on a playful stance when they were asked to do so.

It seemed that being prompted to play set in motion a positive cycle.  The cycle was kicked off with a feeling of freedom from specific constraints and goals. This brought into a play an exploratory, curious, and open-ended “look-and-see” interactive approach to the materials at hand.  This cycle was both accompanied by, and further activated by, positive feelings of sensory, aesthetic, and reflective pleasure.  In turn, there were feelings of autonomous and intrinsic motivation, that opened the way to unexpected and surprising outcomes.  The unexpected creative outcomes fostered expanding feelings of competence, which “looped back,” sparking further exploration and interactions.

So where does that leave us? It seems, in principle, possible to simply and directly ask ourselves to become more playful, spontaneous, and exploratory.  By prompting ourselves – and giving ourselves permission – we can creatively surprise ourselves.  We can draw upon an untapped resource of playfulness to prompt a self-reinforcing perception-action cycle of making-and-finding.

Intrinsic motivation can emerge from action.
Source: Figure 4.4 from Koutstaal & Binks (2015, p. 152), Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

To think about:

“Come on… make ducks!”

  • What voice in your own head is ordering you to just make ducks? Is it a voice that you’ve chosen for yourself?
  • Or is it an inner voice that just autocratically takes over, and automatically plays and re-plays itself at different times?
  • If the voice isn’t yours, or isn’t fully yours, or plays through your mind unbidden at times you wish it wouldn’t, how could you counter that voice?
  • What other voices could you imagine to give yourself the space – and the time and the permission – to be more playful?

 

References

Heimann, K. S., & Roepstorff, A. (2018).  How playfulness motivates: Putative looping effects of autonomy and surprise revealed by micro-phenomenological investigations.  Frontiers in Psychology, 9,Article 1704, 1–15.

Koutstaal, W. & Binks J (2015). Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

—> Also posted at “Our Innovating Minds” Psychology Today.

 

Are you giving sound enough space in your creative world?

August 29, 2018 By in dynamic brains, idea landscapes Tags: , , , , , ,

The many places and spaces of sound. Source:Victor Talking Machine Company; Right: Dnoahg via Wikimedia Commons

 

Given our (often) tremendous visual capacities, it’s easy to just let vision habitually take the reins, and assign other senses to lower rungs in our sensory hierarchy. For example, sounds and hearing often play “second fiddle.” What would it mean to place a higher priority on other senses, especially the roles of sound, in our sensory repertoire?

—> For more, including a Q & A with vocalist, musician, and Resonance Box founder Aida Shahghasemi see: Exploring and Expanding our Auditory Horizons 

 

Creativity: What’s privacy got to do with it?

August 5, 2018 By in dynamic environments, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , , , ,

An open-plan aquarium. Source: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta via Wikimedia Commons

 

How might a lack of privacy influence our creative thinking?  Our general common sense might suggest a number of reasons that being constantly “on view” for others to see us, as in an open-plan office, could bring with it cognitive costs.  Considerable mental effort may be needed to stay focused on one’s own work, and not be distracted by nearby sounds, movements, happenings, the coming and going of others.

But are we fully aware of all the different ways that lack of privacy might influence our thinking?  And, apart from simply asking people for their self-reports, how might we get a clearer and evidence-based understanding of how a lack of privacy impacts our thinking and making?

Let’s take a look at two highly creative experimental approaches – and the unique insights they provide – on the creativity-privacy connection.

—> For more see Wilma’s post: “Does an Open Office Plan Make a Creative Environment?: New support for the value of privacy at work.”

What’s your metaphor for creative change?

April 15, 2018 By in goals, idea landscapes, productive mistakes Tags: , , , ,

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

How does asking yourself action-related questions catapult creativity?

March 10, 2018 By in idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , , ,

Source: Moh tch via Wikimedia Commons

 

What questions or ways of thinking could you adopt to give some fresh lift into your ideas –– like the bubble-blowing device –– expanding them and letting them take flight?

Coming up with good new ideas can seem like a mysterious and mysteriously murky process.  Where do good ideas come from?  Are there any tips, or tricks, or strategies, that we can draw on to help us generate good ideas –– or more of them, more often?

It might seem that we could just begin by asking people who come up with lots of good ideas:  How do you do it?  Tell me!

But that approach presupposes that such “good idea generators” know what it is that they do.  It presupposes that the good idea generators know how they think when they’re thinking creatively.  It also presupposes that a good idea generator can articulate (convey or tell us) what it is that they are doing.

Sadly, neither presupposition is often met:  The processes that a good creative idea generator uses are often somewhat obscure and opaque (perhaps subconscious) even to themselves.  So precisely and clearly telling us what they’re up to during their innovative idea discovery process may not be at all easy, or even possible.

But all is not lost. . .

—> For more see: “Using Action Ideas to Boost your Creative Idea Search“

What helps us to recognize good novel ideas?

December 2, 2017 By in exploration, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , , ,

Source:Flickr: Smelling the Roses via Wikimedia Commons

 

Not every good new idea gets the recognition it deserves. Promising novel ideas are often overlooked, ridiculed, or dismissed. But why?

Read more at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-innovating-minds/201712/seeing-the-creative-value-in-new-good-idea-isnt-easy

Are inquiring minds creative minds? Does curiosity catalyze creativity?

July 5, 2017 By in exploration, idea landscapes, thinking components Tags: , , , ,

Source:Ronald Keith Monro via Wikimedia Commons

 

We all have likely seen them, at one time or another:  the job advertisements calling for curiosity as part of the desired “package of qualities” of the successful applicant.  The ways in which curiosity is described might differ.  But the message is much the same:  what is needed is (choose the one that most resonates with your past encounters) –– a passion for learning; a thirst for knowledge; an inquiring mind; hands-on curiosity –– paired with innovative and creative thinking, and an ability to think “outside the box.”

The connection between curiosity and creativity seems so clear and obvious, that we scarcely notice that these two different qualities have been linked together.  But what is the empirical evidence for their association?  How closely connected are they, really?  And, if they are associated, what is the direction of their connection:  Does curiosity fuel creativity?  Or does having a creative cast of mind catalyze curiosity?

Despite our intuitive sense that there should be a strong association between curiosity and creativity, only recently has the nature of the connection between them begun to be systematically probed.

For more see: Creativity –– What’s Curiosity Got to Do with It?

Can we be sad and creative too?

June 4, 2017 By in detail stepping, idea landscapes, thinking components Tags: , , , , ,

Putting sadness in creative focus.
Source: pdpics via Wikimedia Commons

 

Sometimes in trying to understand creativity and emotion we draw hard and fast rules. We are quick to see the potential of positive moods for creativity and for helping us see the big picture. But we underplay the role of negative moods — seeing them as leading us to narrowly focus on the trees, and miss the forest.

Can it be that the human mind, and the human mind when it meets with the messy complexities of emotion, is altogether that simple and tidy? What might happen if (for whatever reason) our thinking processes were predominantly detail-focused and our mood was quite positive? Or if our thinking processes were broad and abstract but our mood was somewhat sad?

—> For more, check out our latest Psychology Today post: “When Emotion Meets Thinking.”

 

What helps us as inspiration seekers?

February 6, 2017 By in exploration, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: ,

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikipedia

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia

Notice the intense look of quietly attentive search on the upturned faces of the boy and of the man in the photo above.  What are they looking for?  Do they know — exactly — what they are attempting to see, or to learn?  Or are they — at least in part — discovering what it is that they are seeking through their looking itself?

Searching for information, or seeking for ideas, can often be like this.  We may have a sense of the general direction in which we should be looking, yet not quite know exactly what it is we seek.

For more see —>  Seeking Idea Sparks: Understanding where and how we seek for inspiration.

What objects or “things” could you bring into play, to help you reach a fresh new view of what’s possible?

January 2, 2017 By in associative cuing, dynamic environments, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , ,

Source: Usien via Wikimedia Commons

Source: Usien via Wikimedia Commons

Asked where does thinking take place, maybe we’d answer “in our heads” –– within the internal reaches of our minds.

But is this the full and true story?  Or does it perhaps give too much credit to our mental prowess and powers?  And too little acknowledgment of the many sorts of concrete support that our thinking gets from our physical environment and our ability to physically move and tinker with things?

Does thinking depend not just on how we play with ideas, or thoughts, but also on how we interplay with physical objects — concrete tangible things — existing out there in the world?

—> For more see: Creative Thinking in Action: Sparking insights by using our hands — and things

Getting your creative pacing right

December 8, 2016 By in creative constraints, goals, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

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

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

When to detail step? Learning from young minds making things

September 15, 2016 By in dynamic environments, exploration, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , ,

Source: Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons

Source: Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons

 

At any time that we’re making something, there are the big picture goals of where we’re trying to get to and the smaller detailed “how-tos” of actually getting there.

But if we’re helping someone who is creatively learning, which of these (larger goals or how-to details?) should we emphasize? And how much should we directly spell out? What sorts of things might people best learn in the thick of action itself — based on their own observations or noticings of what helps them sidestep snags and stumbling blocks?

Here’s a compelling example of when to stand back and let incidental learning take the reins. It’s an excerpt from a blog post by Kartik Agaram about teaching computer programming to a young student:

“As the exercises he worked on became longer than a screen or two, though, he started noticing for himself that there was a problem: he was having a hard time explaining his solutions to me, or getting help when he got stuck. I’d often ask, “where is the matching counterpart to this bracket?” Or, “where does this loop begin?” Often he wouldn’t know either, and more than once figuring out the answer would also help figure out why his program wasn’t working. One fine day last week I showed up to a lesson and found him imitating my indentation.

I continued to ignore this and focus on the specific problem we were working on, but I’ve been finding myself increasingly reflecting on this one seemingly trivial evolution. Did the fact that he picked up indentation automatically suggest that it was in fact more important than I think? On reflection, I think the lesson is something else: my student magically managed to learn how to indent code, without learning a bunch of undesirable habits and heuristics:

That indentation is more than an incidental detail.

That good programming is about following a set of rules.

That aesthetics matter in code beyond the behavior being implemented.

Basically, my student now indents just like any other programmer (to the extent that anybody should care about it) but knows why he does so, the concrete benefit he derives from it. He is open to changing his habits in the face of changing circumstances. Most important, he doesn’t dwell overly on minor local details compared to the prize: understanding what this program does.”

To think about:

  • What are the parallels to “indentation rules” in your making universe?
  • How do you and your team foster and respond to incidental learning?
  • Are there ways for you to better structure your thinking/playing spaces to take advantage of affordances, and so sidestep things that get in the way?
  • How can you introduce more vicarious learning into your creative worlds?

Play, Newness, and You: How our environments help sustain – or squelch – innovation

September 4, 2016 By in dynamic environments, exploration, idea landscapes Tags: , , , , ,

KidTribe hula hoopers photographed by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons

KidTribe hula hoopers photographed by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons

What leads us to try new things? Although there are clear individual differences in our openness to novel experiences, an often overlooked factor that shapes –– and either propels or stalls ­­–– our readiness to explore and to innovate is our day-to-day environment. 

The powerful ways in which daily environments can shape responses to newness and innovative behavior are strikingly revealed in the contrasting behaviors of animals living in the wild compared to their zoo-living peers.

—> For more, and some questions for you to think about, see Wilma’s full Psychology Today blog post here.

New ways to think about how to turn limitations into helpful guides and goads

May 1, 2016 By in creative constraints, General, idea landscapes, making and finding, teams

All of us have deadlines and limitations on how much money, time, and other resources we have for our creative projects.

We can see these constraints as irksome or anxiety provoking, and this they sometimes are! But is this our only option?

In the words of musician Joe Henry: “You don’t have endless resources and endless time. I don’t see that as an obstruction. Instead, I see it as something else that’s guiding us.”

Sometimes what we see as blocking our way can be just what we need to creatively guide us forward. . .

For how constraints can be both guides and goads, see Wilma’s Psychology Today blog post: Corner Flags, Constraints, and Creativity.

Our constraints can be seen as "corner flags." Image source: Idlir Fida via Wikimedia Commons

Our constraints can be seen as “corner flags.” Image source: Idlir Fida via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

“Let’s find our own thing”

February 28, 2016 By in creative constraints, exploration, General, idea landscapes Tags: , , , , ,

cafe

A recent interview with the award-winning chef and restaurateur Alex Roberts was rich in wisdom on the creative process. The long-time owner of Twin Cities-based Restaurant Alma and Brasa and the forthcoming Café Alma spoke with the Star Tribune’s Rick Nelson.

Here we interweave some of Alex Roberts’s thoughts (in bold italics) with a few of our own (in regular text).

“I’m trying to create a new definition of what a cafe is.”

A café is a category of possible things, and like all categories somewhat pliable. Categories aren’t completely rigid, so that’s our invitation to play with them and give them new slants of meaning. And the categories we use to think about objects, places, and events can go through cycles of re-envisioning and revisiting, based on meldings of other — real and imagined — times and places.

“. . . that’s one of my disciplines, to choose the thought that’s more about the possibility.”

Even though there’s nearly always a more conventional or negative interpretation available to us, we’re not compelled to choose that interpretation. We can choose to give optimism a place to grow and thrive.

“The relevancy and resiliency combination are maybe the biggest challenge for restaurants.”

How do restaurants stay relevant — across the entire day and throughout the year? And how do they, at the same time, maintain their resilience across setbacks, recessions, shifting demographics, or fluctuating trends? Staying both relevant and resilient is a large part of an organization’s so-called absorptive capacity.

Whether large or small, organizations need to be receptive to changes and emerging new knowledge and capabilities around them in order to stay relevant. By constantly learning, an organization stays resilient, bouncing back better from setbacks, and turning what would otherwise be liabilities into assets.

“To be honest, the constraints around the [small kitchen] space have forced us to be creative and collaborative to make it work.”

Constraints and creativity go hand in hand. Indeed, one group of neuroscientists recently defined creativity as “novel generation fitted to the constraints of a particular task.”

“The good stuff in life comes from between the lines. It’s about enjoying the process and not just the end result. That’s what we try to foster here, otherwise you’re always living in the future, and not in the moment.”

So wise! We can always ask “so what?” but very often much of the true meaning of our projects and endeavors is in the concrete doing and making itself.

“I was looking for inspiration, but I realized that I was losing this thread that was running through me. That is, my own vision. For better, or worse. So I started sitting down with a blank piece of paper — or an old menu, since they reflect our past — and try to create from there.”

What’s being described here is, in part, what the pioneering dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp calls “scratching.” Others call it searching or scouting. Whichever term you prefer, it’s important to experiment to uncover those methods of search that best work for you — more often leading you to high caliber ideas.

Turning to an old printed menu or two from the restaurant, is also, in part, what we in Innovating Minds call “wise repeating.” The best ideas are not always completely new but can be variations on, or contain traces of, your own earlier tried and true ideas.

“I’m trying not to be so inward that I’m stuck in my own world, but you want to have this authentic process. Let’s find our own thing.”

Yes, yes, “let’s find our own thing” and our own “authentic process(es)” for getting there. . . .

 

Seven ways to start and keep your writing going

November 17, 2015 By in idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , ,

Beginnings are tough. But if we’d only get started, our marks and words on the page can bootstrap our next moves. Marks and words on the page feed what in neuroscience is called our brain’s “perception-action” cycle. Through this biologically fundamental mechanism, we repeatedly act on the world, and then look to see what our actions have wrought in the world. The world talks back to us, telling us how close we are, or how far we are, from what we’d hoped to achieve (our goals).

Once the words are on the page or on the screen, they’re physical objects (out there in the environment) that we can see and move. Now we’ve embarked on a three-way conversation of mind-brain-environment. We’re in a making-finding cycle, in which we are partnered with the world, rather than being isolated in our own head.

Continue reading WK’s OUP blog post for the 7 pointers here

The continuing cycle of making and finding. Adapted from: Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change.

The continuing cycle of making and finding. Adapted from: Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change.

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New ways of listening

October 25, 2015 By in dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes Tags: , , , ,

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:

Agile music-making

August 18, 2015 By in creative constraints, detail stepping, dynamic environments, idea landscapes Tags: , , , ,

We may have encountered the term “embodied cognition” in recent research showing the surprising interrelations of our minds and brains with our bodies—but here’s a twist.

How might the tuxedo and formal apparel of a violinist in a symphony orchestra detract from their freedom of movement, active expression, and basic physical comfort?

Although creating an experience of ethereal beauty, performing classical music can be sweaty work. In the words of one concert violinist after playing Berlioz’s epically passionate Symphonie Fantastique: “We were sweating through our undershirts, through our tuxedo shirts. My bow tie was completely soaked.”

agile_music_making

Must this be in the 21st century?

By evening a concert violinist, by day an entrepreneurial Dallas businessman, Kevin Yu after his morning run found himself wondering why couldn’t formal concert garb be more like athletic wear?

That was the start of an idea whose time had surely come. Yu soon began prototyping new forms of tuxedo shirts made of fabric that was accommodating, moisture-wicking, and flexible just like his running gear. Although he tried to keep his prototypes under wraps—word soon spread and orders and requests poured in.

As Yu’s friend a Dallas Symphony Orchestra co-concertmaster mused: “You kind of wonder why it didn’t exist in the marketplace to begin with . . . A lot of us just took it for granted: that that’s the way it had to be because that’s the way it always was.”

What else in our worlds might be just like this. . . .

 

—> For more background and the quotations cited above see:

Michael Cooper, Taking the starch out of concert attire, The New York Times, August 18, 2015.

Guinness beer, “absorptive capacity,” and innovation

August 8, 2015 By in exploration, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , , , ,

In its everyday sense, to absorb something refers to our ability to take it in or soak it up or learn it well. But how do organizations absorb new knowledge or skills?

In Innovating Minds (p. 183), we explore what has been called the “absorptive capacity” of an organization. Absorptive capacity refers to:

“the ways in which teams and organizations evaluate, receive, and integrate new ‘external knowledge.’ [It] depends on their dynamic ability to recognize the value of new external information, assimilate it, and apply it. This capacity of an organization to productively absorb new information . . . applies not only to concepts but also to skills and meta-skills or ‘skills of skills,’ such as learning to learn. Appreciating the potential value of new information is something that may not come easily or automatically and needs to be fostered.”

So what’s this all got to do with Guinness beer and innovation?

Let’s travel back in time—to October 1899—in Dublin Ireland. The Guinness Brewery has just hired the young William Gosset, fresh out of New College, Oxford. Gosset’s stellar academic performance in math and chemistry has brought him to the attention of the company and he is recruited as a junior brewer. He will be joining four other recent recruits—all selected to spearhead a newly launched “scientific” approach to brewing.

Gossett soon is confronted with the very practical problem of what to make of the results of their many experiments with samples of malt and hops and plots of barley. Because of financial and other constraints, all of their experiments are based on very small sample sizes. It’s difficult to reach firm conclusions with such small samples because the numbers bounce around so much from one sample to the next.

He begins to see that standard practices won’t work and writes an internal company report suggesting a way forward. The report is well received.

But he and the company’s leadership realize that they need greater expertise and exposure to the very latest statistical methodology—that is only available outside the company. With this in mind, the company grants Gosset a one-year leave to go to England to study at University College London (UCL) with the pioneering statistician Karl Pearson.

Once at UCL, and working collaboratively with Pearson, Gosset recognizes that his small sample problems will require their own unique approach. This heralds the development of foundational insights that allow sound inferences to be drawn even from small sample sizes and a publication leading to what is now known as Student’s t-test. (If you have ever encountered this statistical test to compare two means, “Student” is a pseudonym adopted by William Gosset—see below.)

The fact that the company directly encouraged Gosset to leave Dublin to acquire deeper knowledge underscores that the organization understood the value of purposefully “absorbing” new knowledge and meta-skills into their idea landscapes. The company realized it needed to reach beyond its considerable internal expertise to draw on the insights and novel methods of others—extending its absorptive capacity.

Gosset_paper_1908

—> For further background see:

Phillip J. Boland (2011). William Sealy Gosset — An Inspiring ‘Student’,’ Proceedings of the 58th World Statistical Congress (Session STS028), pages 2650-2655.

When sometimes it helps to forget

August 2, 2015 By in associative cuing, idea landscapes, representations Tags: , , , , ,

Sometimes to make progress in our creative thinking we need to forge ahead in a new direction, setting aside and even forgetting what we’ve tried in the past. But just how intentional does that forgetting need to be?

Redirecting our focus to something entirely new will change our idea landscapes. It can make our previous ideas less accessible to us. This can be a good thing if those ideas were stale or were misleading us.

In a series of experiments, researchers provided participants with a list of several common objects (newspaper, spoon, paperclip, etc.). Each object was accompanied by a list of 4 alternative uses for that object that the participant was asked to study. Here, for instance, are the 4 alternative uses for “bucket”: music amplifier, seat, wear as a hat, small bathtub.

Asked a short while later to generate new uses for the same common objects participants often showed that they had unintentionally forgotten many of the alternative uses they had studied earlier. This “thinking-induced forgetting” was apparent even when participants were given specific cues to help them to remember the studied items.

When the researchers evaluated the creativity of the suggested alternative uses that the participants had generated they found something intriguing. The thinking-induced forgetting was greater for those who were the most creative.

As the researchers explained: “by inhibiting or in some way setting aside the studied uses, participants were able to explore a more diverse and original search space, leading them to generate more creative uses.”

In another experiment, though, the researchers found that if the participants were instructed to use the provided 4 uses as hints to generate additional alternative uses—then there was no thinking-induced forgetting. The same information, now used as hints, for possible uses for a bucket (music amplifier, seat, wear as a hat, small bathtub) was now no longer forgotten and acted to associatively cue ideas that were less creative.

The fate of the provided uses was different depending on how the participants were asked to treat them—either as something to avoid or as something to prompt their idea generation. In the hint condition there was less forgetting—but also less creativity.

conceptual search spaces

From a broader perspective, this illustrates ongoing and adaptive changes in our dynamic idea landscapes with some ideas becoming more reachable and others less accessible. In our idea landscapes thoughts are always forming and re-forming, with some ideas rising to peak awareness and others receding.

 

—> For more on the experiments described above see:

Benjamin C. Storm and Trisha N. Patel (2014). Forgetting as a consequence and enabler of creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, volume 40, number 6, pages 1594-1609. The quotation is found on page 1603.

The Magic of “Inside Out”

July 4, 2015 By in control dialing, detail stepping, dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , , , , ,

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?

 

 

Jumping in—to get ideas

May 14, 2015 By in control dialing, detail stepping, dynamic environments, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

Recently, talking to an experienced designer, we heard that her colleagues often intentionally waited a long time before they actually got started on a new project. By delaying and deeply mulling creative options over in their minds they felt that their work would be stronger and more creative.

But is this “working entirely in our heads” the best approach? What might be gained if we just got going sooner?

Some of the difficulties that we imagine may fall away once we actually start putting our ideas out there into the world. Our idea landscape quickly changes once we get started. What we are looking at and working with associatively cues new ideas, our well-learned procedures kick in, we start to experiment with ideas—trying out, shifting, and reconfiguring possibilities to discover novel promising options.

“There is a much (much!) wider range of information and many more possibilities that will be ‘ready to mind’ once [we become] immersed in the appropriate problem-solving context, which allows processes such as automatic reminding and the triggering of ‘if-then’ rules and so on to come to the fore and ‘share the load’ of thinking with our conscious and deliberate efforts at control.” (The Agile Mind, p. 595.)

Part of the benefit of getting started arises through the “co-evolution” of our understanding of a problem’s requirements with its possible solutions. Creative problems and their solutions often mutually inform each other. We’ll expand on this in an upcoming blog entry where we will talk about the vital role of our working environments in prompting us to bridge to significant insights. These “bridges” emerge especially during our actual hands-on, interactive, individual and team-based collaborations.

To take a concrete example, John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar, has some wise words about the value of just getting started and getting feedback as soon as possible:

 

—> For additional discussion see: Wilma Koutstaal, The Agile Mind, (New York, Oxford University Press: 2012), especially pages 594-595.

What makes some teams smarter than others?

April 29, 2015 By in idea landscapes, teams, thinking components Tags: , , , , ,

How could we answer this question? To find out what makes some teams smarter and work better than others we could look separately at the characteristics of individuals in the team (e.g., how intelligent they each are or how open to experience they each are). Or, instead, we could look at how the team as a team worked and problem-solved together.

To answer what enabled teams to work well collectively, researchers looked at newly formed teams (of four members each) who were asked to think together to perform a wide range of tasks. They were asked to generate ideas, solve puzzles, detect patterns, and make evaluative judgments.

Groups that collectively showed greater intelligence, as shown in higher performance across this wide range of tasks, were distinguished by two factors:

(1) They communicated more often and their communications were more evenly distributed across the team.

(2) Individuals on the team excelled on a test that measures social/emotional perceptiveness (“Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test”). This test asks you to judge someone’s mental state (e.g., curious, preoccupied, interested) from a photograph of just that person’s eyes.

These two factors were earlier established as important to effective team collaboration in experiments using small face-to-face teams. A more recent study (published in late 2014) asked a new question—would the collective intelligence of groups that met solely online or only virtually be influenced by these same two factors?

Newly formed teams of four people were situated in a room. There were two types of teams, and two types of rooms. For face-to-face teams, the members met in a small room, each team member with a laptop, and they could all see one other, talk directly, and they knew who was on their team. For the online teams, the team members were randomly co-located with other team members in a large room interspersed with other similarly scattered teams, where they did not know or see each other and could communicate solely on laptops using text-based chat online.

If directly reading subtle interpersonal cues (e.g., facial expressions, tone of voice, body language) during face-to-face interactions is a critical team mechanism then it would be expected that online teams would perform more poorly. But that wasn’t what was found—the online teams, who scored high on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, did just as well as the face-to-face groups who also had high abilities on that test. This suggests that the virtual teams could still perceive subtle interpersonal cues in the text messages they shared, perhaps conveyed through sentence structure, phrasing, word choice, timing, or tone.

Equally important, the effects of conversational turn taking also were the same in both groups. In online teams where participation was more equally shared, and not dominated by one or two individuals, online teams performed a wide range of tasks just as well as their face-to-face peers who also had a democratic approach to group problem solving.

So, it’s not just your cognitive ability or how smart as an individual you or your team members are—it’s also how well you can coordinate and be “heedful” of others in your group and the situation you jointly find yourselves in (whether working virtually or face-to-face). Part of the key to better team performance is also making sure that each team member shares in communicating within the group.

Sharing in communication and noticing interpersonal cues, whether in the eyes or “between the lines,” may contribute to a broader group characteristic of heedfulness. As we observe in Innovating Minds:

 “In heedfulness the actions and thinking of a group or team emerge based not entirely on habit but on a ‘heedful’ monitoring and comprehending of an unfolding dynamic situation. Each person acts in a way that converges, supplements, or assists with the overall collective effort.

Heedfulness is not solely an effort at paying attention. Rather it is this, combined with an active taking care and staying in touch with new information and its immediate and broader implications—for ourselves, for others, and for a collective envisioning of a larger unfolding joint enterprise.”

—> For more see also:

David Engel, Anita Williams Woolley, Lisa X. Jing, Christopher F. Chabris, & Thomas W. Malone (2014). Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face. PLoS ONE, 9, e115212, pp. 1-16.

Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, A, Nada Hashmi, & Thomas W. Malone (2010). Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science, 330, pp. 686–688.

An example of the Reading of the Mind in the Eyes test can be found here.

 

Creativity at play

February 12, 2015 By in dynamic environments, goals, idea landscapes, making and finding Tags: , , , , , ,

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 in associative cuing, control dialing, goals, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

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.

Dynamic brains & dynamic environments for creativity: How so?

December 27, 2014 By in dynamic brains, dynamic environments, exploration, idea landscapes Tags: , , , ,

Everyone today is telling us that we need to regularly “exercise” our brain. But what does mental exercise mean for creativity? When we regularly workout “mentally” what is really changing in our brain?

By mental exercise, we mean engaging in challenging activities that require us to pay close attention and learn new things and make novel, often subtle, distinctions between similar-appearing things. The distinctions could be sensory-perceptual, or about meaning, or about action. Our brains are continually learning and forming predictions based on the environments we choose and make for ourselves. Environments matter.

Our brain—in response to our environments—changes continually, in multiple ways, and across multiple timescales. Both the structure of the brain (that is, how it is built) and the function (that is, the ways it processes information) may change in the face of experience. At the structural level, stimulating mental exercise may lead to the formation of new synaptic connections between neurons (that is, changing “gray matter”). It may also lead to more efficient connections between neurons and neuronal ensembles at long distances through changing what is known as “white matter” or axons. Greater white and gray matter connectivity may enable us to process and understand information more quickly and efficiently.

In the longer-term, our increased active grappling with novelty might lead to the generation of new neurons (neurogenesis) in regions of the brain such as the hippocampus, important in memory and in making connections between our experiences. Challenging mental exercise may make it more likely that new neurons that are born throughout our lifespan actually survive and become meaningfully connected to our existing memory and experience networks. New, effortful, and successful learning is the ticket to the survival and integration of many newly generated neurons. This could allow us to develop an increasingly deeper and richer wellspring of knowledge to draw upon in our discoveries and problem solving.

We should also consider the conjoined benefits of mental with physical exercise. Putting the two together may yield benefits that are more than the sum of their parts.

So what works best? Particularly potent are activities that involve naturally occurring combinations of mental and physical actions and that call on fine-grained multimodal coordination in time and space, such as various forms of dance, theater, filmmaking, musical performance, or real-world making and shaping. Dislodging old unproductive habits, deliberately varying, and paying attention in the moment all help our brains to dynamically develop brand new neural connections. We should choose and nurture activities that offer us long-term challenges with ever-unfolding possibilities.

As we observe in Part 1 of our book, Innovating Minds:

“We cannot understand creativity, or identify potential barriers to the generation of novel and innovative ideas and methods, if we isolate our mind or brain from our environments.  Our minds, brains, and environments are in perpetual interplay.  It is at their intersections that new ideas emerge and can be realized.”

 

–>For some empirical research on our dynamic brains and environments see:

Newly learning to juggle is a stimulus to brain plasticity. Juggling changes the brain’s gray matter. And juggling changes the brain’s white matter.

How stimulating environments “makes new neurons, and effortful learning keeps them alive.”

Learning to vary: An overlooked avenue to mental flexibility and innovation

December 13, 2014 By in creative constraints, exploration, idea landscapes Tags: , , ,

It’s easy to repeat. But, we can also ask ourselves to not repeat––and reward ourselves for deliberately varying. Although little recognized, rewarding variability is a powerful shaper of creativity and innovation.

As we will see in Part 4 of our book Innovating Minds:

“Deliberately varying our actions helps to bring different sets of thoughts and procedures close together in time and space within our individual and group idea landscapes. This, in turn, allows us to combine and reconfigure aspects of ideas and ways of doing things to make novel combinations. . . . It is not always an entirely new approach that is needed. Sometimes “repeating with a difference” frees us to see new options.”

Whether shy or bold, lab animals that were rewarded for interacting in different ways with new objects later explored more widely. Trained dolphins, too, that were rewarded for varying showed newly emerging novel behaviors that had never before been seen in dolphins.

In our own creative endeavors we can also prompt ourselves to do things differently within constraints. Some questions we can ask:

How can we better learn to (appropriately) “reinforce variability” in ourselves, and in others?

How might we structure our physical, symbolic, and technological environments to better support “useful” experimentation and variation?

Do we too strongly emphasize minor variability in what we already know and do well, with mostly “known” but smaller rewards (sometimes called “exploitation”)? Do our attempts at minor variations come at the cost of more far-afield, novel, and bold exploration that is more risky and uncertain––but also potentially yields much larger rewards and creative breakthroughs?

What might be some of the cognitive processes that underlie the demonstrated benefits of reinforcing variability? That is: What’s being learned when variability is reinforced? What cognitive and perceptual processes (besides motivational ones) might contribute to the observed effects?

 

–>To further explore routes to greater creative/productive variability in behavior see:

Wilma Koutstaal (2012) The Agile Mind [Learning to vary versus learning to repeat, in chapter 5]  (New York, NY: Oxford University Press) pp. 220-233.

Patricia Stokes (2001). Variability, constraints, and creativity: Shedding light on Claude Monet. American Psychologist, 56 pp. 355-359.

Alison Weiss & Allen Neuringer (2012). Reinforced variability enhances object exploration in shy and bold rats. Physiology & Behavior, 107 pp. 451–457.

Beyond simple brainstorming: Emerging, without submerging, good ideas

November 4, 2014 By in associative cuing, idea landscapes, teams Tags: , ,

Most everyone knows what brainstorming is—the group idea generation process where any and all ideas are welcomed, and ideas can be combined or built upon. Not being “judgy” is key, etc.

But how many of us know how to assess the effectiveness of a brainstorming session? And how to make what may be a good process even better?

Compared to what?

Individuals in a group brainstorming session may generate many ideas—but how do those ideas compare with the number and quality of ideas that would be produced by the same number of individuals working alone generating their own ideas?

Many research studies and meta-analyses show that typical interacting face-to-face group brainstorming sessions produce fewer unique (non-redundant) ideas than do the same number of individuals working alone. The ideas generated in the typical face-to-face group are also of lower average quality than if the individuals had worked independently.

Why might this be?

Hearing the ideas of others has the effect of associatively cuing our ideas in the same direction as what we are hearing. This can be helpful if it occurs at the right time by cognitively stimulating our thinking in new and useful directions. But such associative cuing can be a big drawback if it occurs at the wrong time, or too soon, preventing us from reaching and articulating ideas we otherwise would have formed.

Another factor is that ideas compete with one another for emergence in our awareness and “bottlenecks” may be created while we wait our turn to speak.

As we observe in Innovating Minds: “Verbally expressing our ideas to the group too soon may lead to a single shared idea landscape—without the beneficial input of each individual’s contributions and successive reworkings. Variations on simpler face-to-face group brainstorming are attempts to avoid the drawbacks of jumping into a single idea space too soon.”

Brainstorming variants

So what should we do?

We might try brainwriting. Here we each individually and silently write down our ideas and place them on idea sheets in the center of a table. People in the group, when they feel they are ready, can select and read the ideas of others, adding to or elaborating on those ideas if they choose. Another approach is to pass the idea sheets along. In the 6-3-5 method: 6 people each generate and write down 3 ideas on their own. Then they pass them along 5 times, silently and in parallel building on the ideas of others, until the idea sheet returns to where it started.

Sketches rather than words could also be circulated this way or later displayed as a “gallery” of ideas. Or ideas could be generated individually and then selectively shared and later broadcast more widely electronically via a computer network.

Each of these are potential ways of maximizing the diverseness of our idea landscapes, reaping the cognitively stimulating benefits of encountering the ideas of others without incurring creativity costs. Such “pairs of pairs of pairs” methods allow varied contributions and intermeshing of the contributions of others in a way that can optimize both individual and group idea generation.

 

–> For a recent extensive review see: Wolfgang Stroebe, Bernard A. Nijstad, & Eric F. Rietzschel, “Beyond Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: The Evolution of a Question” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 43, 2010, Pages 157–203.

Creativity friendly environments: Two examples

September 19, 2014 By in idea landscapes, making and finding, teams Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

What makes for a “creativity friendly” environment?

There is no single “one size fits all” answer… but here are some broader themes to think about. Let’s look at two recent examples through the lens of our iCASA framework.

(1) Shared learning and experimentation space

A very large Chinese factory that produced mobile phones had a massive open floor plan where the workers on the production lines and the supervisors were continually and readily seen. What would happen to production speed and quality if some of the lines were surrounded by a privacy curtain?

A field study with four production lines randomly chosen to be surrounded by such a curtain for several months found that the curtain increased improvisation, encouraged “productive deviance,” and led to higher productivity and quality. The comparative increase in team privacy afforded by the curtain allowed temporary, smaller issues to be solved locally through line-level learning and it promoted collective team knowledge.

Observations by embedded student researchers on the curtain-surrounded lines revealed that the workers actively switched roles to learn multiple tasks and enable team cross-support, fluid adaptation, experimentation, and learning.

The innovations that were observed “were a mix of preexisting and new ideas: some of these were ideas that were just waiting for an opportunity at experimentation, while others reflected novel learning on the line through the increased levels of experimentation the curtain enabled.’’ (Bernstein, 2012, p. 202)

The curtain allowed the line to collaborate and discuss new ideas and to iteratively test and try process improvements, arriving at successful prototypes before sharing them outside of their local idea landscape. It formed a “scrutiny-reduced” supportive making-and-finding environment where the workers and the line managers could adaptively and contextually experiment with an increased degree of autonomy.

—> For the research study, see Ethan S. Bernstein, The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control, Administrative Science Quarterly, 57, 181–216. Also, see Bernstein’s, “The transparency trap”

(2) Cross-pollination at IKEA

IKEA’s product catalogs feature multi-color contemporary images of home furnishings in various natural looking settings. The company, though, was looking to move from its longstanding tradition of studio photography of its products to computer-generated images. Transitioning to computer-generated imagery would greatly reduce logistical and environmental costs because the many products would no longer need to be flown in and configured on site. Instead of physically creating multiple culturally specific settings, for example a typical Japanese kitchen, a German kitchen, and an American kitchen, computer-generated imagery would make such reconfigurations much simpler. But how could IKEA make this transition in a creativity-friendly way, while preserving catalog image quality and empowering employees throughout the change process?

The solution was simple and incisively creative: They started small scale, and then scaled up. After initial experimentation and demonstration of the feasibility of the computer-generated imagery process, all of IKEA’s studio photographers were required to learn to use the 3D computer generated process and vice versa. This in-depth cross-training extended the skills and understanding of both groups, and led to an increase in quality, with computer-generated images that were essentially indistinguishable from conventional photographs. There was a synergistic meeting of the two approaches to image making, and a fuller appreciation of the goals, aspirations, and constraints that each uniquely faced. The merging of techniques expanded and deepened everyone’s individual and shared idea landscapes and mental models. There was learning and unlearning at the same time.

—> For more background on the IKEA process, see: Kirsty Parkin, “Building 3D with IKEA”