Category Archives: making and finding

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.

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.

 

 

How Re-Playing Can Help Us Reach Our Goals: Realizing the many creative values of iteration

January 31, 2019 By in creative constraints, detail stepping, making and finding, productive mistakes Tags: , ,

Often some whoosh is just what we need.
Source: Margalob via Wikimedia Commons

 

For some of us, iteration has a bad name.  We may think that returning to a problem multiple times, re-visiting it, coming back to it and thinking it through yet again, is a waste of time and energy.  Couldn’t we just move forward, or settle everything on one go through?  Why all this cycling back, and reconsidering what we’ve already discussed, and made plans for.  Why can’t we just do it?

True, not every instance of iteration is helpful.  Sometimes iteration can be a sign that we’re in a muddle or lack clarity in our goals. Yet in many cases iteration is precisely what is needed.  By realizing the broad – and deep – values of iteration and re-play, we can give our creative problem solving a great deal of “whoosh.”  And often some whoosh is just what we need.

Benefits of iteration

Research suggests that iteration may be beneficial – and even necessary – for the success of a creative project in situations where the project we are embarking on is unfamiliar, poorly defined, or complex.

Iteration in these sorts of situations, when we don’t initially really know what the constraints, limits, or opportunities for a project are, can allow us to gradually learn more about both the problem and possible solutions.  We can integrate what we learn from earlier plays through with our later insights, leading us to a more creative, and creatively interconnected, outcome.

Staying open to re-plays may also enable us to more flexibly and effectively deal with a changing context. Having a clear understanding of our goals for each iteration also may make the process especially productive.

What’s your mental picture of iteration? 

 How do you think of the process of iteration?  Although re-playing can seem quite straightforward, we can have quite different underlying pictures or mental images of what iteration is.  And the mental images we are using may shape both what we expect of the process, and why we may become frustrated with it.

Let’s take a look at five different ways of picturing iteration.  The five mental pictures are based on a detailed and systematic analysis of the ways “iteration” is really used, and talked about, by people working in design and development.  As the researchers in the study remind us, “Iteration is a fact of life in any project” (p. 153).

Given it’s unavoidable, it’s best for us to understand that we can have different mental pictures of what iteration is and what it’s meant to do.  The researchers identified five different mental pictures we might have. I have elaborated their pictures with verbal analogies.

Depending on the creative circumstances, any one or more of these pictures may fit best.  And it may be that the best-fitting picture itself changes as a creative endeavor moves forward, getting closer to completion.

Picture 1 –  The Home Cook.  Imagine a home cook, trying to decide what’s possible for a tasty meal using only the ingredients already on hand in the pantry and refrigerator.  Here he explores many possible ideas, going back-and-forth, forward-and-back, narrowing in as he gathers greater knowledge of what’s actually on hand, and this guides his various ideas of what delicious options there might be.  There could be lots of variation in what comes to mind, and where he ends up may not be anywhere close to where he started.  This form of iteration is exploration, or “iterating around problem and solution while elaborating them concurrently” (p. 167).

Picture 2 – The Crime Detective.  Bring to mind a detective as she conjures up different possibilities at a crime scene.  Here she looks for clues, successively drilling down from broad and vague possibilities into the specifics of just where, when, and how the crime may have taken place. Once she has arrived at a strong initial hypothesis, she tries to fill in any missing pieces to test it and home in on what really happened in full detail.  This form of iteration is concretization, or “revisiting elements of the design while increasing their levels of definition, ensuring consistency” (p. 167).

Picture 3 – The Digital Photographer.  Envision a photographer working on a photograph of a desert landscape for an exhibition.  The scene is set, but in her computer graphics editor she can slightly adjust the color, nudge the contrast, and tweak the exposure, each time getting closer and closer to a setting of parameters that is just right for her aesthetic aims.  By the time she is finished, it is not that she has arrived at a completely new photograph; it is, though, a meaningfully different work.  This form of iteration is convergence, or “point-by-point improvement of parameters and details, at a fixed level of definition” (p. 167).

Picture 4 – The Interior Decorator.  Imagine an interior decorator, who has already decided on what the largest pieces of furniture are for a particular room, and where they should go, but is rearranging the smaller accents and decor, trying this, trying that, making minor tugs and refining tweaks after the central decisions have been made.  There is nothing amiss with the primary design, but the adjustments improve secondary aspects such as reducing the cost of the redesigned room.  This form of iteration is refinement, or “adjusting, improving, perfecting once primary objectives are met” (p. 167).

Picture 5 – The Long-Distance Runner.  To your mind’s eye, bring a resolute long-distance runner, counting down the miles.  Here, the runner is gradually increasing the information she has gained, first along one part of the route, then another part, then the next, until the run is complete.  This form of iteration is incremental completion, or “repeating a task on different information to incrementally arrive at a goal” (p. 167).

Which “picture” of iteration we’re working with has implications for how we expect the process to unfold.  And it may be that the picture of play/re-play/re-play that we have itself needs to change, as we move forward on a creative or change-making endeavor.

For Picture 1 – the home cook – it may be that any single suggested idea is quite different from the prior proposed idea, so it can feel as though there’s no progress being made, or that the progress is chaotic and unpredictable at best.  But if we stick with it, a delightful meal may soon be on offer!  For some of the other pictures it can seem that the iterations leave little room for surprise or newness.  But not all forms of surprise are welcome.  And sometimes even quite subtle adjustments or refinements make a big positive difference.

Reference

Wynn, D. C., & Eckert, C. M. (2017).  Perspectives on iteration in design and development.Research in Engineering Design, 28, 153–184.

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.

 

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 makes for good creative feedback?

February 4, 2018 By in exploration, making and finding, productive mistakes Tags: , , , ,

Pliable Feedback?  Source: Tequask via Wikimedia Commons

 

We’ve all been there.  Imagine it with me now.  You’ve been working and thinking hard, and now that first version of your latest work or creative effort is done.  Now it’s time to put it out there to show it to your coworkers, or to your friends, or to the rest of your team.  It’s time for someone else to comment on your work, giving their impressions on what you’ve done.  It’s time to ask for feedback.

How does the process of asking for feedback on our drafts and our emergent ideas shape our creative process?  And what, exactly, makes for “good” feedback?

—> For more see: “Are You Using Open Questions as Springboards to Creativity?”

How’s your robot feeling today?

August 13, 2017 By in creative constraints, exploration, making and finding, representations Tags: , , , , , , ,

Two poses of the robot Nao.

 

Soon social and assistive robots will become ever more a part of our lives. They could be in our homes, our hospitals, and our schools, helping us with childcare, elderly care, in rehabilitation from injury or disease, and as social and assistive aids in all sorts of capacities.

But how much do we know about the psychology of our interactions with robots? What should any one social or assistive robot look like? How should it move and react to us –– and to what sorts of information? Should it appear to show “emotions” and be responsive to our own emotions? How much like a person should an assistive robot be? How innovative can we be in designing robots to be responsive assistants and sure supports including in times of stress or in tension-fraught situations?

Let’s take a look at two different recent research studies that explore how we understand and respond to expressions of emotion in robots. . . .

—> See: How do we Read Emotions in Robots: Of social robots, innovation spaces, and creatively finding things out.

Are you recognizing what really energizes your creative making?

May 7, 2017 By in making and finding, representations, thinking components Tags: , , , , ,

Source: m-louis via Wikimedia Commons

Ideas in your head.

Ideas on paper.

Asked which one is better for carrying your creativity forward:  conjuring and imagining ideas in your mind’s eye, or physically sketching them on paper, it’s a fair bet that we’ll say sketching.  Put your ideas on paper.  Capture them.  Put those representations out there –– physically –– in the world.  Grab a pen, a pencil, it doesn’t too much matter, but get those ideas on paper, out there, in the world, not just in your head.

We’ve read this, heard this, been told (and maybe even told ourselves) this many times.  But why?

—For more see:

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

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?

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

 

 

Can we train ourselves to be more mentally flexible?

February 2, 2016 By in creative constraints, dynamic environments, making and finding Tags: , , ,
There is not one single master key for sustaining mental agility. Source: Dinkum via Wikimedia Commons

There is not one single master key for sustaining mental agility. Source: Dinkum via Wikimedia Commons

 

What keeps us mentally agile? Can we train ourselves to be more mentally flexible?

There is continued debate on whether more narrowly focused forms of “brain training” on specific tasks are actually beneficial. Often the training simply enhances performance on the trained-on task itself, with little effect carrying over to unrelated tasks. And some claims for the benefits of narrowly focused brain training are exaggerated and misleading. However, it’s not all pessimistic.

There is growing hope, based on a wide range of theoretical and empirical findings in humans (e.g., Karr et al., 2014) and other animals (e.g., Kempermann, 2012)) that creatively combining different types of cognitive training can work — especially if the training includes novelty and variety.

Creativity packets

Consider what seems to be a relatively simple and straightforward task. You are given a few dozen multi-colored pipe cleaners, and asked to use them to create a small vase filled with flowers. . . .

For more see Wilma’s Psychology Today blog post: “Being Creative about Staying Creative.”

Staying the course

January 23, 2016 By in dynamic environments, making and finding, teams Tags: , , , , ,
Korean traffic detour sign. Source: P.Ctnt via Wikimedia Commons.

Korean traffic detour sign. Source: P.Ctnt via Wikimedia Commons.

Take a look at this Apple web page describing ways producer/musician Greg Kurstin, in working with the singer/songwriter Adele, anticipates — and eludes — likely detours during their creative process.

  • What are the materials that are ready to hand/ready to mind for Kurstin? How did they get there?
  • How does he clear the path to capturing ideas? What different ways does he use to make sure his ideas don’t escape?
  • How do gaps in time contribute to their creative process?
  • How does the thinking-making process repeatedly interweave between singer/songwriter and producer/musician?

With these insights in mind, what possible obstacles are detouring you on your creative path — and how could you better elude them?

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

December 19, 2015 By in exploration, goals, making and finding, productive mistakes Tags: , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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What’s your creative destination?

November 15, 2015 By in detail stepping, goals, making and finding Tags: , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sources:

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

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

Keep Moving . . .

November 10, 2015 By in dynamic environments, exploration, making and finding, teams Tags: ,

Asked to conjure up a mental image of someone who is thinking, many of us will envision a seated figure.  Perhaps we imagine something like Auguste Rodin’s famous statue of “The Thinker” — he leans over, resting his chin on his hand, still, silently lost in thought.

But opposing this sedentary image there may be other images or recollections that come to mind instead.  Prompted by our associations, we may bring to mind, instead, the prodigious walking habits of such diverse thinker/creators as Charles Darwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, or more recently, the intense walking-meetings of the late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs.

. . . For more on “tracking down how and why physical activity boosts creative thinking” see Wilma’s Psychology Today post here.

“Goal tuning” at Apple, Inc.

October 13, 2015 By in creative constraints, goals, making and finding Tags: , ,

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

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

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

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

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

The Five Interrelated Components of Goal Tuning

The Five Interrelated Components of Goal Tuning

 

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

—> For additional background

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

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

Cycling Change

July 11, 2015 By in exploration, goals, making and finding Tags: , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring at the edges of what we know

March 11, 2015 By in associative cuing, control dialing, detail stepping, dynamic environments, making and finding Tags: , , , , ,

Sometimes when we are exploring for ideas or information online, using a search engine, we have a general sense of what we’re looking for—but we can’t put it precisely into words. Yet, we would readily recognize promising outcomes or directions if we saw them.

Some of our online searching goals are more open ended and multifaceted. Here, getting an answer quickly is not our top priority. We’d rather embark on a somewhat slower search that got us closer to where we ultimately would like to be. The journey itself is part of the learning. We make and find as we go along, with each step providing us with new pathways.

How might our search tools themselves better enable us to truly explore? What if our search tools allowed us to fluidly and rapidly express our changing sense of where we really wanted to go?

One recent example that actually registers and iteratively acts upon our search intent in an interactive fashion—repeatedly inviting our feedback—is called SciNet. Imagine you have a research question about gestures. You enter the search term “gestures” and, on a radar-like circular screen, you are presented with a range of alternative topics—a number of which you might not even have thought of, say, “immersive environment” or “accelerometer.” Suppose further, that you can then move those topics about on the screen. You can pull the most relevant topics into the center of the radar screen. Suggestions that seem more peripheral for your purposes, you can move away closer to the outer edge of the circular radar-like display. The system dynamically responds in real time with new suggestions as your expressed interests change.

Such “interactive intent” search has been shown in a study, using SciNet, to provide significantly improved quality of retrieved information, allowing users to access both more relevant and more novel information in an efficient way. The search tool allows us to deeply tunnel into a meaning space that is already familiar to us (exploitation) but also offers support for experimental forays into the currently less well known (exploration). In the words of the system’s developers: “The model and its environment (the user) form an online loop, and learning involves finding a balance between exploration (showing items from uncharted information space for feedback) and exploitation (showing items most likely to be relevant, given the current user intent model).”

This interactive visualization allows the searcher to capitalize on their natural ability to rapidly and largely effortlessly recognize—rather than recall from their memory—relevant information. With this visualization we can rapidly adjust where we are on our “cognitive control dial” as we cycle through moments of automatic recognition and more deliberate evaluation and goal setting. The interactive visual display maps to both our visual and motor capabilities—allowing rapid updating of our search intent without costly sidetracking of our thinking. In this way, the boundary line between what’s “inside” and what’s “outside” in our thinking/meaning space becomes more permeable and more fully integrated with our unfolding thought processes.

Developing such cognitively friendly and fluid interfaces for structuring and guiding our exploratory idea search and experimentation are examples of what we broadly call thinking scaffoldings. As we explain in Innovating Minds, thinking scaffoldings are a way of productively guiding our perception-action cycles. They are intentional queryings and quarryings of our idea landscapes that are meant to help bootstrap (that is, “scaffold”) our idea generation processes. Thinking scaffoldings include not only databases or tools for extracting and identifying promising ideas or directions but also many other modes of scaffolding our idea generation processes such as adopting design heuristics, engaging in reflective verbalization, and drawing on tools for analogical or biomimetic search.

Thinking scaffoldings assist us to transition and keep moving across ideas, prodding us to re-categorize and shake-up or unsettle creative objects or their configurations. They help us to see things we could try or attempt—without an assurance that what we are trying will work.  They prompt us to test and revise, look and revise, and test again.

 

—> For more on exploratory online search see:

Dorota Glowacka, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Ksenia Konuyshkova, Kumaripaba Athukorala, Samuel Kaski, & Giulio Jacucci. (2013) Directing exploratory search: Reinforcement learning from user interactions with keywords. Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 117-128.

Gary Marchionini (2006) Exploratory search: From finding to understanding. Communications of the ACM, 49(4), pp. 41-46.

Tuukka Ruotsalo, Giulio Jacucci, Petri Myllymäki, & Samuel Kaski (2015) Interactive intent modeling: Information discovery beyond search. Communications of the ACM, 58 (1), pp. 86-92.

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.

 

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

January 3, 2015 By in control dialing, dynamic brains, goals, making and finding Tags: , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

So what’s a robot for?

September 27, 2014 By in detail stepping, exploration, making and finding, teams Tags: , , , ,

Most of us have encountered the notion of “functional fixedness” – our tendency to yoke a particular use or function on to objects. For example, we might assume that a spoon is for scooping or a chair is for sitting, but less readily recognize that a spoon might serve as a lever or a chair might act as a doorstop.

So what’s a robot for?

Cirque du Soleil, partnering with ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena, sought to creatively call upon precision aerial robots as collaborative dance performers. They experimented with sundry semblances and scenarios but discovered that the quadrocopters truly came into their own as…. lampshades. The lampshades each can sport multicolor designs and textures, tassels and various appendages, and convincingly assume idiosyncratic roles and personalities.

In the words of the actor Nicolas Leresche, who fluidly interplayed with the flying machines:

“Actors think they are the ones who make objects move. I think that, on the contrary, it’s the objects that make us move. In the case of drones, even more so! They are companions (in an etymological sense), confrères, brothers.”

–> Here’s the quote and a video tracking parts of the team’s creative process.

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”

 

Creativity Cross-Checks and Queries, No. 7

August 17, 2014 By in detail stepping, making and finding, productive mistakes

We use the expression creativity cross-checks and queries to refer to questions we ask to encourage reflection and connections to your own work and practice . . .

Here’s an insightful quotation to reflect on:

“I think initial ‘concepts’ or ideas are always over-rated. My starting points are usually quite simple—the fun and skill is in the making. . . . What I love is the physical process of making a machine. It’s partly drawing—not pretty drawings but drawing as a way of thinking through problems. . . . The making process also involves lots of prototypes—there are many problems drawings can never solve.”

— Inventor and cartoonist Tim Hunkin

Cross-checks and queries:

  • how might you give yourself more time and space to try repeatedly and make productive/promising mistakes?
  • could you more keenly enjoy the wending and winding of the discovery process itself?
  • do you invite varied formats to guide you to what might be left out (both details and abstract principles)?

For more creativity cross-checks and queries (Parts 1 through 6) see our: Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).