[music] Let's say you wanted to find a creative person.
What would you look for? How would you find a creative person?
Is it their personality? Is it something genetic?
Is it something in their behavior? And so this is a really interesting
question. And it's been a question that
psychologists have studied for a long time.
In general, the common wisdom, and, and early research, suggested that creatively
performing individuals, that is people that are able to do creative tasks.
They tend to have broad interests. They tend to see complexity, that they're
looking for more complex things. Are intuitive, they can work off their
gut. They're aesthetically sensitive.
They're ambiguity tolerant. And they're also self-confident.
And these are the, the kind of the features that are, that are part of what a
individual will have. There's a question of whether creative
individuals are born or made. The kind of things I just talked about,
these kind of things that we just talked about are not personality traits.
They're not actually a part of your personality.
The personality being the thing that stays stable over time.
So I measure you today, and I measure you tomorrow, or a year from now, that you
would be, measure the same on those traits.
And those traits, aesthetic sensitivity is not something that psychologists call a
personality trait. And so, despite a hundred years of study,
there's not really been a great finding. That is we're not absolutely certain that
there's this thing called the creative personality.
In fact, we're pretty certain that there's not a thing called a creative personality.
And so what about that? We want to think about that.
Personality, for psychologists personality is defined into these sort of five
personality traits. One is agreeableness, to what extent do
you go along with others and you get along with others.
Extroversion, extrovertly oriented, due to the extent that you bring you get, gain
energy from the outside. Neuroticism, to what extent that you
worry, and you're nervous about things. Conscientiousness, that sort of follow
through, persistence, and openness. To what extent are you open to new
experiences? And so the, among these big five, there's
not one called creative, or creativity, although you may have some suspicion that
some of these are related to creativity, in fact.
Well here's the chart that shows a study that was done.
The study basically had people that measured their part of creative, part of
their personality and then had them do a creative task and so what they tried to do
was say, is that element of your personality related to your ability to do
creative tasks. Remember these five things that are there,
these five possibilities for what is, drives creativity.
And so we can see here that agreeableness, to what extent they were agreeable, had no
correlation. This is a correlation chart.
It had no correlation with, creative, creative output.
So that is to say, if someone was very high in agreeableness, as based on a
personality test, it did not matter if they were high or low with respect to how
much creative output they had. The second one does have some does have
some correlation, and so we can see here that at you know 0.12, somewhere in there
that extra version actually does seem to have some correlation with creative
output. So people who are more extroverted tend to
have a little bit more creative output. Next we see neuroticism.
Neuroticism is negatively correlated with creative output.
Why would that be? Well, maybe it's because, well go ahead
and think about it for a moment. Maybe it's because there were people were
worried about the experiment, they're worried about other people who were trying
to do something creative. We're sort of constantly second guessing
ourselves, and that would make us a little bit less creative.
Then we have this conscientiousness, it seems pretty high actually.
The conscientiousness, the follow through, the persistancy seem to have a fair amount
more of correlation with creative output. And then also openness.
So it looks like of the, of the five personality traits, we have three of them
that are actually somewhat correlated with creative output.
The only problem is, that these correlations are not very strong, and so
if you know statistics and if you go into statistics and do this kind of research,
you'll see that a, r squared at 0.1. Right?
It, it, Where you see where 0.1 is. Is barely significant.
It's really barely above the level of noise.
And so oh, there's something here. It's not very strong.
And so it really doesn't tell us what the secret is, to make a person creative.
Let me add one column in this chart. So again, when this researcher did this
study, they measured people's, base, based on these personality traits and they also
added another measure, and this measure was called cognitive ability, the thing we
call IQ, Basically how smart they are as, as, as far as we measure those.
And all of a sudden we see a large, much larger correlation that being smart is
more important than being neurotic and being open and being extroverted and being
all those things with the respect to the output.
Isn't that interesting? So there's something we possibly can do.
Can we change your smartness? Can we change how your IQ is?
Well I think at least creativity we, we don't want to, okay, I think we don't want
to say that creativity is an attribute of our personality in any kind of technical
sense right? So there's not a thing in the ways that
personality is measured by psychologists that create is part of that, but what we
want to do is think about another way of thinking about it.
What research suggests is that the way that we think, the harbi-, habits of
perception, how it is we bring information into our brain, how it is we think
different thoughts. So remember, IQ was correlated, so IQ
maybe has something to do with that. And specifically, what it is that the
power to be creative is going to come down to three basic things.
Perception, so perception is about getting information in, but if I want to have
ideas, that's on the basis of something. We call that those, those that data, that
information. And so perception is the most important
thing to get information in. Once I have the information in, I have to
think about it. I have to put it together in different
ways and say I saw this here, I saw that there, How do I bring them together into a
new idea. So thinking is a part of it also.
Then finally an idea does no good in your head.
It has to come out and that's what we're going to call expression.
How do I get my ideas out of my head? And without being able to bring
information in, without thinking about things in different ways, without
expressing our ideas, we're not going to get to a new place.
And so what we want to think about is what can go wrong in each of these, and how is
it that we can protect ourselves against things going wrong in each of these cases.
So here's a picture of the model and how we're going to think about it.
Perception bringing information in, intellection how we think things through.
And expression is how we put our ideas back out in the world for other people to
see, to judge and to test. At this point, I'd like to go into a
little more detail in perception. Let's think about perception about
bringing information in, and what's involved in that because again, if you
can't bring information in, you're not going to be able to have new ideas.
There are at least three, I mean there are many, many, many issues in perception but
let me just talk about three of them. I want to talk about, actually there is
four of them I want to talk about. I want to talk about selective perception,
that is when we choose what to pay attention to in a suboptimal way.
We choose what to pay attention to in a way that does not.
Help us become more innovative. Stereotyping.
Stereotyping is where we use a short hand, we make a reference to something without
really thinking through what it is, without really seeing.
We do limited data gathering. Often times we won't gather all of the
data we possibly could. We can't bring the data in.
And also the distance we are from the data.
The data, maybe we're too close to it, or we're too far away from the problem.
We probably have all expereinced that where we're too close to the problem, it's
realy difficult to. See beyond that or if you're too far away
you don't have the details you need to see it so let's talk about each of these in a
little bit more detail. Perception is about looking without
seeing, and I think through this idea of being able to see what's really there.
And bring it into our brains, so that we can actually use it as a base to new
ideas. Take a look at an image like this.
This kind of image is an optical illusion, and it may be that something that looks
like its moving when its really not moving we've all seen all kinds of optical
illusions, the way things change shape. That has to do with our, actually the
physical apparatus that we use to perceive things.
How is it we get things then? Take a look a this.
Because of the way this pattern is, if you try to count the black dots, you're
standing close to this and you can see the black dots, that your eye, because of the
contrast between the little squares there, it looks like there's a black dot, but
when you look at it, it goes away. That's again because of the physical
apparatus, the way that our brain and our eye, optic nerves are designed in the way
that we do, looking for edges. Inside of a brain, we have no control over
it. It causes us to not be able to see certain
things or to be able to see things that are not there.
And so, again, that's how perception matters.
We get selectively, we get selective with our perception when we actually start to
only consider the rough outline of something.
This is sort of something in a very basic level, without really understanding,
without really going into a little bit more depth of what it is.
Let me tell you out loud about this a little bit more clearly now.
So if we take a look at a picture like this, this is the human body drawn with
the body parts size drawn with respect, in proportion to how many nerve endings, how
many touch nerve endings go to your brain from that part.
Look how big our thumbs are. Thumbs are gigantic.
That is this lots and lots and lots of nerve endings through our thumbs, they go
to our brain. These fingers here, you know the 2 fingers
in the middle, that's why its hard to do spark thing, see if you can do this.
Its kind of difficult to do because of this smaller number of nerve ending there.
So you can see that in the picture this is pretty clear our big toes very important,
we need our big toes for balance. So when we're walking.
We actually use our big toes. Our face is very sensitive.
When you look at our face you can tell about a quarter of a degree temperature
difference with our face just because of the neural endings there.
And so what this suggests is that we bring in information even at a very
physiological level deferentially. That is we bring in more information from
some parts of our body than other information, in the other parts of our
body. I mean think about this.
When's the last time you thought about your big toe?
Maybe it's the last time you stubbed it. Nonetheless that is the kind of, of
information that we might want if we were designing a pair of shoes for example.
So if we're not thinking about our feet, we're not going to come up with good ideas
about toes. And the perception is there, we're just
not, I mean the, the sensation is there, the physical, stimulus is there.
We're just not paying attention to it. There's an argument we learn through the
body and here's a picture of a little statue I saw in Switzerland at this museum
of the hand. And this statue depicts how we bring in
information that is, what parts of our body we learn the most from.
So if you took a person from zero years old until they were you know, 25 years
old, the way that they learn through the body is a lot through the hands.
We're always touching things. Notice the size of the mouth also, that
we're always putting things into our mouth, and that's something that allows us
to learn. That is, we're putting things in our mouth
more than young children, so young children, immediately everything goes in
the mouth, and that's how they learn about the, the world in there.
Eyes are much smaller than we would give them credit for being.
Sure we learn a lot from that. We learn a lot from reading, and from
seeing, and from looking around. But if you think of over the lifespan of
how much we've learned, is from being a baby, from being a helpless baby all the
way up until, growing up, we learned a lot, lot more at a much higher rate when
we were young than we do now. Not withstanding this class.
So, when we think about pattern finding or stereotyping, what we do is, we routinely
ignore, just because cognitive limit of the brain we routinely ignore things that
are there that actually there. For example, you might go in to a room and
you look around and all you really see, You see a window, you see a chair, you see
a thing and we're really not, sort of taking apart those sensations.
We're not really looking at it. And so I say, that's an ugly lamp without
really looking at it, and sort of trying to understand what is it about that lamp.
And I have to do that. Because if every time I walk into a new
space, if I were to take apart each little thing, oh there's a this, and there's a
little light bulb, and there's a piece above there and there's a piece under
there, I would be debilitated. I would not be able to move on with my
life. But the chances that I want to, excuse me,
but what, what, when it matters. Is when we want to pay attention to those
things. If I want to design a new chair, design a
new lamp, then I want to be able to look at a lamp and its take it apart.
Really understand what it is in there. That is, take it apart in my mind.
So let's take a little exercise here. What I'd like you to do is to draw a
bicycle. So, go ahead just take a moment to, the
video will pause here, just draw a picture of a bicycle.
After you're done, come back. These really simple sketches take you
know, a minute at most to draw a bicycle. Did your bicycle look anything like these
bicycles here? Probably a, a fairly normal bicycle, one
like this or, or a bicycle like this, those bicycles are the stereotypes of
bicycles. But what about these other kinds of
bicycles here, a recumbent bicycle or this little hot rod chopper down here?
How are they different than normal bicycles?
I mean if you look at them, that's actually kind of interesting.
One of these bicycles, the, if, bicycles we assume that the wheels are the same
size. Same size at the front as in the rear.
And these bicycles, these bicycles, these sort of weird bicycles, seem to violate
that. Also, we generally think of a bicycle as
you sit up a seat, and you push down with your feet on the pedals, and you're using
gravity to stay on board the bicycle. These violate that.
One of these even has a steering wheel instead of a handle bar, and that really
is unbicyclelike. Now, it's important to know, to have a
stereotype of a bicycle. Say, for example I'm walking along with my
friend. And there's something coming, they say,
oh, hey, Steven, there's this thing coming.
It's got, like, two big round wheels and there's a guy sitting up on top and he's
push, by the time I explain what a bicycle was my friend would be run over by that
bicycle. Instead I say hey Stephen the bike and we
jump outta the way. But if I were going to start a bicycle
business with Stephen that would be really different.
In that case I'd really want to take apart what a bicycle is.
What are the assumptions that we make about a bicycle and how it is that a
bicycle works and why it is that a bicycle is shaped the way it is.
Is it shaped because of the way history's made it that way or is it shaped for some
other reason. So again, we're taking apart this idea of
what the thing is and breaking it into constituent components.
We're not just working, operating off a stereotype of what that thing is.
A chair. Go ahead and see if you can draw a chair.
Do a same exercise and draw a chair. Now I'll show you some other chairs.
That you might not have come to. Let's think about it.
What is a chair, a chair is a flat surface that you sit on, or is it more than that.
So here's a number of chairs. That also, that violate the sense of
chairness to more or less. And again if you just want to sit down,
using your stereotype of chair is enough. Does it have a flat surface that will hold
my wight than it's a chair. However if you're going to think about
chairs in a way then we sort of stop and take apart what are the assumptions that
we make about chairs from a purely sort of stereotypical perceptive.
So there's pattern finding of the stereotype, stereotyping is necessary and
it helps us, but also gets in the way, because we couldn't get through life
unless we, basically made shortcuts, cognitive shortcuts for things.
But also that would be very difficult for us to get to a new place.
Unless we sort of stopped and took things apart in our mind.
Another thing we do among these constraints of perception, we limit the
universe of relevant data. There's data out there.
And we don't take it in, so again there's this thing about stereotyping, which is a
short hand for bringing information in. When it's time to go out and look for data
that would apply to the problem that we're doing, sometimes we just would begin to
take shortcuts. Maybe we're were too lazy, cognitively
lazy, or even physically lazy to go out and gather the information.
What we tend to do is gather information from the places that we've gathered it
from before. So, if I'm used to Googling something to
find information, then I'll tend to Google it in the future.
And if it works for me, I'm especially likely to go back and do it in the same
exact way. So, if my, boss, my supervisor has asked
me to gather some data to make some decision, and I gather it once that way
and it works, then I'll try to gather that way again.
Because that way I avoid new search costs, that way I'm more certain that it's going
to be correct, data in that way. But, if we want to get somewhere new,
we're going to need different data. Right?
We have to find all relevant data in somewhere else, somewhere that we look.
Let me, show you a little piece of video here, you may have to click the video, but
watch what happens as this unsuspecting pedestrian gives directions to someone.
Is that interesting? 50% of the people in the study did not
notice that the person had been switched, that the person giving directions had been
switched. Why is that?
One thing is people are really busy. And we get really busy, we get engrossed
in something. We don't notice what's going on around us.
And so that's this kind of selective perception.
That's just only paying attention to the one thing we want.
That's fine, right? Because does it matter that a different
person's there when we really, you know, we're focused on giving directions?
It may not matter. There's times when we're really busy and
we just need to get something done. However if we're too busy to look when
we're actually trying to do innovation, there's more seeking new things, we're
trying to innovate, we have to pay attention.
It's much more difficult to not to get somewhere new if we're not paying
attention. And the problem is, many of us lead
over-scheduled lives. We're very busy at work.
We're over-worked. We feel like we're doing two people's
jobs. And so how can we possibly peel away the
time to just sort of sit back and really pay attention and not be focused and busy
on our work that we do on a daily basis. Here's a telephone keypad.
I'm sure you've seen one of these things many, many, many times.
What I'd like you to do is see if you can fill-in the numbers and the letters that
go with the keys in, in the arrangement here.
So hopefully you've seen one of these before.
And if not, don't worry. But see if you can put in the numbers
where they go. And the letters where they go.
What's hard about this is that we've seen these things so many times that we, our
brain has realized why do I need to remember this, I can just look it up when
I need it. So we'll just look up, the keys when we
needed. So I have a, I'm trying to make a phone
call, I see some numbers and letters, I'll just go ahead and see them right there.
I don't have to commit that in the memory and so that's these one of these kind of
shortcuts that I may take to help my brain, actually get through the day
without overheating. So, remember when Art Fry was asked to
gather data for the post-it note, was when they were going to do a market study, they
kept going to the market study, doing a market study in the same way they done
them before. The way that 3M traditionally did market
studies. It was only when they changed the way they
gathered market data, that is the way they did the market study, that the new data
was able to be meaningful for them. And so the old way that they were doing
things was not going to work for this new kind of product and that's the kind of
warning, or cautionary tale that we want to take out of that.
And so the data that we trying to get hold of could also be affected by the
organizations that we're a part of. And some organizations for example you're
not allowed to have certain kinds of data because it's you know, it's considered
proprietary, it's considered secret. You may be, someone's worried that you'll
give this to competitors and so we may not get the data that we need to make you
know, market study decisions or, or other kinds of decisions that effect our
organization. And so again, being persistent about
gathering the data, I think, is a really important thing that we'll want to do.
Another problem we have, we don't get close to the data.
And so we take a picture like this. And ask what is this picture?
It's really hard to say. However, now if we back off of this
picture and look from a little bit farther away.
You can see what it is. And so I'm using this as a metaphor to say
sometimes we are so close to the problem, it's really difficult to see what it is.
And in related way, we may be too far away from the problem that we're looking at to
see the data for what it really is. So these perception restraints.
So these are the four, perception restraints we've talked about.
Selective perception, you know, only looking at certain things.
Only bringing in information because that's the, how we bring it in.
Stereotyping, using the shorthand method for, for talking about things.
The limited data gathering, not going and finding information because we're not
allowed to or because we're, it's not convenient.
And then also the distance from the data, how closely is we can be to the data.
So how do you overcome? If you want to overcome these constraints,
how we overcome them? Because again the problem of innovation,
the problem of having good ideas starts with the base information that we brought
in, the perceptions that we brought in. So if we're going to have good perceptions
we need to overcome these things, how do we do that?
Well, we find more sources of data. That's a pretty simple one, right?
Find a source list, for example, if you have a project that you're working on,
write down a list of all the sources of information that you could possibly
imagine getting. And again, you're going to use your fa-,
your good brainstorm technique to get those.
Use your strategies for brainstorming. Get a big long list of all the sources of
data that you're going to use for a project and then come back to it later and
say did I use all those sources of data, did I go to all those sources of data.
So if I have ten sources of data, I'll talk to my boss and I'll look at my
competitors and then I'll benchmark this and I'll find, someone else who's done
this and then I'll look in Google and I'll look at this other place and I'll look in
all these other places. Once I have my ideas, I can go back to
this list and say well have I looked everywhere I possibly could?
It's a pretty simple step and a lot of us don't do it.
Another thing we can do is we can use this sort of what I call practiced empathy.
That is, imagine how other people perceive this problem.
Get into their shoes. How was like as a kid?
How would it be like as a director? How would be like as a you know, person.
So I have a friend, an acquaintance who was a playwright.
So she would write plays. She was interested in writing a play from
a young boy's perspect, perspective, and that might be hard for, you know an adult
woman, to write a play from a young boy's perspective.
But what she did was, she went out and got a bunch of skateboard magazines, and, and,
magazines that were obviously pointing at young boys.
And began to look through those and try to understand how things were.
What was the language that they used? What are the things they're interested in?
What kinds of ads are they are pointed at them, and how do those things look?
And that gave her lots more information or data about how it is that a young boy
would behave, and how is it that a young boy would feel.
And so this kind of empathy that she practiced was, that was a great way, I
believe, to practice that type of empathy. Another thing we can do is we can enrich
the input. The more sources of data we have as input,
the better off we are. Think about starting with your workspace,
the environment within which you work. If you walk around your office, and you
see things that other people have at their desk, does that serve as data?
In the product development company IDEO people have all their different junk, the
projects they have worked on in the past inside their cubicle or inside the little
office where they work and as you walk around you can see.
Oh, that guy worked on some food and that guy worked on scuba gear and that guy
worked on a fishing rod, and that tells us something about them.
Not only does it stimulate our own information, our own perception we're
seeing things, that again but it also advertises to other people what they know.
And so it's also important for me to know the things but it's important for me to
know who knows. So, I if I don't have to, if I am going to
work on a project for scuba diving equipment i can then just go find the
person who, that worked on the scuba diving because I can see That stuff.
Or I can go to the scuba diving store and learn from those people there.
So again, if we can advertise to other people what we're interested in, and what
we know, that could be another source of good input for us as we go forward.
So, next we're going to talk about intellection constraints that thinking
constraints that go on.
