Creative Think

What's Your Creative Thinking Style?

It's time again for some inspiration from Heraclitus, the world's first creativity teacher (he lived around 500 BC). Today's insight is: “I searched into myself.”

Heraclitus felt that consulting our own knowledge and intuition is a wonderful way to gain insight. Unfortunately, some of us never learned this lesson. Much of our educational system is an elaborate game of "guess what the teacher is thinking," and we come to believe that the best ideas are in someone else's head rather than our own. Heraclitus reminds us that there are good ideas within ourselves if we are willing to dig deeply enough.

I believe there's a creative strategy in Heraclitus' insight, and it is:

Discover your own creative style.

We can emulate Heraclitus by searching for own creative tendencies. Here are six of mine:

1. I get my ideas either when I'm under a lot of pressure — "the ultimate inspiration is the deadline" — or when I'm away from the problem altogether. I rarely get them when I'm doing routine tasks that require some attention.

2. If I'm mentally blocked in trying to solve a problem, it's usually because I'm in love with a particular idea — so much so that it prevents me from looking for alternatives. Only when I force myself to become detached from it and "kiss it goodbye" do I find new answers. Letting go of a previously cherished idea can be one of life's great pleasures.

3. I try to pay attention to small things: how much frowning takes place in beer commercials, what sorts of patterns dead leaves make around a storm drain, and so on. I do this partly because I've trained myself to do it, but also because I've been forced to. I'm left-handed, but the world is designed for right-handed people — something most "righties" don't even think about. I'm constantly being made conscious of how things are put together. For example, telephone booths are designed to make right-handed people feel comfortable and at ease, but lefties can feel clumsy using them.

4. My own ego can get in the way of discovering new things. However, if I allow myself to lower my resistance to those ideas that I typically dismiss as irrelevant or unattractive, I find that they can become doorways to solutions I've been overlooking.

5. I don't know what I don't know. I've got a big blind spot, and the only way to get access to what's lurking out there is to put myself in a humble, receptive frame of mind (not always easy to do) and ask others to point out what I'm not seeing.

6. Rejection of my work in the early phases of the creative process doesn't bother me. I'm not afraid of taking one of my less than stellar ideas and asking complete strangers what they think of it. I find their responses frank and refreshing.

Questions: What's your creative style? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

The Wisdom of A Recovering Stroke Victim

Over the years, people have used my various products (books, card decks, software, tools) to stimulate their creativity and/or amuse themselves.

Yesterday I discovered the following video made by "Bill from Richmond" last April. Bill is a recovering stroke victim and the video is a "letter" of sorts to his grandchildren. The production value isn't high, but I think Bill's enthusiasm and openness to life come through clearly.

The four-minute video was made in Bill's home studio. It starts slowly, but "Bill" grows on you. He explains why "Grandpa isn't senile." About halfway through, Bill provides his grandchildren with a simple tip to a fuller life. You can tell he's having a great time. (Check out the cool stuff Bill has in his lab.)

Needless to say, this video made my day! As Bill says, "Play with it!"

Think Like A WoMan

This past weekend, my wife and I went to the amazing BodyWorlds 2 exhibit currently showing at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. I highly recommend this touring presentation to anyone wanting to get to know himself/herself better.

One of the displays was about the human brain. Over it was a very large display poster with the following writing:

Think Like A WoMan

Various studies suggest men and women have differently structured neural networking possibly due to early exposure to sex hormones during critical prenatal and postnatal periods.

The physiological difference in the brain is especially obvious in the hypothalamus, a tiny structure at the base of the brain. In males, it is much larger and saturated with the male sex hormone testosterone.

Men and women seem to think differently too, approaching intellectual problems in different ways. Yet although different brain regions are activated, they may well arrive at the same solution.

Women's brains have more neuron cell bodies, giving them an enhanced blood flow and greater efficiency. This may explain why women often learn language better, have a better memory for details, and can fight aging better than men.

On average, women are more empathetic, expressive, articulate, and diplomatic, and better able to sense what others feel.

Male brains contain more of the longer neuron fibers, allowing distant neurons to communicate better. Therefore, men may be better at focusing on a specific task, orienting themselves spatially, or solving complex math or physics problems.

On average, men are more physically violent but better at coping with conflict and moving on.

Here's my question: What differences do you notice in how men and women approach problems and problem-solving?

Prizes Before Utility: A Designer Dogma?

In a recent post called "Get Out of the Dogma House," I wrote about how one's dogmas can interfere with seeing alternative solutions to problems.

Today I received the following observation from the British/German "Idea Engineer" Graham Horton. Graham (shown below) is a Professor of Computer Science at Universität Magdeburg and also the co-founder of the German ideation firm Zephram (blog link here) whose clients include Daimler, BMW and Siemens. This is what Graham wrote:

"One designer dogma which I find particularly annoying is the belief that it is more important to win design prizes than to produce objects that meet customers' needs. A concomitant dogma is that the prize criteria be abstract and internal rather than pragmatic and useful.

"Two common examples are advertising and architecture. Prizes are awarded for commercials which are completely unsuccessful in imprinting the product in the viewer's/reader's mind.

"Similarly, two buildings on our university campus [Magdeburg] have won architectural prizes which have serious deficiencies from my (the user's) point of view. In the first building all the projection surfaces are mounted next to the windows (with no possibility of lowering blinds) so that it is virtually impossible to make out the images being shown. In the second, (our university library) the roof began to leak owing to a design error only one year after after completion and had to be completely overhauled."

Thanks for your thoughts, Graham.

I'd like to hope that the "cool appearance before functionality" mindset isn't widespread. Nonetheless, here's my question.

Question: What's your personal experience with products (or other artifacts such as buildings, ads, etc.) that won awards from their creator's peers (or were deemed "cool") but didn't live up to their intended users' expectations of effectiveness?

My Weirdest Seminar Settings

I've been doing creativity seminars and workshops for over thirty years. In that period I've worked a lot of different venues: from the exotic (Big Sur, Banff, Athens, and Abu Dhabi) to the more customary (downtown Marriotts, airport Sheratons, and suburban Hiltons). But I've also had my share of strange ones.

Here are the three weirdest settings in which I done my sessions. (I should note that these locales were not of my choosing, and I more or less went along because the Presidents or VPs who brought me in were so gung-ho about their choices).

3. A light house in California at two in the morning. The client was an ad agency. The VP really wanted to give his people "a whack on the side of the head" and he felt that the locale and timing would force the participants to change their assumptions. It was a good thought but the people were pretty spaced out.

2. The laundry room (industrial size) of a large Chicago hotel (Sheraton). The general partner of an accounting firm thought that his people needed to get a better appreciation for what happens behind the scenes in any business. So he arranged for the session to be held in the laundry room: workers coming and going speaking various languages. Machines pounding away. All kinds of sights, smells, and sounds. It was crazy!

1. The multi-level parking garage at the Denver Marriott. The client was Chevrolet (General Motors). We met in a regular hotel seminar room and had coffee. Then the VP stood up and said, "We need to get closer to our products . . . the cars." He proceeded to march the participants (and me) out to hotel's parking garage. I did a day-long session there. By the afternoon, people started getting head aches because of the fumes.

From these (and others), I've learned that it's possible to get a little too crazy in picking the locale for a creativity session.

Question: In what unusual settings have you done a seminar?

What Do Our Self-Help Books Say About Us?

Here's a question for you.

I've been listening to a Shakespeare course (from the Teaching Company).  In a lecture about the play Henry V, the author Peter Saccio makes an interesting aside.

"You can learn a lot about a culture and an era by examining the self-help books that were popular during that time."

For example, during Elizabethan Times (especially the 1590s), the top best-selling self-help books dealt with death, namely the correct way to approach death. This, in great part, reflects the deadly "London Plague" of that decade.

Best-selling self-help books during the Victorian Era dealt with proper etiquette. This is because a number of people had made substantial sums during the Industrial Revolution, and they were able to buy themselves a higher class lifestyle. One thing they needed to fit in was knowledge of the proper manners of their new class.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this genre produced best-sellers dealing with improved sexual performance and also consciousness-raising. (Picture from Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex.)

The 1990s produced a number of money-management and wealth-building guides. And this certainly reflects the "go-go" aspects of that decade.

Which brings me to my question:

As you look at the how-to/self-help best-sellers of 2007, what do they tell us about our era, our life-style, and our hopes, desires and frustrations?

Carbon Credits Humor

The Internet makes many new enterprises possible.

For example, I recently ran across this example (from Rodger Schultz).

Hooray for human ingenuity! The guy in the bed has used the Internet to combine his sloth (sleeping in) with environmental concern (people wishing to offset their carbon use) and clever marketing ("having an environmentally friendly day"). Made me laugh!

Use Your Shield

It's time for some creative inspiration from the Creative Whack Pack. Let's reach for a card. It’s number 58, “Use Your Shield.” Let's take a closer look.

New ideas can be threatening, and they often provoke a negative reaction.

For example, when the composer Igor Stravinsky first presented his Rite of Spring ballet with its unusual harmonies and primitive rhythms, he was met with a rioting audience.

When Johannes Kepler correctly solved the orbital problem of the planets by using ellipses rather than circles, he was denounced.

When the nineteenth-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiss suggested to his fellow doctors that they could reduce disease by washing their hands in chlorinated lime water before inspecting their patients, he was ridiculed by his colleagues who strongly resented the idea that they were "carrying around death on their hands."

Be prepared for such a reaction and don't let it prevent you from acting. As German statesman Konrad Adenauer put it, "A thick skin is a gift from God."

How strong is your shield?

I've found that when I've embarked on some of the more interesting endeavors in my career — from going into business for myself to self-publishing my first book, from buying a new house during a recession to creating a new manipulative toy business — there have been more than a few people who told me such things as:

• “You're leaving IBM to do what?”
• “What does ancient history have to do with anything?”
• “Where’s the market for that?”
• “I don't think anyone would pay money for that.”
• “Why would an adult want to play with plastic blocks?”

Criticism is vital to the creative process. Having people disagree with you helps you hone your ideas. Indeed, ideas are much stronger when they've been tempered by opposing viewpoints.

But once you're convinced that your idea is worth doing and you've committed yourself to implementing it, such negativity can be a burden to your performance. People are going to take their shots: you need to have a strong shield to deflect criticism. If you let every nay-sayer prevent you from moving forward, you'll never reach your objective.

Think of an idea you're currently trying to get into action. What negative reaction do you expect? How can you protect yourself from it? How well do you deal with criticism? What types of shield do you use?

It's time for some creative inspiration from the Creative Whack Pack. Let's reach for a card. It’s number 58, “Use Your Shield.” Let's take a closer look.

New ideas can be threatening, and they often provoke a negative reaction.

For example, when the composer Igor Stravinsky first presented his Rite of Spring ballet with its unusual harmonies and primitive rhythms, he was met with a rioting audience.

When Johannes Kepler correctly solved the orbital problem of the planets by using ellipses rather than circles, he was denounced.

When the nineteenth-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiss suggested to his fellow doctors that they could reduce disease by washing their hands in chlorinated lime water before inspecting their patients, he was ridiculed by his colleagues who strongly resented the idea that they were "carrying around death on their hands."

Be prepared for such a reaction and don't let it prevent you from acting. As German statesman Konrad Adenauer put it, "A thick skin is a gift from God."

How strong is your shield?

I've found that when I've embarked on some of the more interesting endeavors in my career — from going into business for myself to self-publishing my first book, from buying a new house during a recession to creating a new manipulative toy business — there have been more than a few people who told me such things as:

• “You're leaving IBM to do what?”
• “What does ancient history have to do with anything?”
• “Where’s the market for that?”
• “I don't think anyone would pay money for that.”
• “Why would an adult want to play with plastic blocks?”

Criticism is vital to the creative process. Having people disagree with you helps you hone your ideas. Indeed, ideas are much stronger when they've been tempered by opposing viewpoints.

But once you're convinced that your idea is worth doing and you've committed yourself to implementing it, such negativity can be a burden to your performance. People are going to take their shots: you need to have a strong shield to deflect criticism. If you let every nay-sayer prevent you from moving forward, you'll never reach your objective.

Think of an idea you're currently trying to get into action. What negative reaction do you expect? How can you protect yourself from it? How well do you deal with criticism? What types of shield do you use?

Delightful Pentagons

Several years ago when I was in Delhi, India, I visited the dargah (shrine) of the mystic Hazrat Iniyat Khan (1882-1927) who is credited as helping to bring Sufism to the west.

I was struck by the beauty of the surroundings — especially this carved marble wall screen made up predominantly of pentagons.

I took great delight in this pattern, and spend a good fifteen minutes sitting next to it studying it. I found it quite soothing.

You might take a moment to check out the different pentagons and the patterns they make.

Question: I'm currently working on a project that involves the pentagon shape. If you feel like sharing, I'd love to hear your favorite ways pentagons are used, either in nature or in human-made constructions. Perhaps you have a pentagon story.