Tag Archives: creative thinking
Engage in sci-fi thinking to understand what makes people tick
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Last week I gave a workshop on how to mine social networks for insights. I used Facebook’s Fan Pages as a use case. Many of the participants were surprised as they didn’t visit Fan Pages and thought most were spammy. They also said they didn’t like it when brands suddenly went off topic because businesses should be serious, not fun (dominant assumption calling to be turned upside down).
And boy were they surprised with what I told them next… (more…)
To innovate: Steal don’t imitate
When no one knows what’s going to happen we’ll naturally look at other people for clues on how to behave. This is the basis of imitation, and it’s a survival tactic. Simply said, in an environment where the world is changing, the best strategy is lots of imitation. The problem with this is we’re rarely aware of how ‘much imitation’ is necessary and outright imitation is stupid plain and simple. It’s a balancing act to decide what to copy and what not.
Practice ‘Smart Stealing’
The best strategy is to ‘steal’ from different sources, ideally ‘the best’ sources outside your industry.
Examples abound of companies who have ‘stolen’ from others. Apple stole Xerox’s musical interface and mouse ideas. Facebook and MySpace stole Friendster’s social network idea. Microsoft stole Netscape’s browser idea. Kobe Bryant has stolen moves from other basketball greats. It’s even happening in the Venture Capital Industry where one popular VC firm models itself after a Hollywood talent agency. (more…)
Use constraints to fuel your creativity
Quickly think of as many white things as you can in ten seconds. Now think of white things in your kitchen. Did the more constrained prompt spark more ideas? Yes.
Recent research on the best approach to creating novel things says that the number one key to innovation is scarcity. In other words, constraints help you focus on what matters. Apple knows that embracing constraints helps them focus on what matters. Google is popular for using constraints to fuel their design and development process which have resulted in ‘perceived innovations’ in user experience. The ever popular 37 Signals, maker of online business management apps, pretty much runs their business on constraints.
So how does placing constraints to fuel creativity look like?
Fueling creativity
A few months ago a client of mine let me know that they’re in the process of opening another restaurant and that this one will focus on Mediterranean food. With months away before it opens, they asked me if I had any ideas on whatever.
I won’t go into full detail about our discussion, but what I will do is show you how placing constraints changes the ideas you generate by shifting your perception.
Time constraint
1st Approach: How much time does the average family spend at a restaurant? An hour to an hour and a half (we mexicans like to take our time).
- What if we created a concept restaurant experience so they only spend 30 minutes? What would that look like?
2nd Approach: What if the menu was composed of only five different meals?
- What activities would need to be done so the client stays an hour and a half with us? How would the
3rd Approach: How would Apple do it?
- If Steve Jobs walked in, what would be the ‘crappy’ stuff he would tell us to eliminate?
Money constraint
Another constrain often times is money. For example, how much does the average family spend at a restaurant? $50 – $80
- What if we have a policy that clients spend less than that? How would our plates change? Meals? People?
The questions above are things I thought out rather quickly with no real goal in mind, just thinking out loud. The answers will be all over the place but that’s the key, to unlock your brain you have to ask the ‘unquestionable’.
The key is asking the questions that actually matter. This is tricky.
Closing thoughts
The thing about constraints is it forces you to look at different angles to approach a problem. It’s also important to have balance and look at the opposite of placing constraints, creative stretching, for coming up with unseen ideas.
While my example applies to a restaurant, you can use constraints on anything. How have I used constraints? I’ve used it to accelerate my basketball conditioning in less time, to write short blog posts that get to the point, to tweet less stuff but that actually matters, to read less but get more out of it.
Fuel your creativity!
How do you use constraints in your work, life?
On starting from scratch
The old musicians stay where they are and become like museum pieces under glass, safe, easy to understand, playing that tired old shit over and over again…Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change. – Miles Davis
One post that caught my attention in the last few weeks was how U2 gets ideas for it’s songs, specifically this comment by Bono on why starting from scratch can be the fastest way to a solution:
“That song [Where the streets have no name] was recorded, so there was a version of it on tape. That version had quite a lot of problems. What we kept doing was spending hours, days and weeks… probably half the time that the whole album took was spent on that song, trying to fix this version on tape. It was a nightmare of screwdriver work. My feeling is it was just better to start again. I’m sure we would get there quicker if we’d start again. It’s more frightening to start again, because there’s nothing. So my idea was to stage an accident. To erase the tape so we’d just have to start again.” – Brian Eno”
Starting from scratch sounds like a big waste of time, yet starting from scratch is at the center of creative thinking. I’m dumbfounded when I get asked for practical ideas that worked for someone else (usually competitor) and how they can best replicate it. This is the opposite of creative thinking and what most people fail to understand is that starting from scratch is highly rewarding. It’s like reformatting your computer and then starting with a fresh new installation!
Do it as if nothing
As a Ninjutsu practitioner, I understand very well the concept of mushin (no mind). Unlearning what you’ve learned and being open to whatever a situation presents and being able to adapt to it without thinking.
When you first start out in Ninjutsu you will immediately notice that nothing goes according to plan. Most of the stuff that you’re taught at the beginning is meant to ‘de-routinize’ your mind. To see it free.
Much like in other domains, most students will learn techniques and try to implement them ‘as they learned them’. Meaning they look at a scenario with similarities to how that technique was taught. This is a big no-no for there are an infinite number or techniques and they can all be applied in any point in time, you just have to go with whatever comes and do it as if nothing. As if you’ve done it before.
Develop mental flow
True Nimpo is really practiced when you get rid of the technique, you never show your technique to your opponent. Your movements should be human like, not mechanical. They should flow. Techniques are taught to us and sometimes we’re more concerned in applying in them just as the book says or as the Sensei says. While you may get rewarded for having beautiful technique, in the real world applying it won’t be so. You have to keep your mind open to whatever situation presents itself and respond as fluidly as possible. Be in the moment.
The element of water is what best describes flow, as water easily adapts to the environment.
Keep the mind moving
To develop mental flow, think of the mind as a river: that faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater it’s energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving, stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency of the mind.
Superior strategists see things as they are. They are highly sensitive to dangers and opportunities. Nothing ever stays the same, and keeping up with circumstances as they change requires a great deal of mental fluidity. Great strategists do not act according to preconceived ideas; they respond to the moment. Like children, their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past because the present is much too interesting.
Closing thoughts…
Just like Martial Arts have unlimited techniques and all of them can be applied to any scenario, so it is in other domains such as business. They’re not mechanical in nature. You train to be perfect but in the real world where unpredictability reigns, you have to be in the moment and respond as if nothing.
Understand: the most creative strategists stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized.
Innovation posts of the week: The Innovation Matrix
- The Cognitive Cost Of Expertise by @jonahlehrer
- The Five Uncertainties of Innovation by @ovoinnovation
- Another form of creative thinking – Financial Times
- The Innovation Matrix by @timkastelle
- The Myth of People Stealing Your Ideas by @pekpongpaet
- Why You Should Focus on “Worst Practices” by @umairh
- The Downside of Best Practices by @mikemyatt
- The Three Threats to Creativity – HBR
- Innovation Mullet: Simple in the Front, Complex in the Back by @bhc3
Remove the associative barriers that hinder new ideas
Image via Wikipedia
Last week I mentioned that the number one creative skill you need to master is the ability to free associate, to make connections between dissimilar things. I just stumbled into Ellen Di Resta’s post on the innovator’s perception where she probes further into the concept to which I left a comment:
Hello Ellen,
You’re right. I think it comes down to people’s ‘associative barriers’, or the ability to make new connection between dissimilar things.
For example if I say ‘car’ someone might say ‘tire’ because our minds make that connection automatically because we know it exists. But how about if I say ‘granola’ and someone else says ‘water’, which makes no sense to some of us but if you put the two together that person might see ‘river’.
So in other words when someone sees something different out of the unknown it’s because that person has very low associative barriers.
One of the reasons why most of us can’t make insightful new connections between dissimilar things is because we have ‘high associative barriers’. A person with high associative barriers will quickly arrive at conclusions when confronted with a problem since their thinking is more focused. He or she will recall how the problem has been handled in the past or how others in similar situations solved it. A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically.
The question then is how do we remove these barriers?
Understand why
If you’re on the ‘high barrier’ side, it has nothing to do with your parent’s genes, it has to do with with how our brains evolve. Our brains evolve to find order in things, grouping concepts together and finding structure in the environment surrounding it.
Be aware and destroy
I think they key is to be aware of this and then systematically break down those barriers by exposing yourself to new stuff like traveling to new places, talking to people whom you have nothing in common with, reading about stuff outside of your interests and then questioning your own assumptions as to how you think the world works.
The internet provides us with all this and more, and right at the center of it is other people (social media ring a bell?). If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one right now. You’re going to want to follow some people so go to Listorious and instead of looking for people that fit your interests do the opposite and follow dissimilar people (Ex. if you’re into art, follow people in science!) and see what they’re sharing and engage them.
Combine both
If you take two people — one with high barriers, the other with low barriers — and you give them the same information about a problem, they’ll approach the problem in a completely different way. So the objective is to be able to achieve ‘whole brain thinking’, where we can shift from divergent to convergent thinking in the flip of a switch. The more fluid our thinking is the better we’ll be equipped to adapt and make sense of things that look like a puzzle with no shape of form.
What would you add?
A notebook that will help you solve your problems
I’ve got a really fresh brain after this weekend because I read Jack’s Notebook by creativity and innovation expert Gregg Fraley, it’s my first time reading a literal business novel so it was refreshing to have a book put my visual senses to work and putting me in the story. Jack’s Notebook is essentially about a guy named Jack Huber and his friend Manny who is a professional problem solver that helps Jack get his life straight through the use of CPS (Creative problem solving) to solve his work and personal problems.
So what is CPS? It’s a technique developed by Alex Osborn who coined the term brainstorming and it basically helps you have more ideas and therefore more solutions to any problem you encounter. CPS brings order to the chaos that is solving problems, it’s a systematic process of creating lists and then making decisions. That simple!
Like business and life, the story has twists and turns and the problems that Jack faces are solved using CPS in a very simple way. This leaves you with this feeling of ‘uh that was easy!’ and I think this is really the big takeaway most people will get from the book…solving problems doesn’t have to be hard, it can be fun!
So if you’re stuck in a corner and always seem to do the same thing over and over again with the same result because you try the same old ideas then I recommend you read this book. In fact even if you think you’re pretty fly at solving problems already and don’t think you need anymore lecturing, you should read this book because most likely your brain has gone stale and need some refreshing…we all do!
Mr. Fraley has given us a notebook with all his secrets and he wants to help us solve our problems in a fun way and the plus is it’s also a great story. Get it. Read it. Start your own notebook.
Once you’ve read it, follow Gregg Fraley on Twitter and tell him what you think.
P.S. Thank you Mr. Fraley!
