Where Creativity Happens

When was the last time you felt outside of your comfort zone?  I don’t mean at the prospect of something bad happening, I mean more like at the prospect of speaking in public  – something that makes you feel uncomfortably conspicuous.

Most people don’t like it.  We are uncertain how we will perform or how will be received, so we get nervous.  But what happens?  most of the time our fears are not realised.  And it doesn’t even matter if we have done it before, we still get nervous.  The reason why we get so apprehensive is due to the uncertainty.  We fear the uncertainty, our emotion overwhelms our logic.

But what happens when we come through the test unscathed?  Relief certainly, but also a tremendous feeling of wellbeing and achievement.  Unfortunately, the next time an opportunity arises, our memory of the apprehension always outweighs memory of the elation.

What’s this got to do with solving problems I hear you say?  

It’s about being prepared to go places where you feel vulnerable.  Have you ever felt afraid to ask a question for fear of exposing what you don’t know? (I was once in a meeting where it turned out that nearly everybody in the room was afraid to ask the same question). 

It’s about choosing uncertainty; willing to risk appearing foolish because you made a crazy suggestion. 

Being bold.

The Creative Paradox - Overcoming Uncertainty

Why do people want to reject a creative idea?  You can see it happening in meetings when a solution that is just too novel is suggested.  People disengage with the process – it’s not for them. 

I read an interesting research paper about creativity.  The research concerned a paradox of creativity.  Generally, people think ‘creative solutions’ are a good thing.  Unfortunately, dealing with the consequences of novel, or creative solutions sometimes makes people uneasy and tense.  This is because a novel solution introduces uncertainty – it may not work.  The consequence of this is that people are quite happy to reject the novel solution, even though the wildly improbable idea could be a real winner – they don’t want to be associated with something that sounds like a silly idea. 

The initial idea about looking for a creative solution is logical.  If you have tried all the logical ideas, a creative one might just come up trumps.  The trouble is, people often prefer to avoid uncertainty because of the risk it may entail.  The uncertainty triggers an emotional response which overrules our logic.  

How can we overcome this?  It is our reaction to the feelings of uncertainty that is the problem; we need a different way to react. 

There is a way to do it, it’s called Improv.  Put simply, Improv is a group of people performing an unscripted play. They make it up as they go, nothing is certain, they have no idea how the play will develop.  Somebody suggests a character, then somebody else speaks to him, every line of the play is improvised.  The key point is that it is not possible to fail; anything that any participant says simply develops the plot. 

This way, uncertainty is driving the creativity instead of killing it.

Try it, (its also good for getting people to work together) or get in touch if you need some help. 


There are a few rules:-    http://www.improvwiz.com/rules-of-improv/

How to Solve an Impossible Problem

Here is another story from ‘The Shadow of the Sun’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski  (one of the best books I have read, beautifully written).

It concerns a rather improbable method of trading that used to take place between the Tuareg people of the Sahara and the Bantu people of the Sahel.  For centuries a great enmity has existed between them, villages burnt, people killed and enslaved - made worse in times of drought.  Both groups had valuable commodities to trade, the Tuareg salt, and the Bantu gold.  But such was the level of fear between them, it was impossible to see how they could trade. 

 How did they solve that seemingly impossible problem?   You would assume that they simply traded through a third party, but for some reason, this is not so.

If fact, they contrived an extraordinary solution. 

When the Tuareg arrived at the trading location, they left salt in orderly piles.  They then retreated half a day’s travel.  The Bantu duly approached and left a measure of gold by each pile of salt.  After they had retreated, the Tuareg returned and if they deemed the amount of gold to be sufficient, they took it and left the salt, if not, they left both the gold and salt in place and retired.  The Bantu returned and either took their salt, or added more gold or took it away. This exchange continued until there was no further exchange.  The transactions took place with neither party seeing the other, it was called ‘silent trading’.

Silent trading took place for hundreds of years, but how did it come about?  How did such an extraordinary level of trust come about between two violently opposed groups?

Given our usual assumptions about trading, an ‘incremental’ solution doesn’t seem possible; they obviously found another way round the problem.

Using Visual Metaphors to Overcome problems

Look at this image*.  If you were a robot, what would you see?  I think I can say with some confidence that you would see a lot of colour pencils and a pencil sharpener.

 

But you aren’t a robot, you see a zip – and it isn’t as if you have to concentrate, it jumps out at you.  But there is no zip.

This is not a skill we need to learn, it is inherent.  We pick out the key features and make associations with other objects or concepts that may have similar features.  We create ‘visual metaphors’. 

This is an extraordinary gift that we all have – to be able to see a zip from a bunch of pencils.  What it does is to expand our thinking.  It enables us to think far more creatively.  Frederick Law Olmstead described his design for a connected system of parks as an ‘emerald necklace’.  Visual metaphor is much used in architecture; - the Sydney Opera House’s shell forms reflect the image of yachts in Sydney Harbour.

It is less commonly used in engineering, but a significant example is in the development of supersonic flight.  Scientists were struggling with the effects of shock waves at trans-sonic airspeeds.  This was overcome when a key figure thought of the airflow over the fuselage as being in the form of ‘water pipes’.  By redesigning the fuselage to match the contours of the ‘pipes’, the problem was overcome. 

Perhaps a better known example is the struggle that the chemist Kekule had when trying to understand the shape of the benzene molecule.  He dreamed of a snake eating its own tail, and realized that benzene comes in the shape of a ring.

Visual metaphors provide stepping stones, clues that can lead to seeing a solution. 

Each of us has a fantastic visual ability, by pushing ourselves to see something new in the familiar will help overcome the most intractable problems.

*To see more of this artist's work, see  http://kpk-photography.de/gallery

Tension - The Essence of Creative Problem Solving

I have always thought that art and problem solving have something in common.  It has often been said that creating art is ‘in the seeing’ - reflecting what the artist sees.  So it is with problem solving, seeing the  problem in a new way leads to an insight that brings about the solution.  ‘Seeing’ is much about leaving out  details as including them, and seeing from novel perspectives provides insights both in art and problems.



For example, look at this picture (email readers view image here).  We easily recognise it as a man’s face, but the colours are completely wrong.  No face was ever coloured like that, it is an impossible image, yet somehow it works.

Furthermore, we are drawn to the image.  This is because of the ‘tension’ between what we know to be the normal facial colours and those in the picture.  Our brain tries to ‘resolve’ the tension between what we are expecting and what we see, by imagining the possible lighting that would create the startling colour effects.  Personally, I see a wet face perhaps in a brightly lit street full of neon lighting.  It works.

Edgar Degas put it well, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

The artist has set us a problem of how to make sense of something that is ‘wrong’.  He has set up a tension in the picture that we have to overcome. We don’t just say, “well that’s impossible”, we ‘solve’ it by creating the circumstances in which it could be true. When we work it out, we gain a new perspective about the image. There is no logic involved here, intuitively we figure out how to make sense of the image.

Some problems don’t have logical solutions, and intuition can provide some help.  By setting up a tension - an internal conflict, we can get a new perspective on the problem and gain an insight.

This is the essence of creative problem solving.

For this and similar images, go to
http://scene360.com/main_news/7100/vibrant-knife-painting/

One Way to solve an African problem

I have been reading “The Shadow of the Sun” by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Its about his life as the Africa correspondent for a Polish newspaper and is a collection of anecdotes of his life there.

In one episode, he was living in Lagos, Nigeria.  His apartment was in one of the less upmarket areas and consequently was regularly broken into. Putting secure locks on the doors would prove to be ineffective as it would merely attract more attention.

One day he met and got to know Suleiman, a man from northern Nigeria, who knew his landlord. He mentioned his problem to Suleiman and some time later Suleiman took him to a market that sold witch doctors medicines, talismans, etc. Suleiman told him to buy a certain bunch of expensive white rooster feathers. When they returned to his apartment, Suleiman arranged the feathers and tied them to the top of the doorframe.

He was never burgled again.

Now we all know the chicken feathers are unlikely to deter any potential thief.  How could that possibly work? To western eyes, it was no solution at at all, but the point is, it worked in the culture of Lagos.

Perhaps sometimes we should view the solutions to problems from different perspectives.

Sometimes a Problem needs a Radical Solution

1n the 1990’s, Cook County Hospital (of ER fame) had a problem.  The Emergency Department had to deal with 250,000 patients a year. 

One of the biggest claims on their limited resources was heart attacks.  About 30 people a day came into the ER with chest pains.  Diagnosis was often inconclusive.  Patient’s answers were often unclear, and ECG tests far from perfect.  The only sure tests took hours – the one thing they didn’t have.  So the doctors had to make an estimate.  The trouble was that different doctors made different estimates – no matter how trained or experienced they were.  Add to this the risk of malpractice, and the doctors admitted people just to be sure.  Unfortunately, they had neither the beds nor the money to deal with them.

An incremental change would not be enough, they needed something radical.

The head of the Department of Medicine turned to a cardiologist who was involved with some  mathematicians who were interested in using statistics for identifying subatomic particles.  The cardiologist had developed an algorithm that identified three of the critical risk factors for diagnosis in conjunction with the ECG.  These were;

1. Is the pain unstable angina?
2. Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs?
3. Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?

These three tests were the works of years of research, but it was only research, no testing had been done.

Eventually, they trialled the algorithm at the hospital, after two years they compared the results with the doctors usual estimates.  The new method was 70% better than the doctor’s usual method.

The point is that even with the best training and experience, severe conditions can undermine even the best practice.  Sometimes something new is required.  Because conditions at the hospital were so demanding, they had to try something radically different.


The full story can be found in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking"