Great ideas — even digital ones — begin with a sketch on paper. Here, through the simplest hardware, blue ballpoint ink on a pad of college-ruled paper, we see the earliest incarnation of Twitter, as first envisioned in July 2006 by @jack:
Not Just for Artists Any More
Harvard lecturer and researcher Dr. Shelley Carson, who focuses on the interface between creativity and psychopathology, understands that our changing world makes the further development of our creative abilities more crucial now than ever — particularly for those in the business world. She expands upon this idea in her fascinating book, "Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life."As Dr. Carson explained to Elizabeth Cooney of The Boston Globe:
"The roadmap for how to do things has disappeared. In the business world, creativity is now the number-one quality that head hunters are looking for in top-level chief executives. Most of the elite business schools in the country now have courses on creativity, and many Fortune 500 companies have hired creativity consultants. Creativity isn’t just for starving artists and musicians any more."And Dr. Carson knows that creativity can, and must, be taught.
"What we have found in recent years in the neuroscience of creativity is that highly creative people tend to activate certain neural patterns in their brain when they are solving a creative problem or doing creative work. We have also found through biofeedback programs and other types of cognitive behavioral research that it is possible to change your brain activation patterns. Therefore we can mimic the brain activation of highly creative people."Read more of the Globe interview.
In Your Creative Brain, Dr. Carson identifies how developing our creative potential can lead to greater success and fulfullment :
"The trick is in understanding networks that connect our brain’s “hot spots” for creative thought, and then developing the ability to “turn on” these networks. Each of us is stronger in some areas than others – some are great at brainstorming but weak in follow-through. Others experience creative block because they’re too critical or inhibited. And some people squelch their imaginations when they’re feeling low, rather than recognize that there is creative potential in a negative mood."Based on the latest findings in neuroscience using brain imaging and neuropsychological testing, combined with interviews with hundreds of creative achievers, Dr. Carson's book constructs a set of seven brain states, through the acronym CREATES, standing for: Connect, Reason, Envision, Absorb, Transform, Evaluate, and Stream – and she describes how these "brainsets" relate to creativity, productivity, and innovation.
Explore more of Dr. Shelley Carson's brilliant and original research, and learn more about her new book, at her inspiring website.
Aristotle's Categories
In creative problem-solving, checklists can provide an essential resource for examining the multiple aspects and qualities of a challenge, and for analyzing the elements that become the building blocks of a solution.
Arisotle's ten Categories list all the possible kinds of thing which can be, what he termed, the subject or the predicate of a proposition.
1. Substance or essence
What is it and what makes it unique or individual?
2. Quantity or magnitude
How many, how much, what degree?
3. Relation
Rank, comparison, derivation.
4. Quality
Value, attributes, shape, habits.
5. Action
What is it doing or does it do?
6. Affection
Reputation, attitudes toward.
7. Place
Where is it?
8. Time
When? (now? historical? future?)
9. Position
Sitting, standing, displayed, hidden.
10. State
Planned, broken, untried, changing.
Robert Harris explains how checklists can aid problem-solvers and decision makers in his book Creative Problem Solving.
Arisotle's ten Categories list all the possible kinds of thing which can be, what he termed, the subject or the predicate of a proposition.
1. Substance or essence
What is it and what makes it unique or individual?
2. Quantity or magnitude
How many, how much, what degree?
3. Relation
Rank, comparison, derivation.
4. Quality
Value, attributes, shape, habits.
5. Action
What is it doing or does it do?
6. Affection
Reputation, attitudes toward.
7. Place
Where is it?
8. Time
When? (now? historical? future?)
9. Position
Sitting, standing, displayed, hidden.
10. State
Planned, broken, untried, changing.
Robert Harris explains how checklists can aid problem-solvers and decision makers in his book Creative Problem Solving.
The Often Forgotten First Stage
Invention is the result of innovation. But innovation is the result of imagination.
That easily forgotten though crucial first stage, imagination, is not merely a talent but a skill, which must be emphasized and encouraged through education — so that the skill of imagination
becomes a habit.
~ Sean Kelly
That easily forgotten though crucial first stage, imagination, is not merely a talent but a skill, which must be emphasized and encouraged through education — so that the skill of imagination
becomes a habit.
~ Sean Kelly
Awarded Annenberg/Getty Fellowship
Sean Kelly has been named a fellow for the 2012 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship Program.
See full announcement with links to biographies of all the fellows:
Great thanks to the program leaders:
Sasha Anawalt, Director
Douglas McLennan, Engine30 Project Architect
Edward Lifson, Associate Director
Arianna Sikorski, Program Coordinator
Business Innovation Conference at Yale
Yale School of Management
in association with AIGA
July 22-27, 2012
at Yale University, New Haven, CT
BUSINESS PERSPECTIVES FOR CREATIVE LEADERS
BUSINESS PERSPECTIVES FOR CREATIVE LEADERS
"...is designed exclusively for design executives who work with designers or clients to develop strategic responses to client challenges—in the form of a comprehensive communication or positioning strategy, or the design of a range of products or services. This select group of senior-level creative leaders will come together to discuss, network, debate and grow with each other.
Explore timely topics to understand significant transformations and technological advances in the business world, apply financial tools and strategic analysis, and capitalize on new client opportunities. Case studies, lectures, guest speakers and study groups will give attendees a more complete understanding of business and design through the eyes of business executives."
-- From the American Institute of Graphic Artists
More information here.
How To Be Creative? Don't Be Uncreative.
As journalist Charlie Brooker illustrates in this witty parody created for the BBC, the worst way to tell a news story is through all the obvious gimmicks.
MIT's 150th Birthday: The Network Effect
The students, alumni, and professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are a brainy — and busy — bunch. To mark the university's 150th year, Fast Company magazine charted a handful of smart and productive minds with ties to the school. The categories include Entrepreneurs, Inventors, Government Leaders, Astronauts, Athletes, Artists, 76 Nobel Prize Winners, and 2 Radio Host Siblings (Tom and Ray Magliozzi: "Click and Clack" on NPR's Car Talk, Classes of '59 and '72). Among the impressive statistics: MIT grads have founded more than 25,800 companies, and have been issued 166 patents in 2010 alone. Other more notorious achievements include the annual "hacking" by MIT students, like this 25-foot-long fire truck (above right) placed on the Great Dome at the school in 2006. Historical videos and a timeline are featured in MIT's special 150th anniversary website.
Chart below by Fast Company Design, article by Rachel Arndt
in the April 2011 issue of Fast Company.
(Click to enlarge)
A complete list of articles about MIT published in Fast Company.
UPDATE: Read an entertaining and well-researched list of "150 Ways That MIT Made a Difference" in The Boston Globe.
Creativity Profiles: Incubate, Imagine, Improve, Invest
Jeffrey DeGraff and Katherine A. Lawrence think of creativity as a core competency for corporations, and they describe the notion of Creativity Profiles in their 2002 book from the University of Michigan School of Business Management, Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen.
INCUBATE
By profiles, they mean a description of the biases, tendencies and preferred creative activities of particular individuals, groups, and organizations, together with the desired creative outcomes of their activities. For each of the Creativity Profiles, an example of its implemenation and a representative organization are provided. DeGraff and Lawrence feel that each endeavor must be tackled differently, choosing a creative approach suitable to each challenge. The four I's of the profiles are: Incubate, Imagine, Improve and Invest.
INCUBATE"Long-term Development"
Example: Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous
Growing a community through shared values and learning
IMAGINE
"Breakthrough Ideas"
Example: Walt Disney, The Walt Disney Company
Inventing radical products, services and markets
IMPROVE
"Incremental Adjustments"
Example: Ray Kroc, McDonalds
Implementing systems, structures and standards
INVEST
"Short-Term Goals"
Example: Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM
Competing through focused initiatives, hard work and partnerships
DeGraff and Lawrence, from the introduction to Creativity At Work:
"The study of creativity in business is somewhat unique in that its singular purpose is to produce superior performance for customers and investors. We wrote this book for managers who want to develop their people and practices to be more creative at work. What we have seen again and again are businesses desperately trying to make their products, services, and processes more valuable by making them better or new. Although leaders acknowledge and invest in creativity, we seldom see creativity hold a credible place in the business development process.
We suggest that this is primarily because creativity often fails to create value. Today's leaders demand that their employees produce value, and we believe that creativity can be a path to this end."
See more of Jeffrey DeGraff and Katherine A. Lawrence's work.
The News Reels
HOW MODERN TECHNOLOGY DISRUPTS OLD MEDIA:
What's the future of newspapers? Look to the past — and Hollywood.
Video by Sean Kelly
(Featured on Romenesko)
Multiply
“Ideas are like rabbits.
You get a couple and learn how
to handle them, and pretty soon
you have a dozen.”
You get a couple and learn how
to handle them, and pretty soon
you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck
The Neuroscience of What Jokes Are Funny
From London's New Scientist magazine:
The Neuroscience Of What Jokes Are Funny
by Daniel Elkan
"Despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold.
...Yet humour is a far more complex process than primeval pleasures like sex or food. In addition to the two core processes of getting the joke and feeling good about it, jokes also activate regions of the frontal and cingulate cortex, which are linked with association formation, learning and decision-making
...Perhaps unsurprisingly, personality also appears to play a key role in humour. Mobbs has shown that people who are classed as extrovert and emotionally stable have increased activity in reward areas of the brain during exposure to funny stimuli. Neurotic people, in contrast, have less of a reward response compared with the average person "This suggests that personality style may be important in how we process humour," Mobbs says.
.
...More than anything, the recent research confirms the fact that humour, an oft-neglected trait when considering our cognitive skills, requires a tremendous amount of brain power. "Getting a joke would seem - on the surface - to be a very trivial, intuitive process. But brain imaging is showing us that there is more going on than we might think," says Samson."
Full article here.
Standing on the Shoulders
"I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.
To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense."
— Henry Ford
The Meaning of My Meandering Mind
As John Tierney's article in The New York Times's Science Times section emphasizes, daydreaming is great, but please remember your itinerary — and keep an eye on your luggage — for you'll discover uncharted territories if you really pay attention.In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.Full New York Times article with links to psychological studies is here.
But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals.
Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.
And those are just the lapses they themselves notice, thanks to their wandering brains being in a state of “meta-awareness,” as it’s called by Dr. Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
To encourage this creative process, Dr. Schooler says, it may help if you go jogging, take a walk, do some knitting or just sit around doodling, because relatively undemanding tasks seem to free your mind to wander productively. But you also want to be able to catch yourself at the Eureka moment.
“For creativity you need your mind to wander,” Dr. Schooler says, “but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it."
Strokes of Genius
"Great things are done not by impulse,
but by a series of small things brought together."
Vincent Van Gogh
Nature, Nurture, Not Sure
Discipline, not giftedness, is what's vital to greatness.So says David Shenk in his recent book, The Genius in All of Us.
And, he admits that his sub-title, Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong, makes quite a strong claim:
"It is a bold statement, and it reflects how poorly the public has been served when it comes to understanding the relationship between biology and ability. The clichés we’ve been taught about genetic blueprints, IQ, and 'giftedness' all come out of crude, early-20th century guesswork. The reality is so much more interesting and complex. Genes do have a powerful influence on everything we do, but they respond to their environments in all sorts of interesting ways. We’ve now learned a lot more about the developmental mechanisms that enable people to get really good at stuff. Intelligence and talent turn out to be about process, not about whether you were born with certain 'gifts.' "But, how do we go about finding the genius in all of us? What steps can we take to unlock latent talent? Shenk replies with wonderfully positive spirit:
"Find the thing you love to do, and work and work and work at it. Don't be discouraged by failure; realize that high achievers thrive on failure as a motivating mechanism and as an instruction guide on how to get better."From Annie Murphy Paul's book review titled "How to Be Brilliant," in The New York Times:
Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as Ericsson put it, “repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,” which results in “frequent failures.” This is known as “deliberate practice,” and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible. Behold our long rumored potential, unleashed at last! Shenk is vague about how, exactly, this happens, but to his credit he doesn’t make it sound easy. “You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.”David Shenk, the author of five previous books including The Forgetting, Data Smog and The Immortal Game, is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, Spy, The New Yorker, NPR and PBS. Shenk is a 1988 graduate of Brown University.
Ideators and Alligators
This week, The Creativity Seminar will be presented in Miami where Sean Kelly will be a guest speaker at a workshop on journalism, design, technology and creativity. It's likely that in South Florida in late summer, any brainstorms will develop into full-fledged hurricanes.
Chief of Confusion
A visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, John Seely Brown calls himself the Chief of Confusion, in that he helps people ask the right questions.Prior to his current position, he was another kind of Chief, the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation, and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, knowledge management, and complex adaptive systems. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). In a world of these acronyms, he's known as JSB.
With Paul Duguid he co-authored the acclaimed book The Social Life of Information and with John Hagel he co-authored the book The Only Sustainable Edge which is about new forms of collaborative innovation.
Brown (a Brown graduate) describes himself as "part scientist, part artist and part strategist."
His new book, written with Hagel and and Lang Davison, is The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. It helps us to understand that pull is far more than search or accessing media on demand. Pull can be more systematically used to shape serendipity. The authors provide a guide to connecting with personal passion and finally turning stress into success.
JSB and Hagel are co-founders of Deloitte's Center for the Edge and recently were interviewed for Nokia's IdeasProject about their notion of "creation spaces," which they describe as:
online and in-person experiences designed to draw out what Hagel refers to as tacit knowledge — "Valuable knowledge that we have a really hard time expressing to each other." This process allows people to bring out the knowledge by coming together over extended periods of time to jointly problem solve and learn from each other in the process.From the video transcript:
How do you get people to come together over extended periods of time, working together, contributing different perspectives, different experiences and skill sets, to jointly problem solve over an extended period, and learn from each other in the process and scaffold towards new sets of knowledge that just are not available today?For more, see JSB, Hagel and Davison's manifesto,The Power of Passionate Creative -- an inspiring call to action.
(On a related topic, see The Lemelson Center for Invention and Innovation's excellent Places of Invention.)
Seeing is Believing
“I prefer drawing to talking.
Drawing is faster,
and leaves less room for lies.”
— Le Corbusier
The Magical and The Mathematical
A spreadsheet plot written out by J.K. Rowling. Her approach to spreadsheet plotting is to divide the columns by chapter number, story timeline, chapter title, main plots and subplots.
More on the spreadsheets here.
The Benefits of Structure and Constraints
"You can't improvise on nothing, man.
You got to improvise on something."
— Charles Mingus
The Defeat of Habit
“Creativity can solve almost any problem.
The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”
The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”
The Verbal and The Visual
In advance of the eagerly-anticipated release of Steven Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, the very brilliant, best-selling author has presented a pair of videos highlighting the crux of his thesis: And evidently, good ideas come from both his own spoken words, at a fascinating TED lecture recently; and from the nimble-fingered illustrations of Cognitive Media.
An extremely original thinker, tireless researcher and artful writer with a dry sense of humor, Steven Johnson was a semiotics major at Brown University.
An extremely original thinker, tireless researcher and artful writer with a dry sense of humor, Steven Johnson was a semiotics major at Brown University.
His conversation with Wired magazine's co-founder Kevin Kelly at The New York Public Library is now available on video. And Johnson also presented an excellent overview of Where Good Ideas Come From which is available here. (Both videos courtesy of ForaTV.)
Magazines and iPads: The Creative Process in Process
On March 7, 2011 the Donald J. Reynolds Journalism Institute hosted a day-long seminar titled iPads: The Creative Process in Process.
iPads and the clones that are hitting the market are a game changer for magazines - and the entire publishing industry. In the midst of this digital upheaval, iPads: The Creative Process In Process brought together editors, designers, tech and visual thinkers for a day-long conference that explores how to adapt and generate original content for this ground-breaking device.
Speakers included: National Geographic executive editor/e-publishing, David Griffin; panelists Gary Hoenig, ESPNPublishing general manager/editorial director, ESPN.com editor in chief, Rob King, and ESPN senior writer Wright Thompson; design director Wyatt Mitchell of Wired magazine, Mike Haney, deputy director, research & development, who oversees iPad for Popular Science and other Bonnier titles; Better Homes & Gardens executive editor Kitty Morgan, creative director Michael Belknap and Joe McCambley founding partner of Wonderfactory, Meredith's consulting firm for Better Homes; Matt Bean, associate vice president of mobile, social, and emerging media for Rodale's Men's Health and Women's Health magazines; plus Regina McCombs, online and multimedia expert, the Poynter Institute and Roger Fidler, digital publishing expert at the Reynolds Journalism Institute
SESSION TOPICS:
• The National Geo Empire Goes Digital
• ESPN: Touch Changes Everything
• Wired: Full Speed Ahead
• In the Trenches with Popular Science
and Mag+
• Better Homes & Gardens: Testing
the iPad Waters
A full listing of the events, bios of the speakers, an archive of on-site blogging that day, and video of each session are available at the Reynolds Journalism Institute website.
AN UPDATE: Since the planning of this seminar, Speaker David Griffin has been named Visuals Editor of The Washington Post.
On Selectivity
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep."
Scott Adams
Think Inc.
The current issue of Inc. Magazine offers what they dub their "highly practical, eminently doable, totally reasonable plan to create a million new jobs." Inside the magazine are articles such as "Entrepreneurship Education for All," "How Incubators Speed the Start-up Process," and "How Business-Plan Competitions Reward Innovation."Like Businessweek's expanded coverage on, and special attention to, Innovation (especially by the Design Thinking columnist Bruce Nussbaum), Inc. Magazine has begun to put more focus on innovation and creativity inthe corporate world.
A useful resource is the updated section of Inc.'s website which
provides a full archive of all their articles on inventive thinking
in the workplace.
Past Innovation topics are grouped into categories:
MANAGING FOR CREATIVITY
• Hiring For Creativity
• Encouraging Process Innovation
• Marketing New Ideas RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
• Brainstorming
• Interdisciplinary Research
BRINGING INNOVATION TO MARKET
• Expoiting Idea Marketplaces
Overnight Incubation
Sean Kelly's Creativity Seminar explores the miraculous percolation that can occur in the mind at night, before the coffee starts its own percolation in the morning. When we turn off our conscious mind, the subconscious goes to work on our creative project, while we're thinking about other things -- and especially when we're asleep. But, only if we've done the research and the preparation, and explored the possibilities the night before.
The brilliant performer and writer John Cleese discovered something additionally remarkable about how a good night's sleep can relieve a dilemma for us:
"If I was trying to write a sketch at night, and I got stuck or couldn't think of an ending or I couldn't see how to continue the sketch, I would go to bed.
And when I woke up in the morning, I made myself a cup of coffee and went to my desk and looked at the problem.
Not only was the solution to the problem immediately apparent to me, but I couldn't even remember what the problem had been the previous night. I couldn't understand why I couldn't see what the solution was."
"To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing.
Most people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing. It explains a great deal of life.
It explains, particularly, Hollywood."
Thinking Broadly
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, discusses how businesses can benefit from thinking broadly about society.
Describing her latest book, "Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good," she encourages companies to find new opportunities by creating a new perspective on every aspect of operations and using that to drive the business strategy.
Organizations, she suggests, can think broadly and -- by breaking familiar patterns -- think differently:
"One of the essential tasks of leaders is to inspire people—but it isn't just to inspire people individually, it's also to create a framework in which people can communicate and collaborate. Having a strong corporate culture is one of the best ways to do that.
That's one cluster of lessons. A second cluster of lessons is: Do more in the outside world. Think more broadly. Ask everyone to be scouts for new ideas. Hold meetings in unusual places, where you make contact with customers that you don't yet have—who are not yet in your market but could be."
Full Q & A here.
(Back to) the Future of News
It was a pleasure chatting with Garry Trudeau once again at this year's National Cartoonists Society convention and awards ceremony in Jersey City, NJ.
Previously, and more seriously, on the topic, the Doonesbury creator said:
"I don't believe there's anything I can do personally to prepare for a post-newspaper future, other than hope that the large media companies will come to their senses and form a gated Web collective along the lines of cable TV. They need to form a news utility, financed by subscription or micropayments because going it alone has been disastrous for all of them."Read the rare interview with Trudeau here.
Party of One
"Be alone, that is the secret of invention; Be alone, that is when ideas are born."
Nikola Tesla, 1934
Places of Invention
The 12x18-foot garage in Palo Alto, CA from which, in 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their business.
The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History is planning a new exhibition called Places of Invention. The exhibition will explore several questions about creative communities, including:
• What social, psychological, and spatial elements spark creativity?
• How do these elements give rise to places where invention thrives?
• How does collaboration affect innovation?
Through a series of design challenges hosted by The Tech Virtual, the Lemelson Center invites the public to develop and prototype design concepts for the Center’s next exhibition about modern and historic “hot spots” of invention and innovation.
The public can contribute ideas in one or all of these categories: design an interactive exhibit space that allows museum visitors to model their own place of invention; design an activity that encourages museum visitors to practice collaboration, a key feature of many innovative communities; or use a virtual environment or other design tools to model the contributor’s own place of invention.
More at Inventors Digest.
What Encourages Employees To Be Creative?
According to a Wall Street Journal article by JC Spender and Bruce Strong, the best source of productive ideas at any corporation is the employees themselves, through what the authors term Innovation Communities. These forums that share concepts across functions and ranks are defined by seven key characteristics:
• Create the space to innovate
• Create the space to innovate
• Get a broad variety of viewpoints
• Create a conversation between management and staff
• Create a conversation between management and staff
• Participants should be pulled to join, not pushed
• Tapping unused talent keeps development costs low
• Collateral benefits are as important as the innovations
• Demonstrable value is key
To make the case for the need for Innovation Communities, the authors present a sidebar article that explains why tapping into employees' imaginations through traditional routines rarely produces results.
Three factors are blamed:
(a) Senior management doesn't see the potential. They look to outside managers for new ideas.
(b) Managers suppress employee imagination. Problems and possible solutions aren't shared up and down the chain of command. Each end doesn't feel comfortable talking to the other.
(c) Managers don't know how to use employee imagination. Suggestion boxes generally fail. Research shows that creativity is generally not stimulated (and may in fact be harmed) by financial incentives.
This third explanation brings to mind a remarkable study that explored the related topic and delved deeply into the question: If you were paid more money would you produce more creative work? Teresa Amabile, who has investigated the intersection of business and creativity as a professor at the Harvard Business School, found that the answer is a surprising "no."
For over 30 years, Teresa Amabile has researched and written about creativity, innovation, and the motivational forces that influence them in individuals, teams, and organizations. This work has led to her prominence as one of the leading experts in the field. Using both laboratory experiments and field research, Teresa discovered the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity:
People are most creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge inherent in the work itself. In addition to providing a comprehensive theory of creativity, Amabile’s work in this area has led to a method for assessing creativity and a set of prescriptions for supporting creativity and innovation.
See her article, Creativity Under the Gun, about the surprising effect that deadlines have on creative work.
Although high levels of time pressure usually hamper creativity, and low-to-moderate levels are generally optimal, there are certain (rare) conditions of high time pressure under which creativity can thrive. The keys are motivation and focus.
(Amabile, T.M., Hadley, C.N., and Kramer, S.J. (2002). Creativity under the gun. Harvard Business Review, August 2002, 52-61.)
Teresa Amabile (Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office)
• Collateral benefits are as important as the innovations
• Demonstrable value is key
To make the case for the need for Innovation Communities, the authors present a sidebar article that explains why tapping into employees' imaginations through traditional routines rarely produces results.
Three factors are blamed:
(a) Senior management doesn't see the potential. They look to outside managers for new ideas.
(b) Managers suppress employee imagination. Problems and possible solutions aren't shared up and down the chain of command. Each end doesn't feel comfortable talking to the other.
(c) Managers don't know how to use employee imagination. Suggestion boxes generally fail. Research shows that creativity is generally not stimulated (and may in fact be harmed) by financial incentives.
This third explanation brings to mind a remarkable study that explored the related topic and delved deeply into the question: If you were paid more money would you produce more creative work? Teresa Amabile, who has investigated the intersection of business and creativity as a professor at the Harvard Business School, found that the answer is a surprising "no."
"Since coming to HBS in 1995 from the psychology department at Brandeis University, she's engaged in a longitudinal study to "track creativity in the wild," she says. Poring over 12,000 electronic diaries submitted by workers in seven companies, she's encountered some myth-busting answers to what makes creativity tick in the work environment - and what grinds it to a halt.(From Beth Potier's article in Harvard Science magazine.)
Money, it turns out, does not foster creativity; Amabile found that people doing creative, innovative work do not focus daily on salary or a potential bonus. Ditto for severe deadlines, which despite common perceptions generally stifle creativity. Competition and fear of retribution also hinder employees from doing their most creative work, she found.
While these findings might chafe against popular management wisdom, they support Amabile's core hypothesis, formulated in social-psychological laboratory experiments, that creativity is a product of intrinsic motivation. "That's being motivated to do the work because it's interesting, it's positively challenging, it's captivating," she says. On the flip side, extrinsic motivators - expected evaluation, competition, anticipated reward - tend to decrease creativity.
For over 30 years, Teresa Amabile has researched and written about creativity, innovation, and the motivational forces that influence them in individuals, teams, and organizations. This work has led to her prominence as one of the leading experts in the field. Using both laboratory experiments and field research, Teresa discovered the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity:
People are most creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge inherent in the work itself. In addition to providing a comprehensive theory of creativity, Amabile’s work in this area has led to a method for assessing creativity and a set of prescriptions for supporting creativity and innovation.
See her article, Creativity Under the Gun, about the surprising effect that deadlines have on creative work.
Although high levels of time pressure usually hamper creativity, and low-to-moderate levels are generally optimal, there are certain (rare) conditions of high time pressure under which creativity can thrive. The keys are motivation and focus.
(Amabile, T.M., Hadley, C.N., and Kramer, S.J. (2002). Creativity under the gun. Harvard Business Review, August 2002, 52-61.)
Teresa Amabile (Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office)
Trans (across) Discipline (study)
Parsons The New School for Design launched a new Masters program this spring:FROM THEIR WEBSITE:
"Emphasizing collaborative design-led research, the MFA Transdisciplinary Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons will serve as an academic laboratory in New York City for graduate students seeking to define the next phase of design practice globally.
The complex problems that confront a networked 24/7 global culture call for broad design approaches. Parsons created the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design (TransDesign) for a new generation of designers who want to address pressing social issues using new ideas, tools, and methods. Students work in cross-disciplinary teams, consider issues from multiple perspectives, gain insight from industry leaders, and emerge with a portfolio of projects showcasing design as a process for transforming the way we live in the 21st century.
A NEW KIND OF DESIGN THINKING
Graduates of the MFA TransDesign program will possess a unique set of skills and capacities that will distinguish them professionally. Students learn to practice:
• Reflective collaboration – working flexibly in multidisciplinary teams to solve highly complex problems
• Complexity modeling – visually modeling complex systems and social structures to yield new insights
• Critical reframing – examining problems and turning them into design opportunities
• Design-led research – articulating a research problem and exploring it through a design process
• Fitness prototyping – discovering an appropriate resolution of a problem that belongs to no single design field.
Read an interview with Jamer Hunt, chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons.
What does "Transdisciplinary" mean? Just ask the man or woman on the street...
See and Sow
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Musical Chairs
Need New Ideas? Trade Places."When two successful CEOs switched places for a day, the result was new ideas and a fresh perspective. Don't limit your imagination to what you already know. If you need to innovate, don't look to what others in your industry are doing, or to your past successes.
Seek out a new experience, put yourself in a new context, and find ideas already proven in one field that might be applicable to yours. If you can, find someone who has a similar job in a different industry and trade experiences; what might be routine and ordinary for him may be revolutionary for you."
Adapted from "Trading Places: A Smart Way to Change Your Mind" by Bill Taylor.
Corporate Creativity and Comedy
Sean Kelly's Creativity Seminar uses examples from his 25 years of producing humorous illustrations and from great comedic minds such as Moliere, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, The Second City's guru Del Close and writers for The Simpsons. During difficult economic times, humor can provide comfort -- and lead to great solutions.Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of Supercorp, explores the power of a sense of humor as a tool for corporate innovation.
"Creative leaders unlock ingenuity and build support for change by lightening up. They are willing to consider new possibilities that seem absurd, even ludicrous, at first...This is exactly what humor is all about: playing with ideas, challenging assumptions, and poking fun at tradition.Dr. Kanter's brilliant commentary is a serious analysis -- with lots of very funny examples.
In the classic tradition, tragedy is apocalyptic; whatever one tries, the outcome cannot be altered. Comedy, in contrast, is hopeful. It involves ludicrous juxtapositions with never-ending possibilities for improvement. Humor helps us understand that things aren't always as they appear, they can shift shape or form, there are opportunities for change, and we're not trapped by past decisions."
Read "Laughing Your Way To The Bank."
Science and Creativity
Science journalist Marcia Bartusiak and Harvard physicist Lisa Randall explore the creativity involved in scientific research and writing about science at Cambridge Forum. The free program, titled Criticizing Creativity, takes place at The First Parish (Unitarian Universalist) 3 Church Street, Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square) at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 7, 2010.
From the press release:
"Creativity is a trait commonly associated with artists --writers, painters, or composers. But other professions require creativity as well; think of the doctor coming up with a diagnosis, the teacher creating a new lesson plan, or the scientist confronted with aberrations in data. How is the creative spark that informs a scientific investigation the same as the inspiration that generates a work of art or literature? How is it different? What can we learn about the nature of creativity when we examine the ways in which it is used outside of the arts?MIT’s Marcia Bartusiask and Harvard’s Lisa Randall each have experience in scientific research and in the arts. They bring this dual perspective to the discussion led by Dr. Sasha Helper."
Vibrated
"There are no days in life
so memorable as those
which vibrated to some
stroke of the imagination."
so memorable as those
which vibrated to some
stroke of the imagination."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scott and Zelda, Westport, CT, 1921
Transforming Journalism
George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, in association with the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The Newseum, hosted "Transforming Journalism: The State of the News Media 2010" on March 29, 2010.
The event featured panelists Tom Rosenstiel (Director, PEJ), Jim Brady (President, Digital Strategies, Allbritton Communications), Tina Brown (Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Beast),
Susan Page (Washington Bureau Chief, USA Today), Charles Sennott (Exec. Editor, GlobalPost) and Mark Whitaker, (SVP and Washington Bureau Chief, NBC News). The panel was moderated by SMPA Director Frank Sesno.
The keynote speaker was Vivian Schiller (President & CEO, NPR).
Live Twitter reports featured quotes, such as:
Susan Page: "It's still 'legacy media" that is driving conversation in the country and traffic on the web." (80% of links on blogs come from traditional journalism sources such as The New York Times.)More info on the panel at GWU's SMPA is here.
Vivian Schiller, to students: "Don't let family, neighbors tell you to not go into journalism because there are no jobs. Students in this room will re-invent biz, make models and make $"
The new Pew annual report on the health and status of American journalism (March 15, 2010) is here.
The Innovator's DNA
From The Harvard Business Review, an article by Innosight founder Clayton Christensen, BYU Professor Jeffrey Dyer, and INSEAD Professor Hal Gregersen describes the critical characteristics of successful innovators, and presents practical tips for business leaders looking to strengthen their innovation muscles.
"Our research led us to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. We found that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50% more time on these discovery activities than do CEOs with no track record for innovation. Together, these skills make up what we call the innovator’s DNA. And the good news is, if you’re not born with it, you can cultivate it."What makes innovators different?
"Innovative entrepreneurs have something called creative intelligence, which enables discovery yet differs from other types of intelligence (as suggested by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences). It is more than the cognitive skill of being right-brained. Innovators engage both sides of the brain as they leverage the five discovery skills to create new ideas."
Full article here.
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