Posts Tagged ‘creative problem solving’

Personal transformation and New Year’s resolutions

Monday, January 9th, 2012


I do not believe in the adage, You cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Personal change, even transformation, is possible. And, with the right strategies, it can be relatively painless and certain. John Tierney, on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page, lists seven research-based strategies to optimize your ability to transform yourself – or at least to keep your New Year’s resolution!

Pint-sized but leonine, she was playing me as her favorite tune

Write down your plan and read it at least once a day


But first, let’s start with an anecdote.

As a young father, I found myself caught in a power struggle with my pint-sized but leonine daughter. And – no surprise to any parent – I was losing. Terribly. She had me completely figured and was playing me as her favorite tune. She’d call – seeking my attention by displaying negative behavior – and I’d respond – with angry discipline. The pattern was strong, established and escalating. I knew I was in serious trouble when I found her leaning against the screen in a second-floor window.

Coincidentally, I was soon off to the Creative Problem Solving Institute. I decided that I needed to make significant change and transform my relationship with my daughter. Good fortune had it that I went to a session by Roger Firestien. As I recall, he was presenting how to apply the creative problem-solving process (CPS) to personal transformation. He reviewed the standard CPS steps, with which I was intimately familiar:

  • Identify a goal, wish or problem
  • Gather data
  • Clarify the problem
  • Generate solutions
  • Select solutions
  • Plan and act

And then he recommended a strategy I hadn’t heard before: if you really want to implement your plan, write it down and read it at least once a day for two weeks. He guaranteed that fidelity to that final piece of advice would result in success in much less time than that.

Upon my return home, I did just that. I wrote the plan down and then I read it every morning when I got to work, before lunch and before I left for home. Although I read the plan for two weeks straight as recommended, the desired change occurred after about four or five days. I had transformed my relationship with my daughter.

Tierney’s strategies to maintain will power


Tierney’s strategies are based on Roy F. Baumeister’s recent research on will power, which “social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control…He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.”

Here are Tierney’s strategies for managing your limited will power and avoiding “ego depletion” and failure to change:

Set a single, clear goal: Set “a specific goal…and limit yourself to one big resolution at a time…With a finite supply of willpower, it’s tough enough to keep one resolution.”

Precommit: Have a plan and “further bind yourself by e-mailing your goal to friends or posting it on Facebook.”

Father and daughter 20 years on - Close as can be

Outsource: Use newly available tools such as Twitter or websites such as stickk.com. There you can make a formal contract,  identify a “referee” and even put money on the line. “The more you precommit, the better you do, according to stickK’s analysis of 125,000 contracts over the past three years. The success rate for people who don’t name a referee or set financial stakes is only 29 percent, but it rises to 59 percent when there’s a referee and to 71.5 percent when there’s money at stake. And when a contract includes a referee and financial stakes, the success rate is nearly 80 percent.”

Keep track: Monitor your progress continually.  Again, use the emerging tool sets available to you: “Entrepreneurs are rushing to monitor just about every aspect of your life — your health, your moods, your sleep — and you can find dozens of their products by consulting Web sites like Quantified Self and Lifehacker.”

Don’t overreact to a lapse: Avoid the “phenomenon formally known as ‘counterregulatory eating’ — and informally as the ‘what the hell effect.’” That is, don’t use a lapse as an excuse to give in completely and abandon your plan. You know, like the dieter who succumbs, eats a bowl of ice cream and then figures, “Hell, I may as well eat the whole carton.”

Reward often:  Finally, reward yourself often. As Tierney says, “If you use willpower only to deny yourself pleasures, it becomes a grim, thankless form of defense. But when you use it to gain something, you can wring pleasure out of the dreariest tasks.”

Reversal


The parents among you may be curious to know how I transformed my relationship with my daughter. I used a basic creativity technique called reversal. Each time the call came, my response was the exact opposite to what it had been. Instead of angry disciple, I gave my daughter a warm hug and told her I loved her. Simple as that.

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Readings: Creativity & Problem Solving

Monday, June 13th, 2011


Frequently, I am asked to recommend the best books on creativity and problem solving. Below are three that I consider “must read”:

  • DeBono, Edward. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step-by-Step. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Edward DeBono is a giant among creativity experts and this, his best book is filled with immediately useable insights, tools and techniques.

  • Parnes, Sidney. The Magic of Your Mind. Buffalo: Creative Education Foundation, 1982.

Sid Parnes helped to codify the creative problem solving process that is used throughout the world and that many others have co-opted and re-branded as their own. This book revealed my own unrealized creative potential and illustrated how to begin to tap it.

  • Torrence, E. Paul. The Search for Satori and Creativity. Buffalo: Creative Education Foundation, 1979.

Torrence’s seminal text displays his profound, seemingly encyclopedic grasp of the field of human creativity.

If you’re looking for more good reading, see Prism’s full list of books about creativity, problem solving, facilitation, decision-making, negotiation, psychology, science and Web 2.0.

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Reduce stress! Become more creative in three steps

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011


Life is a cascade of challenge. Sometimes the flow trickles and sometimes it roars. How well you navigate determines who you are and your quality of life. Do you embrace the flow or avoid it? Does a torrent motivate or immobilize you? Do you look to the future with hope or fear?

Your answers to these questions probably correlate to your creative skill. A creative person sees opportunity in challenge. She tolerates and does not fear ambiguity. Entering life’s white waters, she is not paralyzed by stress but energized by the exhilaration. She does not look back or paddle upstream but races downstream toward the new vistas beckoning.

In Iconoclast: a Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, Gregory Berns explains how highly creative individuals are hard wired. fMRI studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains differ in terms of perception, fear response and social intelligence. Importantly, he provides practical ways for each of us to nurture such capabilities in ourselves. Yes! We can rewire the circuits and become more creative by pursuing three specific strategies:

  • Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently
  • Tame the stress response and overcome fear
  • Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your novel ideas

The neuroscience behind creativity


Because the human mind runs on just 40 watts of power, it constantly seeks to conserve energy. It takes a lot of shortcuts, including in the area of perception. According to Berns, “the most likely way you perceive something will be in a manner consistent with your past experience. Commonplace perceptions feel comfortable and cost little energy to process.” The brain categorizes your past experience and then draws from these categories to determine what you “see.” By its nature, the brain does not want to expend the energy required to see differently.

Step #1: Bombard the brain with novel experiences and learn to see differently

Bern’s studies indicate that iconoclasts’ brains are more easily able to see differently — that is, their brains do not seek to conserve energy at the expense of creative insight. What about the rest of us? When confronting life’s cascade of challenge, what can we do to generate innovative solutions?

Berns suggests that we intentionally shock the brain with novel experiences, compelling it to expend the energy required to achieve creative insight. “By forcing the visual system to see things in different ways, you can increase the odds of new insights.” Specifically, he suggests that the “surest way to evoke the imagination is to confront the perceptual system with people, places, and things that it hasn’t seen before…In order to think creatively…bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks.”

For those who can learn to see differently, the brain has another, even more primal attribute that inhibits creative action. Fear. We fear the criticism, rejection and ridicule that may result from thinking differently. We avoid the risk associated with possible failure. We recoil from ambiguity because we fear the unknown. According to Berns, “The stress system is not rational. It reacts when provoked, and this reaction is powerful enough to derail many of the most innovative people out there.”

Step #2: Tame the stress response and overcome fear

Berns offers a number of specific strategies to overcome fear. None are simple and all require persistence and courage. For example, he says we need to understand the effects of fear and then re-frame it. Instead of fearing failure, train yourself to focus on its potential for learning and growth. Similarly, learn to tolerate ambiguity. The unknown can prove either detrimental or helpful to us. Berns suggests that we nurture the ability to mitigate our fear of the unknown by seeing its possible benefits. Finally, to avoid fear of ridicule, recruit a like-minded person to support you when you present an innovative idea to others.

Let’s assume that you have successfully tamed fear and are generating creative ideas. According to Berns, you have one final hurdle: taming the fear in others. Novel ideas are different. By its nature, the brain perceives what is different to be threatening. This is a primal response.

Step #3: Develop social intelligence and persuade others to accept your innovative ideas

Seeing differently and taming the stress response do not guarantee your success in creative endeavors. To implement novel ideas, you need to light up the brain’s circuits for social networking.

“In order to sell one’s ideas, one must create a positive reputation that will draw people toward something that is initially unfamiliar and potentially scary. Familiarity helps build one’s reputation…successful iconoclasts have an uncommon ability to connect on a social level that transcends the idea itself. The key to doing this is through social networks. In order to be successful, the iconoclast builds a network through two fundamental approaches: familiarity and reputation.”

Navigate life’s quick water with dexterity and joy


Reduce your stress! Face your unique cascade of challenge with a creative worldview. See differently, tame your fear and build social networks based on familiarity and reputation. While you may not become an iconoclast, you will surely navigate life’s quick waters with greater dexterity and joy.

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Changing Education Paradigms

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Sir Ken Robinson’s fascinating, thought-provoking, and engaging animated narrative of the history of formal education, its current failures and a better path forward was presented upon the occasion of his receiving the Benjamin Franklin Medal by the Royal Society of Arts in London:

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Are Too Many Options Bad For You?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Ever since I read Sidney Parnes’ The Magic of Your Mind more than twenty years ago, I have firmly believed that having more options is preferable to having fewer options. On the other hand, just about every time I go to the grocery store, I wish there were fewer choices. So I am conflicted: my training and belief system tell me the more options, the better; my experience, sometimes just the opposite.

Research now validates the conflict I experience.

Sheena Iyengar’s fascinating presentation, On the Art of Choosing, discusses the impact of culture on decision-making. One of her key research findings is that the American belief that more options are better than fewer is not universally held by all cultures: “Though all humans share the basic need and desire for choice, we don’t all see choice in the same places or to the same extent.”

I find this interesting but not surprising. What did surprise me is her assertion that even for Americans, having too many options can result in poorer decision-making: “When there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints.” In fact, Iyengar’s research demonstrates that when you give people “ten or more options when they are making a choice, they make poor decisions.”

To view Iyengar’s full discussion of the impact of culture on decision-making, click below. If you wish to go directly to her dismantling of the assumption that the “more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice,” fast forward to 8 minutes 10 seconds.

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The Monkey Business Illusion

Monday, August 2nd, 2010


The video below tests your perceptual acuity. Listen carefully to the directions and then watch the video. (Note: if you think you’ve seen this video, you probably have not. It is a May 2010 sequel to the widely viewed 1999 selective attention test video that many of you probably have seen.)




How did you do? Miss anything? If you did, you are in good company. I, for one, counted the number of passes correctly but failed to see the gorilla in the 1999 version. And in this new version I missed the player in black dropping out. On a positive note: I did notice the color change!

Cognitive scientist Daniel Simons showed the video to 76 University of Illinois students. As reported in i-PERCEPTION, for those who had not seen the 1999 version, only 56% noticed the gorilla (23 out of 41). Just “11% of subjects noticed the curtain change, and 16% noticed the change to the number of players on the black team. Only 1 participant noticed both the curtain and the player change.”

Simons defines the phenomenon as inattentional blindness, “the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected.” In a Seed Magazine interview, he discusses the implications to our everyday life:

In inattentional blindness you’re not seeing something that’s right there because your attention is engaged. The most obvious practical application of that is driving. We intuitively think that if something important happens right in front of us, we will see it…Dan Levin has done studies where he just asked people, would you notice if something like this happens? He shows people the video, gives them the instructions, points out the gorilla, and then asks them “how likely would you be to notice the gorilla if you were doing this task and counting the passes?” Ninety percent of people say they’d notice. Regardless of how you ask that question, you get high confidence, and a high percentage saying “yeah, of course I’d notice that.”

That’s the intuition that’s interesting, and that’s the one that’s dangerous. If we were completely aware of these limits on attention, we wouldn’t do things like talking on cell phone while driving: We would know that it would make us just that much less likely to notice something. But we don’t have that insight into our own awareness. It’s only in that rare case where you actually have an accident that you become aware that you’ve missed something.

As Simon’s studies have demonstrated, we are all prone to innattentional blindness. What impact does it have on our problem solving? What salient events in our visual field are we missing, even though we are confident we are not? How often do we see what we are looking for and not what is there?

Post script

Science News reports on April 25, 2011 that a new study purports that multitaskers are better at spotting “invisible” Gorillas.


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The Antidote for America’s Creativity Crisis

Friday, July 23rd, 2010


In its July 10 issue, Newsweek reported that although creativity scores had for decades been steadily rising in America, since 1990 “they have consistently inched downward.” This news is disturbing for the nation’s children and our future prosperity. But the situation is not dire. There is a clear antidote to this decline in the nation’s creativity.

Creativity is a discipline that can be taught. Although many consider this assertion to be self-evident, others vehemently disagree. A common retort: No matter how much training and practice I receive, I will never be a Mozart or a Shakespeare or a Beatle. But this misses the point. Few would make the claim that creative genius can but taught. But each of us can become better creative thinkers with quality training and sustained practice.

Consider this analogy. When I was a kid, I never suffered the illusion that I would be the next Jerry West or Oscar Robertson, but I did practice a lot of basketball and became fairly proficient at the game. Last fall, while killing time at the local YMCA, I went into an empty gym, picked up a basketball and made 14 free throws in a row. A fluke? Absolutely. But decades later, the muscle memory remained.

Just as we practice an athletic discipline over and over until its skills become automatic, so, too, we can practice creativity skills until they become habits of mind. For more than 50 years the Creative Education Foundation (CEF) has championed research and delivered training in deliberate processes to improve creative thinking. The CEF’s approach distinguishes between two major creativity skills, divergence and convergence:

  • To diverge is to explore options, to consider all possibilities, to extend in different directions often while departing from the norm.
  • To converge is to critically evaluate options, to move toward a common conclusion, to reach agreement, to make a choice or decision.

Diverging before converging is not the natural pattern for most people. By our natures, most of us are more apt to criticize each new idea as it is shared and less apt to defer judgment while carefully considering all possibilities. But the simple fact is that training and practice can instill the habit of diverging before converging in just about anyone.

Both these major creativity skills have sub-skills. For example, divergence requires the ability to think fluently and flexibly. Fluency is the ability to generate a large quantity of ideas quickly. Examples of fluency sub-skills include brainstorming, free-noting, tolerance for ambiguity, among many others. Flexibility is the ability to see diverse and unusual relationships. Here, too, there are many sub-skills, including forced analogies, lateral thinking and morphological analysis. And — like shooting free throws over and over until the motion is preserved in muscle memory — each of these sub-skills can be practiced repeatedly until they become automatic habits of mind.

Yes, we can all learn to be more creative thinkers. We have the research base, the educational resources, the knowledge and skill. America can reverse the trend toward declining creativity among its youth.

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Is America in a Creativity Crisis?

Monday, July 19th, 2010


Last week, Newsweek published The Creativity Crisis with this subheading: For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What was the evidence for this disturbing claim?

College of William & Mary researcher Kyung Hee Kim analyzed 300,000 scores of children and adults on the Torrance® Tests of Creative Thinking. She discovered that although creativity scores had been steadily rising until 1990, “since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. ‘It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,’ Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is ‘most serious.’”

Three days after the Newsweek piece appeared, my local newspaper published an article with the following lede:

“Nicholas Nieves is a veteran test taker. The Horace Mann Elementary student is 10 years old. ‘We do practice tests and practice tests and more practice tests,’ the soon-to-be Binghamton fifth-grader said. ‘And then we do the real thing. We take a lot of tests.’ But does he learn from the tests? ‘Not really,’ Nicholas said.”

Are Nicholas’s insights related to Ms. Kim’s? I suspect so — as are numerous other phenomena that may be sapping a child’s natural inclination to exercise the imagination and be creative. These days, children are less likely to experience active, free and unstructured play and more likely to experience passive, guided and structured play. Just as a for instance, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that “8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day” and that doesn’t count the 1 hour and 35 minutes they spend each day sending or receiving texts.

If Ms. Kim’s findings are accurate, the news is disturbing for the nation’s children and our future prosperity. Consider. Scholars have been tracking those administered the Torrence tests to see how well performance on the test predicted creative accomplishments in adulthood. The findings? “Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.”

Obviously, the converse will prove true: the less creative our children, the fewer innovative and productive adults our nation will produce. But the situation is not dire. See The Antidote for America’s Creativity Crisis for a discussion of the intentional teaching of creativity.

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Errors are Portals of Discovery

Sunday, May 16th, 2010


Errors are…the portals of discovery.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Fear to make a mistake, to fail, or to take a risk is perhaps the most
general and common emotional block in problem solving.

James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting

_________

Years ago, my five-year-old son was assigned to paint a school bus. When he came home that day from kindergarten, he had his school bus, which he had painted blue. Sprawled over his painting were his teacher’s comments: School buses are yellow! In red ink, of course.

I found this interesting for two reasons. First, I wondered if the teacher was familiar with Pablo Picasso’s “blue period” — or with Jim Morrison, for that matter. More practically, I observed that the majority of school buses in our community are, indeed, blue. (See photo left.) Nonetheless, the teacher’s reprimand: School buses are yellow!

Yes, my son’s experience was extreme, but I suspect that most of us have had some similar experience growing up. We can all conjure up that painful memory of having offered an innovative solution or novel idea, only to be told that we were wrong or — worse — to be ridiculed or laughed at.

Consequently, we have been conditioned to seek the right answer and to expect a reward for it. The impacts of this conditioning are significant. We can become risk averse, prefer safe alternatives, reject novelty and sub-optimize.

Effective problem solving and decision-making requires that we embrace risk and accept the inevitable mistakes as learning opportunities. Our errors enrich us, opening portals through which we discover invigorating perspectives and flashes of insight. With each risk, we become more facile problem solvers, more dexterous decision-makers. We grow increasingly clever, agile and — if we keep at it long enough — wise.

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Bugs Bunny Didn’t Brainstorm

Monday, April 5th, 2010


Chuck Jones is a creative genius who towers over American popular culture. Best known as the director of Looney Toons shorts featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd, he knew a thing or two about creative process.

In his autobiography, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, the creator of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote describes a process he and his Warner Brothers colleagues used as an alternative to brainstorming. The “yes” session is designed to explore the potential within nascent ideas.

According to Jones, “The ‘yes’ session imposes only one discipline: the abolition of the word ‘no.’” Jones clearly disdained naysayers. “Anyone can say ‘no’… It is a cheap word because it requires no explanation, and many men and women have acquired a reputation for intelligence who know only this word and have used it in place of thought on every occasion.”

In a “yes” session, anything goes, but only if it is “positive, supportive and affirmative to the premise.” No negatives are allowed. “All roadblocks impeding the advancement and exploration of the value of an idea are forbidden.”

If you need evidence of the effectiveness of a “yes” session, treat yourself to seven minutes of Jones’ brilliance in this hilarious parody of Rossini’sThe Barber of Seville, starring Bugs and Elmer Fudd.

The next time you or your colleagues are problem solving, try the “yes” session. Before you say “No,” say “Yes!” to a new idea — and in as many ways as possible. Like Edward DeBono’s PMI technique discussed in a previous post, the “yes” session ensures that feedback does not kill ideas but enlivens them; results not in the pain of rejection but the thrill of creation.

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