good ideas and problems - morning session brainstorming (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s the scoop.  Brainstorming describes a process of people generating ideas using a few rules. Ad exec Alex Osborn coined the term in a number of books, Your Creative Power: How to Use Imagination (1948) and Applied Imagination (1953). Since its arrival as a concept, meme and practice over 60 years ago, brainstorming received attention both as a panacea and a ne’er-do-well. Dr. Gerard Puccio, director of the International Center for Studies in Creativity, cites research in his blog post The Demise of Brainstorming Has Been Exaggerated: A Reply to Lehrer’s Piece in The New Yorker that is worthy of a look-see for evidence of its efficacy.

Many people are familiar with the practice of brainstorming and not its guidelines.  Here they are as remembered from my studying at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in the late 1970′s:

• Defer judgement (evaluate ideas only after many are collected)
• Quantity breeds quality (the more ideas generated, the better the ideas get)
• There are no such things as bad ideas (each one has some quality that contributes to a successful outcome directly or indirectly)
• Freewheel (feel free to suggest ideas that are beyond the scope of traditional ones; seek unusual ideas and connections)
• Hitchhike (build on other people’s ideas)
• Use techniques deliberately
• No editorializing (keep the ideas short and sweet)
• Write them down (capture ideas as they emerge, rather than not because they are easily forgotten)

The ideas are reviewed and criteria applied after the brainstorming is concluded so new decisions can be made. [FYI, new criteria are often needed for this to occur. These can be brainstormed as well.]

The success of a brainstorm session can be judged in many ways:

• number of ideas
• number of new ideas
• number of far out ideas
• quality of ideas
• level of participation of people involved
• number of good ideas worthy of using in short, medium and long-term

Then another question emerges – what is the success of the session due to?  The facilitator, the prepping of the group, how well-practiced the participants are in brainstorming, the definition of the brainstorm subject, the environment in which the session is held, the number of breaks people have, the kinds of tools used to inspire new thinking, the group dynamic, the personality styles of the players, performance pressure, feelings and emotions of the people involved, the position of the session champion and his/her influence, the openness of communication?  Many variables are at play and each is paid attention to by a skilled creativity professional who wants to make sure client/group experiences success.

Bottom line: What is brainstorming really all about from my point of view?  People being able and open to behave so that they

• say yes to ideas that would normally receive a no
• deliberately use imagination instead of going for the ‘pat’ answers
• risk new viewpoints and alternative options
• play with perceptions
• use many different thinking tools that support bold thinking
  

Don’t let the current brainstorming conversation deter you from generating new ideas (and generating/using new criteria by which to assess them). Just get on with it.  Imagine what would happen if you didn’t.

Adobe study reveals massive creativity gaps, but not in gender or age

April 23, 2012 11:07 AM

Jolie O’Dell

Whether you’re able to be creative or not has little to do with how old you are or whether you’re female or male, but it might depend heavily on where you live, how your boss treats you, and how you were educated.

According to a mammoth survey conducted by Adobe (and strategically released at that company’s CS6 launch event), there are significant gaps in creativity, but those gaps might not be where you expect to find them.

The study reveals some interesting statistics. Around 80 percent of respondents said they thought creativity is “critical to economic growth.” More than 60 percent of them also said creativity is important to society.

However, just 25 percent of respondents said they are currently living up to their creative potential.

What enables those lucky 25 percent to live up to their potential and be creative? For the 5,000 adults around the world in Adobe’s survey, age and gender have almost nothing to do with it. Rather, it all comes down to environmental factors: location, education, and work.

Japan and the U.S. are the first- and second-most creative countries, respectively, among a global audience. While Japanese in the survey didn’t see themselves as particularly creative, they earned high marks from their peers in other countries.

Americans, on the other hand, said they felt highly creative, but the country was ranked second-best globally.

Our biggest barrier to creativity might be at work. In the survey, 75 percent of respondents said they have been experiencing more and more pressure from superiors to be productive rather than creative in the workplace, even though their jobs require at least some measure of creativity. This kind of bottom line-focused emphasis on producing rather than creating leads to — no surprise — less creativity at work. Respondents said they spend around 25 percent of their workday being creative, mostly due to lack of time.

Another major factor in creativity is education: not whether you had a “good” or “expensive” or “public” education, but whether you were encouraged to develop your creativity starting at an early age and continuing throughout your school years.

Around the globe, more than half of Adobe’s respondents said creativity is being stamped out rather than nourished by the education system.

“One of the myths of creativity is that very few people are really creative,” said education and creativity specialist Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D., in a release around the survey.

“The truth is that everyone has great capacities but not everyone develops them. One of the problems is that too often our educational systems don’t enable students to develop their natural creative powers. Instead, they promote uniformity and standardization. The result is that we’re draining people of their creative possibilities and, as this study reveals, producing a workforce that’s conditioned to prioritize conformity over creativity.”

Finally, access to creativity-boosting tools can be important to expressing your creative urges. In Adobe’s survey, 40 percent of respondents said they do not have the tools they need to be creative. These tools are seen as the single most important key to expressing one’s creativity (by 65 percent of all respondents and 76 percent of U.S. respondents).

Of course, an emphasis on tools for creativity is what you’d expect from a company like Adobe. Nevertheless, having access to these kinds of tools can, in fact, make all the difference to a budding artist, designer, or filmmaker. Kinda makes you wish, at least for those young/broke creatives’ sakes, that Adobe products were less prohibitively expensive, doesn’t it?

The Adobe State of Create survey was conducted by research firm StrategyOne among a group of 5,000 adults, 1,000 each in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan. The firm conducted the survey between March 30 to April 9, 2012.

Related articles

• Adobe study reveals massive creativity gaps, but not in gender or age (venturebeat.com)
• Drawing Creativity Out of Employees (blogs.wsj.com)
• Views on creativity throughout the world. (thejunta.wordpress.com)

From Wikipedia:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ph.D. (born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2006 he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, and is a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. Tyson will be hosting a new sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage TV series.

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Optical illusion image used in psychological tests (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wonder why people aren’t engaged when asked for creative ideas ?  Could be that there’s some psychological harassment going on.

If people you work with behave as in the list below, you can bet that there are interpersonal factors that block to allow free thinking and new ideas.

• Make rude, degrading or offensive remarks
• Act to intimidate or get back at someone
• Discredit others by spreading rumours
• Ridicule or humiliate others’ private life
• Belittle people by asking them to do tasks that are below their skill base
• Engage in or encourage others in professional misconduct
• Prevent others from expressing themselves through yelling, cutting them off while they are speaking, isolating them
• Refuse to talk to a person, not acknowledge a person’s existence
• Make fun of a person’s convictions, tastes or political choice

As a leader you can consider how you can model idea-supporting and engagement-producing behaviours. Turn the above statements around to nurture and sustain creativity’s growth, such as

• Make affirming, valuing remarks
• Act to support other’s success
• Spread other people’s success stories
• Honour people’s private lives
• Ask people to do tasks that stretch their skill level
• Behave ethically

When you do, you’ll replace psychological harassment with psychological safety, and then watch the creative ideas flow!

If there is psychological harassment going on, here are a few steps to take – programs to instill, actions to begin

• Promote respectful interpersonal communication – use psychological inventories, such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator®  instrument (I use its framework with executive teams to improve effective communication and navigate innovation through transformation. The interventions often result in them welcoming creative thinking and action and making flexible and productive organizational differences).
• Establish a known procedure that is known, efficient, credible and reality-based to handle conflicts confidentially
• Take a different approach to understanding conflict resolution – visit the Center for Non-Violent Communication for tips, assessments and language

Dragons' Den (UK) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wonder how to select the best ideas for innovation and present them to Dragons/Sharks?  Your responses to seven questions for prototyping (adapted from Otto Sharmer’s Presencing Institute) may just be thing you need to get a yes.

1. How is it relevant?  Why does it matter to all the key stakeholders involved at each level – The person, organization and communities?
2. How does it serve all the stakeholders simultaneously?
3. How is it revolutionary? In what ways does it change the game and the system?
4. How can a pilot be done quickly?  What is your plan for constructing an experiment, receiving feedback and adapting your idea with the new knowledge.
5. How can it be implemented on a small-scale?
6. How does it leverage the strengths, competencies and potentials of existing networks and communities at hand?
7. How is it replicable? How might local participation and ownership be activated on a small-scale before seeking external knowledge and capital for its implementation and growth.

Both the Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank are television shows where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business concepts and products to a panel of  business moguls who have the cash and the know-how make it happen. Pitching an idea for innovation isn’t much different, or is it?

Related articles

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The Way Out, or Suicidal Ideation: George Grie, 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How can you expect to give your best, most imaginative ideas when you feel like a deer caught in the headlights -  eyes glossed over feeling anxious, fearful, panic, confused, or downright uncomfortable because on top of everything else, new ideas mean you’ll have more work. It may also mean that you’ll be committing something akin to suicide for all the effort you’ve invested so far.  Stress can cause you an ideation freeze.

To overcome business ideation freeze, some organizations

• Involve customers in their ideation process
• Look to other industries to see how they involve their customers in new ways
• Focus on customers unsaid needs
• Involve suppliers in product ideation (to bring your unmet needs to the table for a collective partnership).

If you want to create a new pathway for innovation crack through old thinking for creative new ideas that could lead to creative new decisions. Rather than waiting for the world to change, you can initiate the change by taking an alternate (i.e. a creative) approach to meeting innovation challenges. Personal approaches to new thinking may open doors of potential, you can apply your responses to theme and gain insight into the business job at hand.

I use questions similar to these as inspiration for creative thinking, to overcome the ideation freeze, to build flexibility for productivity. Here’s how it works:  After you answer one question about personal needs and values, connect the responses to an innovation challenge at hand.  What I like about this approach is it connects the person to the project and encourages engagement and ownership.  Let me know how it works for you.

Personal Needs and Values Questions

• If you could plant a seed that could grow anything, what would it be and where would you plant it? Is it a seed of professional success in a garden of education? Is it a seed of love in garden of kindness? Is it a seed of world peace in a garden of compassion?

• What makes you feel happy without any effort on your part? What would you do if you inherited ten million dollars? What would you do if you had all the time in the world?

• Imagine that an alternate route suddenly appears in your life (past or present). Where would it take you? Where would you like it to take you? If you could learn a new language or any new subject, what would it be?

• Tune into your feelings about your family and see where those emotions carry you without using any words. What makes you feel safe? If your home was on fire and you could only take one object with you, what would it be?

• See yourself as a little child sitting on a giant throne bathed in golden sunlight. The world is waiting for your command. What would it be?

• Break big issues (problems or aspirations) into small pieces and move them around like a puzzle. If you could be an expert at anything, what would it be?

• Take the other side in any argument or debate. What if you believed in a religion, philosophy or political point of view opposite your own?

• What attribute (brains, beauty, athleticism, practicality, etc.) does someone else have that you want? What would you give in exchange for it?

• What belief would you fight for? Where are you always right? If you could travel anywhere in this reality or in any other dimension, where would it be?

• What would your life be like if you made all the rules? Where would those rules be: work, home, government, etc? Where would you make the most progress by being more disciplined?

• What is your vision of the perfect friend or colleague? Where do you want more cooperation in your life? If you could change an organization or group, what would it be and what should be changed?

• How can you tell the difference between reality and a dream? Where does your spirit end and the next person’s begin? Who is the hardest person for you to forgive? What is the one thing you’d like to be forgiven for?

With thanks to Jeff Jawyer for the insights.

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IMAGINE: How Creativity Works from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

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Amanda Enayati

Editor’s note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of seeking serenity: the quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times.

(CNN) — Creativity has taken center stage in recent years, with a slew of books, articles and TED talks extolling the virtues of imagination and exhorting young and old to go out and exercise their creative muscle.

In a 2010 IBM poll of CEOs worldwide, creativity was identified as the single most important leadership trait for success, enabling businesses to rise above an increasingly complex environment.

The future belongs to “creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers,” declared author Daniel Pink in the introduction to his best-selling book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.”

Creativity also matters to our emotional well-being as we find our way in an uncertain, rapidly shifting world. Imagination underpins our ability to remain resilient during difficult and stressful times since creative people tend to be more tolerant of ambiguity and better able to come back from defeat.

And yet, despite its growing importance, creativity suffers from an odd sort of paradox. According to psychologist and Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller, research shows that even as people explicitly aspire to creativity and strongly endorse it as a fundamental driving force of positive change, they routinely reject creative ideas and show an implicit bias against them under conditions of uncertainty. Subjects in Mueller’s study also exhibited a failure to see or acknowledge creativity, even when directly presented with it.

It would appear that we suffer from a bias against creativity. But we are in denial about it, possibly because of what it may say about us.

“Because there is such a strong social norm to endorse creativity, and people also feel authentic positive attitudes toward creativity, people may be reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity; hence, the bias against creativity may be particularly slippery to diagnose,” Mueller and her colleagues suggest.

Why the bias?

“Creativity is doing something differently than you’ve done before,” says Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist and founder of Lottolab, a hybrid art studio and science lab. From an evolutionary standpoint, uncertainty was a bad thing. “If you weren’t sure that there was a tiger in front of you, by the time you were sure it was too late,” Lotto observes. “Our brains thus evolved to take uncertainty and make it certain.”

Mueller says, “We are intolerant of uncertainty in general. The more creative something is, the more novel it is. And the more novel it is, the greater the uncertainty we are likely to have about its feasibility.”

These negative associations tend to be unacknowledged, and there is evidence that they are unconscious, as in the case of executives who demand creativity but continue to reject creative ideas.

Herein, however, lies the dilemma: Creativity is what we need to help us get through times of greatest uncertainty and difficulty. And it’s exactly during those times, perhaps when we need it most, that we are least likely to embrace creativity.

Imagination scares us because it demands a foray into the unknown. “But only by going into a space of uncertainty can we do anything new,” Lotto says. “That is a tremendous challenge, isn’t it?”

Another reason for the bias against creativity may be the perception that something can either be creative or practical, but that much more rarely can it be both. Many (and perhaps even most) people hold the belief that for every success story such as Steve Jobs, the “patron saint of the creative class,” there are thousands (or more) chronically unemployed and underemployed “artists.”

This belief gives rise to a duality, where practical and creative endeavors lead largely separate existences — one slogged at during the workweek and the other indulged on nights and weekends, or dismissed as a luxury.

The creativity versus practicality dissonance also manifested in aspects of Mueller’s research. She refers to the two separate mind-sets of the “why” people and the “how” people.

People focused on “why” tend to frame the world in more abstract ways. In general, they don’t tend to have feasibility concerns. Those who are in a “how” mind-set, however, are so focused on feasibility that they are likely to overlook or dismiss creative ideas.

“Most boardrooms are all ‘how,’ and the ‘why’ is crushed,” Mueller says. “This is why Steve Jobs was so remarkable. He had a solid grasp of the ‘why’ and was also able to overcome objections to the ‘how.’ He was able to overcome the reality distortion field.”

The folly of seeking certainty

There are a number of problems with our obsession with creating certainty, and the most important is that certainty does not exist.

“Certainty is an illusion! A delusion!” Lotto says.

Or, as Clint Eastwood once said: “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”

The second problem is that the more we seek to create tools to make life predictable — from packaged foods to Starbucks, GPS devices to smartphones, Yelp to Trip Advisor — the more we diminish aspects of our brains capable of dealing with the unexpected.

“Technology is an amazing empowerment and a huge disablement,” says Laura Richardson, principal designer at frog design. “We are losing our capacity for resilience.”

Richardson is a big believer in the “MacGyver” manifesto. (MacGyver, of course, was the ever-resourceful television character who was able to solve complex problems with duct tape, paper clips and any other material he found handy.)

“I remember being locked out of the house once when I was growing up,” Richardson says. “I found an old ruler, somehow prodded up the window latch and got in. It was an amazing sense of accomplishment.”

She says some of our best stories are about those times when we were forced into something and had to use ingenuity to find our way out.

Richardson says she believes that the future favors the flexible. She quotes MAKE magazine founding editor Dale Dougherty, honored by the White House as a Champion of Change, who wrote: “Our future security lies in knowing what we are capable of creating and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.”

Becoming comfortable with uncertainty

Is it possible to overcome our inclination toward the predictable?

Mueller notes an important exception to our avoidance of the unknown. Research shows that the framing of uncertainty changes the way people react.

“We don’t mind uncertainty when it’s associated with something positive, like hope,” she says. “Frame something positively, and people will behave differently.”

David Kelley, founder of the design firm IDEO, observes, “Creativity is being comfortable with having ideas and not fearing being judged when you put your ideas out there.”

Kelley, recognized as one of America’s leading design innovators, is passionate about democratizing creativity by helping people develop creative confidence.

He’s not, however, teaching people how to be creative. “They are inherently creative,” Kelley says. “All we are doing is taking away the blocks.”

Those blocks form early, according to Kelley. Though young children are naturally and unabashedly creative, they either opt out of thinking of themselves as creative or have it hammered out of them in elementary school. “A kind of atrophy sets in, when they start to trust their analytical minds but not their intuitive minds.”

Removing those blocks has a great deal to do with fear. He suggests approaching the fear of creativity the same way you would approach any other kind of phobia, such as the fear of heights or snakes.

Kelley finds that creative confidence carries over into other aspects of people’s lives — in the way they solve problems, sing karaoke, throw dinner parties. “Once you have done something dangerous and succeeded, you try it in other places. And you begin to learn how to synthesize your experience and intuition to make complex and important decisions.”

With the challenges we are facing, we need to rethink what creativity means, Richardson says. We need to expand what we mean by creative. Creativity is not just about painting or drawing or art. It is about problem-solving. It’s the flexibility of your mind, the ability to see things that no one can see and envision something entirely different. We are creating the future, bringing about change. And there is something incredibly empowering about that.

Original post here

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