Cracking
Creativity
Michael Michalko is one of the world's leading
creativity experts. He specializes in providing creative-thinking
workshops and seminars, and facilitating think tanks for
clients around the world. His involvement in the field
began when he organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists
and academics to research, collect, and categorize all
known inventive-thinking methods.
Michalko's creative-thinking techniques
were first made public in his highly acclaimed Thinkertoys
(A Handbook of Business Creativity). He is also the
author of ThinkPak
(A Brainstorming Card Set), which is a creative-thinking
tool designed to facilitate brainstorming sessions.
Michalko's latest book Cracking
Creativity (The Secrets of Creative Genius) shows
how to make use of the creative-thinking strategies of
geniuses. In this interview, he does just that, and offers
innovative solutions to problems consultants face every
day.
* * * * *
MCNews: What are the common
myths about creativity, and how can we think past them?
Michalko: It's a myth that
creativity cannot be learned, and that you are either
born creative or you are not. Creativity is not genetically
determined.
Typically, the average person has been taught to think
reproductively, that is, on the basis of similar problems
encountered in the past. We analytically select the most
promising approach based on past experiences, excluding
all other approaches, and work within a clearly defined
direction towards the solution to the problem.
That's why every delivery expert in the U. S. doomed Fred
Smith's idea of Federal Express to failure. They believed
that based on their past experiences, no one would pay
a fancy price for speed and reliability. And why, after
Univac invented the computer, they refused to market it
to business, because they said businesses had no use for
a computer.
If you always think the way you always
thought, you'll always get what you've always got.
In contrast, creative people think productively, not reproductively.
When confronted with a problem, they ask, "How many
different ways can I look at it?" instead of "What
have I been taught by someone else on how to solve this?"
They tend to come up with many different responses, some
of which are unconventional and possibly unique.
Albert
Einstein was once asked what the difference was between
him and the average person. He said that if you asked
the average person to find a needle in the haystack, the
person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on
the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack
looking for all the possible needles.
Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not
invent the light bulb: his genius, rather, was to perfect
the bulb as a consumer item. Edison also studied all his
inventions and ideas as springboards for other inventions
and ideas in their own right.
To Edison, the telephone (sounds transmitted)
suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), which suggested
motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect,
isn't it? Genius usually is.
Edison felt his lack of formal education was, in
fact, "his blessing." This enabled him
to approach his work of invention with far fewer assumptions
than his more educated competitors, which included many
theoretical scientists, renowned Ph.D.s, and engineers.
He approached any idea or experience with
wild enthusiasm and would try anything out of the ordinary,
including even making phonograph needles out of compressed
rainforest nuts, and clamping his teeth onto a phonograph
horn to use as a hearing aid, feeling the sound vibrate
through his jaw. This wild enthusiasm inspired him to
consistently challenge assumptions.
He felt that in some ways too much education corrupted
people by prompting them to make so many assumptions that
they were unable to see many of nature's great possibilities.
When Edison created a "system" of practical
lighting, he conceived of wiring his circuits in parallel
and of using high-resistance filaments in his bulbs, two
things that were not considered possible by scientific
experts, in fact, were not considered at all because they
were assumed to be totally incompatible until Edison put
them together.
An easy way to challenge assumptions is to simply
reverse them and try to make the reversal work. Try
this: List your assumptions about a subject; then, write
down the opposite of each assumption; and finally, list
as many useful ways as you can to accomplish each reversal.
MCNews: You are well known for helping
people and organizations with the creative process. What
are the common barriers to creativity for most people?
Michalko: Many people have
bought the conventional wisdom that creativity is an innate
gift, dividing us into two groups: "artistic"
types- painters, musicians, directors, actors, writers,
mimes, comedians- and those deemed not especially creative,
who usually wind up in business, accounting, law, or health
care.
But the legendary career of Edison illustrates how
creativity can be cultivated by anyone, in
any industry. His work methods reveal that the true keys
to unlocking creativity are learned traits--namely perseverance
and an open-minded approach to learning. A shrewd businessman,
Edison used his creativity not only in developing new
inventions but also in bringing them to market and winning
out financially over competitors.
Edison was granted 1,093 patents for inventions
that ranged from the light bulb, typewriter, electric
pen, phonograph, motion picture camera and alkaline storage
battery---to the talking doll and a concrete house that
could be built in one day from a cast-iron mold. When
he died in 1931, he left 3500 notebooks, which are preserved
today in the temperature-controlled vaults of the West
Orange Laboratory Archives at the Edison National Historic
Site in New Jersey.
The notebooks read like a turbulent brainstorm and present
a verbal and visual biography of Edison's mind at work.
Spanning most of his six-decade career, the notebooks
are yielding fresh clues as to how Edison, who had virtually
no formal education, could achieve such an astounding
inventive record that is still unrivaled.
The notebooks illustrate how Edison conceived
his ideas from their earliest inceptions and show in great
detail how he developed and implemented them. Following
are some of Edison's creative-thinking strategies, which
you might bend to your will.
Edison believed in quantity, that to discover a good idea
you had to generate many. Increasing idea production requires
conscious effort. Suppose I asked you to spend three minutes
thinking of alternative uses for the common brick.
No doubt, you would come up with some,
but my hunch is not very many. The average adult comes
up with three to six ideas. However, if I asked you to
list 40 uses for the brick as fast as you can you would
have quite a few in a short period of time.
A specific quota focuses your energy in a competitive
way that guarantees fluency and flexibility of thought.
To meet the quota, you find yourself listing all the usual
uses for a brick (build a wall, fireplace, outdoor barbeque,
and so on) as well as listing everything that comes to
mind (anchor, projectiles in riots, ballast, device to
hold down newspaper, a tool for leveling dirt, material
for sculptures, doorstop and so on). By causing us to
exert effort, it allows us to generate more imaginative
alternatives than we otherwise would.
Initial ideas are usually poorer in quality than later
ideas. Just as water must run from a faucet for a while
to be crystal-clear, cool and free of particles, so thought
must flow before it becomes creative. Early ideas
are usually not true ideas.
Exactly why this is so is not known, but
one hypothesis is that familiar and safe responses lie
closest to the surface of our consciousness and therefore
are naturally thought of first. Creative thinking
depends on continuing the flow of ideas long enough
to purge the common, habitual ones and produce the unusual
and imaginative.
It's also critical to record your ideas.
Edison relentlessly recorded and illustrated every problem
in his notebooks. Whenever he succeeded with a new idea,
Edison would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and
inventions he'd abandoned in the past in the light of
what he'd recently learned.
For example, Edison's unsuccessful work
to develop an undersea telegraph cable ultimately led
to a breakthrough on a telephone transmitter. He took
the principle for the unsuccessful undersea telegraph
cable- variable resistance- and incorporated it into the
design of a telephone transmitter that adapted to the
changing sound waves of the caller's voice. This technique
instantly became the industry standard.
Edison would often jot down his observations of the natural
world, failed patents and research papers written by other
inventors, and ideas others had come up with in other
fields. He would also routinely comb a wide variety of
diverse publications for novel ideas that sparked his
interest and record them in his notebooks.
He advised his assistants to make it a habit
to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas
that others have used successfully on other problems in
other fields. To Edison, your idea needs to be original
only in its adaptation to the problem at hand.
Another barrier to creative thinking is that many people
have no clear definition of creativity. Creativity
means looking at the same information as everyone else
and seeing something different. To get new ideas,
you need to rethink the way you see things, to look at
the world in a different way, and to look for different
ways to see problems.
MCNews: When you have a
really tough challenge and can't see the answer, what
is your favorite technique for unlocking your brain?
Michalko: To do nothing! My
favorite technique when stonewalled is to do nothing,
and let my subconscious mind work on the problem.
Sooner or later, an idea or solution will pop up in my
mind--appear after a period of incubation out of nowhere.
The act of recording your thoughts and ideas about a particular
problem plants the information into your long-term memory
and also into your unconscious. In the unconscious mind,
we activate complexes of information without boundary.
Information held in long-term memory can
be processed in parallel in the unconscious and find its
way into conscious thought. An innovative idea emerges
not in any real-time sequence but in a "mind popping"
explosion of thought.
My work notebook contains information about all the ideas,
concepts, and problems that I am working on. By periodically
reviewing my notebook, I activate all the recorded information
in my conscious and subconscious mind.
This sets up a mental system of network
thinking where ideas, images, and concepts from completely
unrelated problems combine to catalyze the nascent moment
of creativity.
Recording your work plants the information in your subconscious
mind and somehow activates relevant patterns so it can
be processed into a mind popping solution, even after
a long delay during which the problem is abandoned.
Archimedes got his sudden insight about the principle
of displacement while daydreaming in his bath. According
to legend, he was so excited by his discovery that he
rushed naked through the streets shouting, "Eureka!"
(I've found it). Henri Poincare, the French genius, spoke
of incredible ideas and insights that came to him with
suddenness and immediate certainty out of the blue. So
dramatic are the ideas that arrive that the precise moment
in which the idea arrived can be remembered in unusual
detail.
Darwin could point to the exact spot on
a road where he arrived at the solution for the origin
of species while riding in his carriage and not thinking
about his subject. Other geniuses offer similar experiences.
Like a sudden flash of lightning, ideas and solutions
seemingly appear out of nowhere.
That this is a commonplace phenomenon was shown in a survey
of distinguished scientists conducted over a half-century
ago. A majority of the scientists reported that they got
their best ideas and insights when not thinking about
the problem.
Ideas came while walking, recreating,
or working on some other unrelated problem. This
suggests how the creative act came to be associated with
"divine inspiration" for the illumination appears
to be involuntary.
The more problems, ideas and thoughts that you record
and review from time to time, the more complex becomes
the network of information in your mind. Your subconscious
mind never rests. When you quit thinking about the subject
and decide to forget it, your subconscious mind doesn't
quit working.
The thoughts keep flashing freely in every
direction through your subconscious. They are colliding,
combining and recombining millions of times. Typically,
many combinations are of little or no value, but occasionally,
a combination is made that is appreciated by your subconscious
and delivered up to the conscious mind as a "mind
popping" idea.
Our conscious minds are sometimes blocked from creating
new ideas because we are too fixated. When we discontinue
work on the problem for a period of time, our fixation
fades, allowing our subconscious minds to freely create
new possibilities.
To experience "mind popping,"
try the following experiment. Write a letter to your unconscious
about a problem. Make the letter as detailed as possible.
Describe the problem, what steps you have taken, the gaps,
what is needed, what the obstacles are, the ideal solution
and so on.
Instruct your subconscious to find the solution.
Write, "Your mission is to find the solution to the
problem. I would like the solution in two days."
Seal the letter and put it away. Forget it. Open the letter
in two days. If the problem still has not been solved,
write on the bottom of the letter, "Let me know the
minute you solve this." Sooner or later, when you
are most relaxed and removed, ideas and solutions will
pop up from your unconscious.
MCNews: What's on your reading list now?
Michalko: At the present time,
I am reading:
Thought
as a System by David Bohm
Science,
Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat
The
Psychology of Consciousness by Robert Ornstein
The
Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
The
Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
* * * *
Michael Michalko's web site can be found
at www.creativethinking.net.
He can be reached by email at: mmichal1@rochester.rr.com.
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