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What are some of the different types of creativity methods? It's very interesting cause if you
pick up any newspaper they're going to talk about how important creativity is, and it
is, but when we talk about what kind of methods should be use you get everything from incredibly
kooky stuff to incredibly turnkey stuff that was built in the Soviet Union in the 40s,
right? There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. Well, I'm going to give you
a different way to think about creativity methods and it's really lifted from some work
really pulled from a lot of work we have on cognitive psychology.
So we're going to look at the types of methods depending upon the depth in which you have
to actually use your mind to be creative. Well, the easiest way to be creative is what
we call mimetic creativity techniques and all mimetic means, it comes from a Greek term
meaning mimesis and Aristotle used to talk about this a lot. It means to imitate. You
see somebody do something and you imitate it. So one of the easiest ways to be creative
or to come up with new ideas is simply to search and reapply ideas from one area to
another.
So if you were to get a digital camera and you were to go on an excursion and you were
to take pictures of what was happening in another company or in a company that was in
a different sector you'd probably come up with a couple dozen good ideas like an anthropologist
would. If you wrote them down and say what would they look like in my company you'll
have creative ideas. All you're doing is moving creative ideas from one place to another.
And, in fact, when Steve Jobs was alive one of the things that he talked about was creativity
is basically just connecting dots. It's moving things from one area to another area and this
is based on a cognitive principle called flexibility, which means your mind is able to take something
from one area and put it into another.
The second level of creativity methods. It comes from a term from a famous author named
Arthur Koestler and the term is called bissociative and Koestler wrote a very famous book called
The Act of Creation. He also, you might have heard his name because he wrote Darkness at
Noon. He was a very famous novelist. He's a very controversial man as well, I might
want to point out. But basically this form of creativity is connecting things. How do
we connect things that normally don't go together?
So the most common form of connecting is what we call brainstorming. There are lots of forms
of brainstorming. One form of brainstorming is that people just throw out ideas and see
what ideas kind of emerge. But there are more structured forms of brainstorming. For example,
one form of brainstorming is called the slip method where somebody will write an idea down
and they'll pass it to another person who will then come up with another idea until
the slip goes all the way around the room and we have a collection of ideas.
One form of brainstorming is what's called the random word list and you can do this with
any dictionary at home. Come up with an idea, open the dictionary and point to a word and
ask how your idea fits with the word, right? You're connecting the two ideas together and,
in fact, some people use this to predict the future. I'm not asking you to predict the
future but the reason this works is there's a concept called defamiliarization, which
means the way our brain stores information is we assimilate information, things that
are like other things are stored together. So it's like Sesame Street. What things go
together gets stored together.
Whenever you take something that's different, that's not normally associated; a word that
doesn't normally go with another word, it creates a new connection. So if I were to
say,I've got to come up with a television program and the television program's going
to be about how to innovate and I'm going to connect that and I open up a dictionary
and I point to the word popsicle. How is my new program going to connect like a popsicle?
And I might come up with ways and it might give me ideas about something being cold or
something having a stick to it or something being a treat or sweet and that's how it's
going to connect.
Finally there are actual structured ways of brainstorming that use concepts and the most
famous is one called SCAMPER and it actually comes to us from a guy named Alex Osborn who
was a famous innovation professor and an ad executive in the 1940s and it basically means
to substitute; to combine; to adapt; to magnify or minify, make bigger or smaller; put to
other use; to use in other ways, to enlist in other ways; or to reverse; to SCAMPER.
So you're going to use these in different ways and actually the E is also in SCAMPER
it's sometimes referred to as eliminate where you actually want to get rid of the idea.
So that's making your brain connect the familiar with the unfamiliar.
The third level is analogical and that's a fancy word for making analogies in your head.
Now if anybody who's ever studied something like Noam Chomsky and his early work on grammar,
one of the things that Chomsky wrote about, and incidentally a lot of cognitive psychologists
since have written about this, is that analogies allow your mind to connect things in bundles
and make them more familiar or less familiar to you. So it's a transfer element. It's an
element that moves you from one place to another place.
And metaphors are a great example so one thing that's very easy to do with trying to come
up with creative ideas is to say how is something like something else. So how is developing
this new soft drink like a NASCAR race? And what you do is you'd say, "Well, there's a
limited amount of time, they're competitors, you know, you need to get a certain amount
of crowd in order to make a NASCAR race work." Then you could actually turn the metaphor
around and say, "But we didn't think who the pit boss was or who the drivers are." And
by coming up with what those are you may actually add creative ideas to your original idea.
So what you're beginning to do is cluster these ideas together. So you see how they
go together and if you turn them around you can see where you have holes and you can add
to that. So how is something like something else? And pick something that everybody can
relate to because metaphors and analogies are very culturally biased. So if you've never
been to a NASCAR race that's not a good idea. But, you know, a first kiss. Spring turning
into summer. Combing your hair or brushing your teeth. Driving to work, whatever it is.
The fourth level is narratological and that's a fancy word for a narrative or making a story
and narratives and stories allow us to integrate things. They allow our thinking to be highly
integral which actually is really hard to do. This is why when children learn, and if
you ever listened to a child tell a story or listened to them tell a joke it's often
very hard for them to do this and it's often why children lie. You know, it's not just
they're mischievous, they're trying to make sense out of things and the way they make
sense out of it is you have to put these elements together.
So telling a story is really hard. There's characters and there's plot and there's theme
and there's color and there's a lot of things that have to go into telling a story. But
once we get a story in our head it's very hard to get it out, right? So it's not just
that we've got to get a story in our head but if we want to come up with some new ideas
we have to change the story. So when it comes to somebody changing their life or losing
weight or finding a significant other or overcoming a failure that they had a school or at work,
a lot of times what a therapist will work on is changing your story.
So what we have to do to change our story is really a couple of things. Ways of doing
this. One way to change your story is to simply start writing or to start telling a story.
The object is to get into a flow state where you're telling the story a little faster than
you can judge it, right? So somebody might say, "Now tell me that story again about how
that product's going to work but this time take this element out. This time it's not
going to be sold in this market. It's not going to be in that color. It's not going
to be this fast." Tell it again, right?
And what happens is when you tell a story enough times you get your shtick down and
you begin to figure out what the story really is. What's the center of the story? And it's
like writing. Writing is a highly iterative process. Anybody who's ever written, you can't
write one draft. You've got to write a lot of drafts cause you're trying to find what
it is you're saying.
So you can do free writing, storytelling. Some people believe if you write with your
non-dominant hand it actually draws on a different part of your brain. Now that's controversial
but you might want to try it. Try and write with your other hand, your non-dominant hand,
and see if you come up with any ideas. And there's one other thing that's really interesting
with stories which is to take them apart. Now these are called morphologies and morphologies
is a fancy way of saying that whenever you tell a story there are characters and there
are actions in the stories.
If you were to draw a little graph and on one part of the graph, on the y-axis you put
who the characters are in your story. So, you know, this is the person who made it.
This is the person who's going to buy it. This is the person who's going to sell it.
This is the regulatory agency. You make the characters in your story. And at the top if
you put the actions that people can take. They can stop your story. They can make your
story happen. They can give you money. They can say bad things or whatever it is in your
story. If you start asking what would happen if this character did this you can begin to
put the story together in different ways.
So you can smash a story into pieces and rebuild it like it was building blocks. So that's
an interesting thing to do in stories. There's a very famous book by an old Russian who is
no longer with us named Vladimir Propp called The Morphology of the Magic Fairy Tale and
what he did was he went and gathered 2000 Russian fairy tales and he took them all apart
and he put them all back together and he said here's how they're all built. The part that's
creative about that is once you tear it apart and you start building it in other ways you
realize how many other ways you could actually be creative.
Now the final level, the fifth level, the bottom level, the deepest level is intuitive
creativity. And this is where you're transcending everything and this is things like meditation,
right? Where you're trying to say a word or to have a thought formed that distracts your
mind, distracts the chatter of your mind so that you can try and empty yourself. So you
can try and find sort of what's at the bottom of this. There are other ways of doing it
as well. You can do yoga. One of the things I particularly enjoy is running. I like to
run every day and there's always that point when you start running where you're no longer
running, you're thinking. The real stuff in your mind is coming up.
Now why? I think it's always important on this last level to maybe have somebody who's
really either somebody from your wisdom, tradition, whatever your spiritual wisdom or tradition
are or somebody who's a professional. You never know what's at the bottom of the pool
so you might find creative stuff but you might also find things that maybe you have to deal
with.
But there are different levels of creativity so I would highly recommend that you start
at the very beginning. You start with trying to search and reapply. Just go around and
see what other people are doing, then you try to do some brainstorming. Then you try
to use some metaphors. Eventually make some stories and if you're really on the path you
find a way to get to the bottom of this in doings something like meditation.