Christian Byrge & Søren Hansen
Enhancing Creativity for Individuals, Groups and Organizations - Creativity as the Unlimited Application of Knowledge
Frydenlund
Enhancing Creativity for Individuals, Groups and Organizations – Creativity as the Unlimited Application of Knowledge 1st edition, 1st printing, 2014 © The author and Frydenlund Publishers ISBN 978-87-7118-490-7 Editing: Line Zahll Hansen Illustrations: Theresa Skov Jensen Graphic design: Debora á Reynatrøð Print: Totem, Poland Partly translated by Maren Lytje
Photocopies of this book or parts of it are subject to the agreement made between Copydan and the Danish Ministry of Education and Research. Any other type of reprint or copying done without the written consent of the publisher is illegal pursuant to current copyright legislation in Denmark. Short extracts used for review purposes are exempt from these rules.
Frydenlund Alhambravej 6 DK-1826 Frederiksberg C tlf.: 3393 2212 post@frydenlund.dk www.frydenlund.dk
Contents Welcome...................................................................................... 9 Introduction...................................................................................... 9
1. Creativity.............................................................................. 15 Introducing creativity..................................................................... 15 Creativity as the unlimited application of knowledge................... 16 The mental library.......................................................................... 20 What inhibits our use of knowledge and thereby our creativity?............................................................ 25 How to become more creative....................................................... 34
2. Apply all your knowledge. .......................................... 43 Introduction to horizontal thinking................................................ 43 Horizontal knowledge means more knowledge............................ 44 Training horizontal thinking........................................................... 51 Task focus guides the direction of our associations when we are presented with a stimulus........................................ 52
3. Only focus on the task. ................................................. 53 Introduction to task focus.............................................................. 53 Why have a principle of task focus?............................................... 54 Task focus generates lateral drift.................................................... 56 What limits our task focus?............................................................ 56 How do we promote task focus?.................................................... 64
5
4. Same focus at the same time.................................... 69 Introduction to parallel thinking.................................................... 69 Multitasking happens at the expense of creativity....................... 70 Discussion versus parallel thinking................................................ 71 Different phases in parallel thinking.............................................. 73 Parallel thinking makes it easier to get rid of the masks............... 78 We should play with our knowledge, not fight it.......................... 79 External memory............................................................................ 79
5. No experienced judgement........................................ 81 Introduction to no experienced judgement................................... 81 Judgement as a dominant unit....................................................... 82 Evaluation versus experienced judgement.................................... 85 The reflexive understanding of judgement.................................... 87 Avoiding judgement....................................................................... 87 Positive and negative evaluations.................................................. 88 Choosing an idea without judgement............................................ 91 Summary of the four principles for the unlimited application of knowledge.............................................. 93
6. Creativity didactics. ........................................................ 97 Introduction to creativity didactics................................................ 97 Creativity didactics involves language, body and attitude............ 98 Creativity didactics is primarily aimed at the body..................... 104 3D cases and 3D activities............................................................ 106 Overview of standard 3D cases.................................................... 109 Training the use of principles....................................................... 112 Training the use of challenges...................................................... 113
6
Training ‘yes, AND’........................................................................ 113 Training ‘Yes, AND’ in groups........................................................ 114 Instructions for 3D cases and 3D activities.................................. 117 Practical guidelines for the use of creativity didactics................. 127 Final comments on creativity didactics........................................ 134
7. The creative process. ................................................... 135 Introduction to the creative platform....................................... 135 The process on the creative platform.......................................... 138 General process model for the creative platform........................ 144 The effect of the creative platform.............................................. 148
8. Training creativity.......................................................... 151 Introduction to the embodied training programme for new thinking....................................................... 151 The prepared reflector.................................................................. 153 Training creativity......................................................................... 155 Learning........................................................................................ 158 Who can use the embodied training programme for new thinking?...................................................... 163 How can the embodied training programme for new thinking be used?........................................ 165 Training sessions........................................................................... 166 Training variables.......................................................................... 167 No experienced judgement.......................................................... 167 Parallel thinking............................................................................ 168 Task focus...................................................................................... 170 Horizontal thinking....................................................................... 172
7
Originality..................................................................................... 176 Fluency.......................................................................................... 177 Flexibility....................................................................................... 178 Elaboration.................................................................................... 179 Identification of creative output.................................................. 180 Training variables.......................................................................... 181
9. Being a creative genius............................................... 185 Introduction.................................................................................. 185 Turn your life into a playground – and play with knowledge...... 188
References.............................................................................. 190
We Welcome
This book is our contribution to making people more creative and innovative. Its purpose is to make it easier for people to use all their knowledge to shape their own lives and communities, to generate new products and services, to engender learning and knowledge and to be creative human beings individually and with others. It is a book about creativity for individuals, groups and organizations.
Introduction This book is about creativity, which is a central part of innovation, entrepreneurship and general life. It describes how we can all become better at creativity in education, work and leisure time. We need creativity to develop something new. We also need creativity to learn something new, and finally we need creativity to improve what we are already good at. In all these cases, creativity is about becoming better at using our knowledge, and becoming better at using more of the knowledge that we already have. In relation to innovation and entrepreneurship, we are in the engine room in this book. The creativity of which we speak is the engine of any innovative or entrepreneurial process. Those who participate in innovation and entrepreneurship must be able to juggle all their knowledge; they must be able to see new connections and to
9
Welcome
put their knowledge together in new ways – and that is exactly what creativity is about.
Creativity and the use of knowledge There are many books about knowledge acquisition – acquisition by self-learning, by networking with the right people, by reading books and so on. Common to these approaches is that new knowledge is something that we have to search for outside ourselves. This book has a different aim. We suggest that to a large extent, what many people regard as new knowledge is knowledge that we already have somewhere in the morass of information that we have gathered throughout our lives. It is quite common for us to only use a small part of our knowledge when we go to work, learn something new in school or engage in leisure activities. The reason for this is first and foremost that the knowledge we regard as relevant has been limited by our contact with parents, teachers, friends, colleagues and the books that we have read. Telling-offs, laughing, politeness, instruction and the like have limited our use of knowledge to fit what we think that others think is relevant. The standard for which knowledge we perceive as relevant is in dire need of being expanded. This will increase our access to knowledge, which we can then use in our daily activities –for inventing, for learning, and for improving the quality of our everyday lives. In other words, we want to make it easier for people to use their knowledge by encouraging and training them to be more creative. With this book, we want to offer our view on how to gain better access to our own knowledge without searching for it outside of ourselves. Furthermore, the book offers some suggestions of how to use our own knowledge in new ways and thereby develop new knowledge, thoughts, and ideas. That is the essence of being creative.
Creativity as the unlimited application of knowledge In this book we define creativity as unlimited knowledge application. With this definition we indicate that we want people to become less
10
Introduction
inhibited by academic, professional, social and cultural standards. A large part of the knowledge that we have acquired is relevant in areas where we do not normally use it. For example, many five-year-olds know little about how plant roots absorb water, but most five-year-olds know a lot about drinking from a straw. Children would be able to use their knowledge of the straw to understand how plants absorb water, because the principle is the same. Unlimited knowledge application is the ability to use all types of knowledge to perform specific tasks or to solve specific problems.
Creative presence A lot of things have been said about creativity in a variety of professions and businesses. Some of it has been quite healthy for the creative process, while other parts have been more or less detrimental to it. From the beginning, our approach was to start from scratch and reinvent tools to develop and enhance human creativity. We found that it was necessary to start over again because the things that we take for granted at work, in school or in leisure activities have been introduced for specific purposes at specific times and with different understandings of what creativity is. For example, it is common to promote creativity by way of competition. Most studies, however, indicate that competition is directly harmful to creativity and should be avoided. We take our point of departure in the idea of creative presence – and that has some fundamental repercussions for our understanding of creativity in this book.
A fundamental choice As human beings we face a fundamental choice when we relate to phenomena. We can regard the phenomenon reflexively, which means that we move away from it in order to deal with it. We could call this ‘the reflexive paradigm.’ Alternatively, we can move in the opposite direction and enter the phenomenon. This is the opposite of reflection and constitutes the idea of creative presence, which lies at the core of everything you will find in this book.
11
Welcome
Our primary reason for taking our point of departure in this paradigm is that the reflexive approach to creativity ties us to certain patterns and principles of understanding. When we become present in the face of a phenomenon, those patterns and principles dissolve. Only in the present moment do we have all our knowledge at our disposal without being held back by academic, professional, social and cultural standards, which inhibit our creativity. In this book we address the obstacles that stand in the way of unlimited knowledge application. Why is it so difficult? We offer concrete suggestions of how to facilitate the use of knowledge, and we present three concepts used in education and business life today to enhance creativity. These concepts are: creativity didactics, the creative platform and an embodied training programme for new thinking. Creativity didactics (previously called 3D didactics in our research) is a didactic approach, the purpose of which is to put the theory of creativity as unlimited knowledge application into practice. This didactic approach is used in developing the creative platform, which enables the development and implementation of creative processes, and in developing the embodied training programme for new thinking, which focuses on exercising creativity.
The structure of the book The theoretical part of this book is based on studies of creativity. We use our own studies as well as studies from the rest of the world that investigate how individual and collective creativity might be enhanced. In this part of the book we define creativity as unlimited knowledge application, and we identify four fundamental principles for its practice: horizontal thinking, task focus, parallel thinking and no judgement. No judgement focuses on how to participate in a process without feeling judged by oneself or by others. Parallel thinking focuses on how a group might focus on the same thing at the same time. Task focus focuses on how to stay tuned into the task and how to avoid focus on the individual person or social relations. Horizontal thinking focuses on how to use all
12
Introduction
your knowledge across existing patterns of thought. The four principles are explained and discussed in relation to specific cases. The practical part of the book is based on our action research in The Research Group for Unlimited Knowledge Application at Aalborg University (www.uka.aau.dk). Our research has been conducted in collaboration with companies, schools, municipalities, regions, hospitals, community colleges, business organizations, ministries, universities, the army and other research institutions. Our engagement has varied from observation, participation, counseling, teaching and facilitating to project management, but research has always been our primary task. On that basis, we have developed the three concepts Creativity Didactics, the creative platform and the embodied training programme for new thinking. This book is not a general introduction to the field of creativity. Nor is it a book that tries to give an overview of creativity methods. It is first and foremost meant for those who want to enhance creativity in the short and/or long term. This might be leaders, managers, teachers, consultants or others who are involved in developing individuals, work environments and forms of education. With this book we hope to inspire you to develop creativity in individuals, work environments and education forms where individuals and groups can use knowledge in an uninhibited way to the benefit of creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation and a better life. Christian Byrge & Søren Hansen The Research Group for the Unlimited Application of Knowledge Aalborg University
13
Cre 1. Creativity
as the unlimited application of knowledge
We define creativity as unlimited application of knowledge. To be creative means using our knowledge without being limited by our academic, professional, social or cultural baggage. The result of unlimited application of knowledge is that we become better at rethinking everything, from small, everyday challenges to complex problems; we become better at applying our knowledge to the task or problem at hand, and we become better at using knowledge which we would normally regard as irrelevant due to biases, principles or habits.
Introducing creativity There are almost as many definitions of creativity as there are books. We will not pretend to give an unequivocal definition; that is not the purpose of this book. Rather, the purpose is to offer concrete suggestions about how to develop creativity. This chapter offers an introduction to creativity and some of its challenges. Creativity is a concept with many definitions and a long history. The ancient Greeks spoke of genius (Anastasi 1965) and often related it to people who were seen as either mad or semi-divine (Klineberg 1931). Often, genius was seen as a gift from the gods, brought to humankind through a few select individuals. Based on this view, creativity would mean being close to the divine.
15
1. Creativity
During the same period and after, there have been approaches which focus on creativity as a special gift. This gift could be related to all sorts of things, a gift of virtue, a gift for making new friends, a gift for training animals, a gift for leading an army into war, a gift for making tools. According to this approach to creativity, headhunting and self-discovery are important tools for finding those who are gifted or for developing your own special skills. Later on, creativity has been linked to great multi-artists such as Leonardo da Vinci. One could also call these people creative geniuses. During the first part of this period, creative geniuses were seen as designed by god(s), but as ideas of evolution became popular, they were thought to be born to other creative geniuses. That is to say, creativity was a family trait that could be traced through the generations. The belief in the chosen individual is crucial to this approach to creativity, and the idea was that the chosen individual must be given time and space to express his or her innate creativity. In the middle of the twentieth century studies in creativity, genius and art changed focus from the great genius to the everyday creativity of common people (Albert 1969). Joy Paul Guilford’s lectures to the American Psychological Association in the 1950’s are often considered the beginning of modern studies of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart 1999). The basic assumption is that everyone has creative potential, and concepts like state of mind, process methods and tools become important approaches to creativity. This book is about how our creative potential can be set free to generate innovation in our work, education and life in general and to the benefit of society as a whole. We offer some suggestions on how to develop creative people through teaching, participation and training.
Creativity as the unlimited application of knowledge The definition of creativity as unlimited knowledge application draws on elements from the different historical understandings of creativity described above. We think that creativity is primarily an expression
16
of how we use our knowledge to conceptualize and change the world around us. In that sense, creativity is a quality of the way in which we use knowledge, which allows us to move freely and sensitively in the world. We also think that creativity can be trained when our state of mind and the world around us allow it. This book is first and foremost about how we can ensure conditions that allow people to use and develop their creativity. In short, creativity as unlimited application of knowledge means that we are more creative when we shed our academic, professional, social and cultural conventions and use our knowledge freely. Most people think that only certain types of knowledge are relevant to certain types of situations, and that they can only be used in certain ways. The result is often conformity and an inability to move on, because we have learned that there is such a thing as right and wrong knowledge in a given situation. For example, within an academic discipline, there are preferences in terms of the application of knowledge. Creativity occurs when we realize that we can bring all kinds of knowledge (even the wrong kind) to bear on the discipline. We appear more creative when we are unlimited in our application of knowledge, because we can juggle our knowledge in ways that give rise to new thoughts and ideas. Creativity is a way of using knowledge. But what does knowledge mean when we talk about creativity?
What is knowledge? Theories of creativity refer to many different types of knowledge. For example, we commonly distinguish between explicit and silent knowledge. It is also common to distinguish between data, information and knowledge – just to mention a few of the many attempts to define what knowledge is. The basic assumption in this book is that it is irrelevant to make such distinctions. Basically, we define knowledge as everything that can give rise to thoughts, ideas and action. It is of no relevance whether what makes us think and act is explicit or silent, whether it is a concrete experience or something we have dreamt. Here, knowledge is the result of our experi-
17
1. Creativity
ences and the things that we have learned and understood in all walks of life; what we have read in books and what we have heard from others. Add to this that the human memory is an active information system, which continuously creates new relations between the stored pieces of information. Therefore, knowledge also contains imaginations, fantasies, dreams and the like. Put together we might say that knowledge is all the things that we have gathered and organized in our memory throughout our lives (Miller, Galanter, Pribram 1969). Many people have an intuitive understanding of knowledge as factual, thinking that what we hear and see is a reflection of what has actually happened. However, research shows that we often create false memories based on the verbal, written and visual stimuli from our surroundings. In these studies, the subject is often shown an image or a list of words, and then shortly after, they are asked to recall what they saw or read. In many cases, the subject recalls elements which did not exist in the images or the lists at all (Miller & Gazzaniga 1998, Loftus & Pickrell 1995, Roediger & McDermott 1995). The test subjects do see the image, but when it is stored in their memories, it is stored with a number of other images that are similar to it or which have been seen in a similar context. This is also why it is difficult to distinguish between different holiday memories. For example, we confuse memories when we look in the album of holiday photos or talk about the holiday years afterwards. In other words, we create false memories – a process which occurs in the storage process itself as well as in the process of recollection. If a situation demands that we recall facts, it is, of course, important that we recall the right facts, for instance when remembering a particular skiing holiday. On the other hand, if we need information about skiing holidays in general, it does not matter whether the information we retrieve is factually correct or not. The information will still be useful for developing new ideas. If we stay with the topic of skiing holidays, knowledge from summer holidays, snowy days at home, exercise in the snow, other locations that you have been to and a whole host of other associated knowledge is also relevant for developing new ideas and thoughts. This means that creativity is about using existing knowledge to generate ideas.
18
Creativity as the unlimited application of knowledge
What does applying knowledge in an unlimited way entail? When we talk about unlimited application of knowledge, we mean that our application of knowledge in a given context is free from academic, professional, social and cultural limitations. An influential Russian researcher describes creativity in the following manner: ‘The solution to your problem already exists somewhere out there’ (Altshuller 1986). Among other things, he found that the knowledge on which new patents were based was seldom new at all. The same knowledge could be found in several older patents. He also found that it was essentially the same problems that were solved over and over again, and that the solutions often resembled each other. We believe that the same is true of the knowledge of the individual. To a large extent, we learn the same things over and over again, but because we learn them in different contexts, we often do not realize that we already know them. Consequently, we do not take full advantage of the knowledge already at our disposal. Unlimited application of knowledge is about realizing the connections between knowledge acquired in different contexts. Where do I (also) know that from? Where have I seen it before? It is to be open to the thoughts and ideas that emerge as solutions to a problem. Creative people spontaneously discover these connections and apply knowledge from one area to solve problems in another. This book is about how we can all become better at doing exactly that.
Physiologically, knowledge consists of associations Human beings automatically make ‘creative’ connections when they apply knowledge. This happens through chains of association built when we ‘store’ and ‘retrieve’ information from our memory. Children are more prone to doing this than adults. When we start to learn what is right and wrong, we construct a number of limitations on the application of our knowledge. An example of this is ‘child spelling,’ which is a method for encouraging children in the first years of primary education to spell a word according to its soun. It does not matter if the spelling is right or wrong. The children engaged in child spelling are not in-
19
1. Creativity
hibited by a wish to spell correctly, and they often find the process easy and quickly learn to spell for real. The point here is that child spelling allows them to apply the knowledge that they already have about the sound of words to the spelling process. Compared to ordinary methods of spelling, child spelling allows for a more unlimited application of knowledge because it removes some of the academic obstacles to the child’s application of knowledge. Using associations is part of the human nature of storing and retrieving information. Later in life it becomes increasingly difficult, because we are corrected when we make mistakes, and we are bullied when we introduce different ideas and thoughts. If we want to make it easier for the individual to apply all of his or her knowledge in school and at work, we need to look at why it becomes more difficult as we grow up, mature intellectually and assume more responsibility. How do we avoid being limited by the academic, professional, social and cultural standards that we meet in life, and how do we soften the standards that are already set? From the perspective of this book, they are unwanted because they block our creativity. It might be worth noting that we have no wish to encourage rebellious, rude or asocial persons. Later, we discuss why these characteristics are incompatible with the unlimited application of knowledge. This book argues that it is possible to be educated and to work without getting stuck in established and self-made limitations. Before we proceed to the things that limit our creativity, we would like to illustrate how we apply knowledge by way of the metaphor of ‘the mental library.’
The mental library We have defined knowledge as the sum of everything we have gathered in life, which can be used to think or to act. To visualize what it means to apply knowledge in an unlimited way, we might play with the idea that all our knowledge is represented in a mental library. A library contains books with knowledge form all over the world. Your mental library contains books from all of your life. You search this library when you need to think, perform a task or solve a problem. Imagine
20