Oh, Mabel Behave (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Every so often for a break I clean out files. Here’s today’s find, a gem. Questions for people in helping roles to consider (adapted from Fundamentals of Counseling Shertzer and Stone, 1974 p.8).
What if these are questions are for creativity facilitators as well. You think? Should they be?
- Can I behave in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, dependable, or consistent?
- Can I be expressive enough so that I will communicate unambiguously?
- Can I let myself experience positive attitudes towards the people I’m working with – warmth, caring, liking, interest and respect?
- Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the group and not own their content?
- Am I secure enough to permit others’ their unique identities and not try to force my will on them?
- Can I let myself enter fully into the world of the others’ feelings and personal meanings and see them as they do?
- Can I receive people as they are? Can I communicate this attitude?
- Can I act with sufficient sensitivity in the relationship that my behaviour will not be perceived of as a threat?
- Can I free others from the threat of external evaluation?
- Can I meet this group or person as people who are in the process of creating something new and not be bound by their past and by my past?
Do you feel it’s important for creativity facilitators to ascribe to a code of behaviour? Just wondering…
Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership; Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures; Founder and Steward, World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21. Speaker, facilitator, author. Executive team building, innovation programs.
]]>(It would be great for all creativity professionals to competently use these and other tools, just as, say, accountants globally use a balance sheet.)
You all know that I’m a graduate of that program at Buff State, right? So proud of my alma mater. Particularly enjoy the colour commentary explaining the stages and key pointers as the session continues. Very well done. Definitely worth the 15 minutes.
Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.
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]]>Brainstorming is a tool; the craft and art of using the tool influences the success of using it, as does the skill, wisdom and openness of the people involved in generating ideas or perspectives for new thinking.
Speaking from experience here, its easy to pinpoint other brainstorming influencers as well: mood in the room, pressure on participants, how the space is used, how the participants ‘get along’ be it personality style, personal agenda for participating, degree of collaborative attitudes and supports, where people are in an organization – using Barry Oshry’s terms – Tops (in charge), Middles or Bottoms. The colour on the walls has influence, the time of day, the food people eat, their physical comfort and state of health, the pharmaceuticals they are taking, the air quality and circulation, yes, I can go on. If there are windows…
The skill of the facilitator as a curator of appropriate mood-setting-imagination-spurring activities, behaviours, tools, and methods also plays a key role. The facilitator’s deftness to design the flow or, as I like to call it, the choreography, influences how willing and able people are to share their thinking; the design informs engagement and quality of outcome. There’s much more to the art of facilitating brainstorming than meets the eye, and good facilitators are aware of them including the dynamics of the people in the room as they experience a variety of highs, and lows throughout the session.
Conversations about the efficacy of brainstorming can be tiresome when its meaning is understood, assumed and experienced uniquely from person to person; that is, when it’s definition is muddy the arguments keep the water murky.
- To some, brainstorming describes an array of techniques and thinking tools that let loose new options; unleash considerations for new potential.
- To others, brainstorming is one tool among many.
I’m from the first camp – brainstorming describes different kinds tools used to crack open new thinking to create new futures; and inferred within the term brainstorming, are guidelines for divergent thinking which allows for exploration before making a decision. The brainstorming rules, or guidelines put forward by their creator, Alex Osborn, include: Defer judgement, Go for Quantity, Hitchhike – build on others’ ideas, Freewheel. One I’ve added is: All ideas are welcome. This phrase replaces the statement many like to use to welcome new thinking. ‘There’s no such thing as a bad idea’, they say. Try passing that sentiment along with full integrity to realists, like me.
Why this blog post? It’s in response to a recent article in Fast Company. From Alex Osborn to Bob Sutton: A Meeting of the Minds to Build a Better Brainstorm. It’s a wonderful piece showing different points of view on brainstorming you might find interesting.
Bottom line: Does Brainstorming work?
It doesn’t matter. If it works for you, keep it; if it doesn’t, use something else that gets the job done. What’s most important is this: new ideas, new decisions, new actions create new futures.
If you are using brainstorming, or idea generating methods and want to get better at it, let’s talk – I can coach you to lead amazing sessions, and teach your team skills to upgrade their capacity for innovative and creativity-thinking.
Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership; Freeing leaders thinking to create new futures.
Related Posts
In a Brainstorming Quandary? Get over it and get on with generating ideas
Idea Generating Intelligence lacking… study
The Man Who Taught Brains to Storm – About Alex Osborn, the one who brought brainstorming to life
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Science Week - Celebrating Creativity and Innovation - theme announcement (Photo credit: Discover Science & Engineering)
The Science of Creativity in 2013: Looking Back to Look Forward
In 1950, the American psychologist Joy P. Guilford delivered a lecture to the American Psychological Association (APA) calling for a scientific focus on creativity. Psychology knew little about creativity at the time. Years earlier, during WWII, the Air Force commissioned Guilford, then a psychologist at USC, to identify pilots who would respond to emergencies with original insights to save themselves and the plane. IQ was a popular measurement but it did not capture the type of thinking that generated novel solutions to urgent predicaments. Studying pilots led Guilford to a few insights he shared with his colleagues at the APA in 1950. First, creativity is not equivalent to intelligence. Second, divergent thinking is central to the concept of creativity. Third, we can develop tests to measure divergent thinking skills. Guilford’s remarks encouraged questions the academy is still having today: What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence? How do we measure creativity? And what, exactly, is creativity?
Unfortunately, Guilford’s ideas did not give rise to widespread research in creativity. Psychologists neglected the domain throughout the second half of the 20th century with notable exceptions including Dean Keith Simonton, Howard Gardner, Teresa Amabile and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was a fringe subject because no one saw any practical applications; acquiring grant money was therefore difficult.
The 21st century is witnessing a renaissance in creativity in both the lab and the pages of popular books and magazines. “Creativity is a topic at many conferences and many grad students are getting excited about the subject,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. “2012 was a good year for creativity research, journals devoted to creativity published a lot of great work and other fields weighed in.”
The most newsworthy research came from cognitive psychologists researching creativity “boosters”. Jennifer Wiley’s lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that a certain dose of alcohol helped participants solve tricky word problems. Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks demonstrated that undergrads were better at solving insight-based problems when they tested during their least optimal time. This means that night owls did better in the morning while morning larks did better in the afternoon. Counter-intuitive findings like these scattered psychology journals and made for catchy headlines in the press.
The neuroscience of creativity is flourishing. In 2008 the journal PNAS published a paper by researchers from the University of Michigan demonstrating that participants who played a difficult working memory game known as the n-BACK task scored higher on tests of a fundamental cognitive ability known as fluid intelligence: the capacity to solve new problems, to make insights and see connections independent of previous knowledge. In other words, the task made people smarter. Oshin Vartanian, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, explained that a lot of researchers are excited about this finding. “The 2008 paper has had a profound effect on how creativity researchers think about creativity. Now scientists are working on replicating the results and figuring out if intelligence gained from the n-BACK task transfers to other domains.” The hope is that “cognitive training” will help children and adults boost creative output. “The application of this research is probably the most exciting idea in the cognitive science and neuroscience of creativity,” says Vartanian.
Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between thinking about two concepts or consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, is also a popular topic in the neuroscience world. Darya Zabelina, a graduate student at Northwestern University who studies creativity informed me that, “a lot of people are studying cognitive flexibility from a lot of different perspectives. It will be one of the topics researchers will continue to focus on in 2013.”
Paul Silvia is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina who researches creativity and aesthetics, among other topics. According to Silvia, “film and creativity is going to become popular; maybe music and creativity as well.” He is currently working on a paper co-authored with Emily Nusbaum that looks at unusual aesthetic states such as awe, the chills, and crying.
Countless popular psychology books that either focused on or mentioned creativity were published in 2012. Susan Cain lambasted brainstorming and “GroupThink” in her bestseller and introvert manifesto Quiet. Drawing on a wide body of robust research she reminded our hyper social world that working alone is usually better than working in groups in terms of productivity and creativity. Dan Ariely’s book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty contains a chapter on the relationship between dishonesty and creativity – honesty might not be good for creativity. The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg made some important suggestions for creativity: if you’re in a rut, try changing your routine. The elephant in the room is Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: The Science of Creativity, which the public gobbled up. Scientists in the field rightly expressed concerns about how Lehrer portrayed and interpreted some of the science but they are also happy that good science writers are attracted to the field. Unfortunately, Lehrer got pegged for plagiarizing and inventing Bob Dylan quotes. Kaufman said it best: “When people started doubting the veracity of that book, they started doubting the veracity of the science.”
Given that the relationship between the science of creativity and the media will continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how the media’s portrayal of creativity affects the research. Starting with Gladwell’s Blink or Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, the public began to expect counter-intuitive results from cognitive science. Now we live in an era where readers of science books on human nature expect clever psychological studies to explain every nook and cranny of our complex nature. This trend is good because it gets otherwise uninterested lay readers excited about cognitive science; Thinking Fast and Slow, Incognito, and others were bestsellers. However, the popularity of these books may create a bad system of incentives for researchers, in which researchers are motivated to publish results just to create a stir at the expense of sound research techniques and less provocative but more important research. (There’s nothing wrong with provocative results of course. Done properly, counter-intuitive findings are vital to any field because they force us to think differently.)*
I’d like to see more researchers active online in the future. My educated guess is that only about one percent of cognitive scientists (professors, grad students, etc.) are blogging or tweeting. This is a problem for three reasons. First, the Internet is an excellent medium for spreading information, including research papers. Consider a project by Melissa Terras, the Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. She put 26 of her articles originally published in refereed journals online for free via UCL’s Open Access Repository. She wrote blog posts and used Twitter to promote them. It helped. “Most of my papers, before I blogged and tweeted them, had one to two downloads, even if they had been in the repository for months (or years, in some cases). Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were on average seventy downloads of my papers.”
Second, pseudoscience, “neurobabble,” and folk psychology flourish on the Internet. We need more experts to set the record straight. “The hard part,” Silvia told me, “is many professors aren’t good at doing that. It’s just not natural for us to ‘grab’ the public.” Not everyone is Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but it’s counterproductive for scientists to trench themselves in the academy. I hope creativity researchers will continue to make a larger online presence in 2013. We need them to keep writers like me honest.
Third, we need researchers to help promote the science of creativity to a wider audience. “I know a lot of really careful, good researchers in the field of the neuroscience of creativity, but no one is talking about them,” Kaufman tells me. “These thoughtful researchers should think about writing for the popular sphere and writers should pay attention to them more. There is so much exciting stuff going on in the field of creativity that most popular books don’t address.”
I’m optimistic about next year. Creativity researchers will continue to produce great research and improve our understanding of creativity as well as methods to measure it. In the spirit of Ken Robinson’s celebrated TED talk (now with over 13 million hits) we should broaden our conception of creativity; it is diverse and anyone can tap into it, even adults. Science writers will continue to write about creativity and the general public will continue to enjoy reading about it. Let’s strengthen the relationship between the academy and the journalism world, keeping in mind how we can use social media to promote the science of creativity and correct misconceptions about it (i.e., that people either are or not ‘creative’). This is important for education, where creativity research is especially useful, although it has implications for every industry.
It’s unclear where, exactly, the science of creativity will go next year, but the most interesting discoveries surely await us.
Full disclosure, Scott is also my colleague at The Creativity Post.
* This paragraph reiterates a point I made in collaboration with Dave Nussbaum, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, on a previous post.
Marci Segal, MS, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.
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]]>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.
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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
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Yesterday I had a call from Elizabeth Huggins a Strategist, Innovation Catalyst and Trainer with Marketing Innovation Change Unlimited and one of the prime movers behind World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21 in its early years. We talked about whether there is a difference between creativity and innovation facilitators and catalysts. To her, there definitely are unique aspects to each. She gave permission to blog her thoughts, I find them intriguing.
Clients choose to work with creativity and innovation facilitators and trainers, Elizabeth says, based on matching needs based on these four factors:
- The process they use (e.g. creative problem solving, synectics, design thinking, 6 hat thinking, etc.)
- Their experience (e.g. the kinds of clients with whom they’ve worked – education, finance, industry, non-profit, public, marketing, etc - and the kind of work they’ve done – ideation, training, innovation, etc.)
- Their personality/tone or manner (e.g. their personality style, how they interact, rapport)
- The thinking strategies they use (e.g. some are better at helping clients make things better; others excel at boosting clients to make things different.)
Facilitators guide the process and do not get involved with the clients subject. They neither approve or disapprove of ideas or decisions, nor do they recommend courses of action to take. They develop, design and deliver process, stimulation, idea capture, creative thinking methods, report writing and if asked, may give an overview and analysis. Prior to a group meeting they help the client focus on the real issue to be approached and move on from there. Innovation and creativity catalysts do the same and more.
Clients choose Innovation and/or creativity catalysts to add content and drive. As well as leading meetings as above, catalysts give new ideas and directions from their best thinking in support of the client’s business or goals. They accelerate and stretch thinking and make unexpected connections while driving the process to move things along. And, Elizabeth says, there’s more. What she does for clients is synthesizes data and insights and presents new never thought of before directions and suggestions, i.e. tips, for the client to use that would really make a difference in their business, it’s in her nature.
Facilitator’s, she says, don’t do that. They may inject new territory into the data collection stage to expand the scope of beginning thinking for projects and they likely don’t write reports that include consumer insights, short list of hot ideas, a synthesis of these in the larger context, and other significant extrapolations beyond perceived barriers. Elizabeth cannot not be prolific in ideas or strategic in approach and that’s what she brings to her clients table.
In our field of creativity/innovation professionals, so few agree on the same differentiators or definitions of terms. How many definitions of creativity there are depends on how many people engage in the conversation. The funny thing about it is, everyone is absolutely right. (what a field!)
Discussion Questions: Are creativity and innovation facilitators different from creativity and innovation catalysts? Which would you be likely to hire? What are your expectations of retaining the services of a creativity and/or innovation professional overall, hm? If you could predict which is more valuable to organizations in the long run – using the definitions included here – which would you say has longer lasting power: the facilitator or the catalyst, and why?
About Elizabeth Huggins
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A study recently released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reports rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour – cutting off motorists, lying in a negotiation and cheating to win a prize – than are their less wealthy counterparts. Researchers also found those who considered themselves ‘upper class’ were more likely to take valued items of others, and see greed and self interests as good pursuits.
Of course the findings are not universal, that is not ALL wealthy people share these traits, and not all of those who are relatively impoverished are ethical. Still it makes me wonder about the ethics of creativity and creativity professionals.
Some people think of creativity, that is, making new decisions that are novel and relevant (as well as the incumbent new ideas generated to solve a challenge or recognize/seize/create an opportunity) as cheating. Cheating because the novel decision does not play by existing rules. Do you think that is one reason some people are reluctant to use creative thinking?
The International Center for Studies in Creativity is hosting the Creativity Expert Exchange May 14-16 in Buffalo, NY. I submitted a proposal to lead a session on creativity professionals’ conduct, competencies and ethics, so this newly released research triggered further thinking. I believe its time for us to have important conversations and ask important questions, such as:
- Do creativity professionals play by rules? If yes, what are they and where do they come from? What happens if a creativity professional breaks the rules, and cheats, for example. What then?
- Is it the responsibility of creativity professionals to make sure their clients act ethically? What role do facilitators play in the outcome and execution of the new ideas and new decisions they help to surface and create?
- What competencies do creativity professionals need to have? How do they prove it?
Related articles
- Upper classes ‘more likely to lie and cheat’ (telegraph.co.uk)
- Rich more likely to take candy from babies (leggotunglei808.wordpress.com)
- Wealthy more likely to lie, cheat: study (business.financialpost.com)
- Is there a link between creativity and dishonesty? (creativityland.ca)
Let’s face it, people use their creativity everyday, even you. You create mash-ups, make new decisions, use your imagination, combine existing elements into new patterns and relationships and more, and not necessarily because you want to.
As conditions continue to change more rapidly than ever you adapt, we all adapt. For example with the growth of smart phone usage, businesses are directing efforts to create new ways to keep in touch with their markets.
So what’s the big deal about creativity? Everybody uses it everyday, and has ever since we had brains large enough to process new thinking and generate ideas. It’s nothing new.
What is new in creativity is the focus and underbelly of creative efforts.
Focus: In the recent past, we looked for ideas to streamline, create greater efficiencies, and do what we did, only better. Now, we are looking for ideas that, in addition to our heritage, move things forward and embrace the technologies that only began to emerge a few years ago, to create new futures. (See thelightsinthetunnel.com for a scenario for where it all might be going. Also, you might want to take a look at What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly and You are not a Gadget by Jason Lanier for an alternative, push back view.)
Underbelly: It’s a dizzying path, so, another new focus is how people feel. New research is pointing to the importance of emotion on people being able to generate new ideas and new decisions.
Why creativity is important in business has been cited by the IBM study of CEO’s last summer and in Newsweek’s coverage as well. There’s no need to convince anyone of the need to promote competence in using skills to develop their natural creative capacity (or inventive capacity as businesses refer to it, preferring to stay away from using the ‘creativity’ word) for innovation to occur.
How to move forward with your creativity
- Believe everyone can generate new ideas and make new decisions
- Acknowledge that different people use different approaches for both
- Support an environment that appreciates and leverages the different strengths people bring to the table
- Learn structures and systems that positively channel create freedom
Shameless self-promotion
The work I’m doing with clients these days supports those four points above. When I enter a room, a lecture hall, or an auditorium I already know everyone present is creative, whether they acknowledge it or not. When I tweet or update my Facebook status the same holds. It’s amazing, rewarding and inspiring to experience the resulting lifted spirits and people’s concrete new actions and directions. Cracking open new thinking to create new futures; turbo-charging the power of creative imagination to make a difference.
]]>If creativity is about using new ideas to make new decisions, and, its base comes from our innate human character to make things better and solve challenges to make life better for our children, and theirs, do we have the responsibility to influence client’s decision-making to include ‘green’ as a necessary criteria?
As facilitators, many Creativity Professionals do their best to be a ‘guide by the side rather than a sage on the stage’ working to guide and encourage fresh thinking and propel new action, supporting the client’s agenda for innovation.
We do this is in two basic stages, by leading activities and providing training, tips, tools and techniques to
- Expand thinking, access imagination, and put new combinations together for new considerations to emerge.
- Establish a new focus, by limiting the scope of ideas generated using specific criteria so that new plans can be made to carry out new actions.
Given the challenge of data available with regards to physical environment (air quality, water quality, etc) is it also our role to guide client decision-making to include planet care among the criteria for selecting ideas or place it within the planning stage?
Are Creativity Professionals also guardians or spokespeople for the quality of life on the planet? Should we be?
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