Scott Berkun's Blog, page 52

Does your workplace affect creativity? Mostly no

There’s a misguided trend in looking to architecture to explain why some groups of people are creative and others are not. There are flawed assumptions at work and I’ll explain why.

Articles in the New Yorker, New York Times and Fast Company point to office design, suggesting the environment has primacy over determining which groups of people will be creative and which ones won’t.  MIT’s famous building 20, is frequently referenced and studied, with some architects assuming if they emulate it’s elements they’ll see similar results.

Where this line of thinking fails is its lack of accounting for most breakthroughs in the history of the world.

A huge percentage of them took place in environments that fail most of the standards for “creative workplaces” or “dynamic work environments”.  Take as recent examples:

The Manhattan Project (cheap military housing in the desert)
The Apollo 11 moon landing (ordinary offices/cubicles)
Any company that started in a garage (Google, Apple, HP, Amazon, Disney)
The Wright brothers (bike shop)
The Internet and the Web (ordinary academic research labs)

Look at the timeline of the greatest inventions throughout history. Or the greatest paintings.  Most of them were made before electricity, before air conditioning, before a hundred comforts and conveniences we take for granted in all of our offices. Cherry picking recent breakthroughs and wrapping a theory around them is confirmation bias. Innovation and invention have been going on for millenia and any theory must include the past as well as the present.

Some articles point to the stimulating effects of some buildings, as the design forces people to mingle and interact in positive ways. I agree this can be an asset. But there is no rule that says this kind of stimulation can only happen at work. Many creative people throughout history found this kind of stimulation primarily at cafes, pubs, neighborhoods, libraries or parks.

Now of course it’s fair to say had all of these people been working in better architected work environments they might have had even better results. Fine. Or perhaps these people had certain skills for overcoming the anti-creative forces in the environments. But the primary reason they achieved what they did had little to do with the special characteristics of the workplaces. Most of them were capable of great work in very ordinary and unremarkable environments.

Architecture is important and can definitely influence culture and behavior, just not nearly to the degree where it is the primary factor.

Related posts:
Applying Jazz to workplace creativity
Teaching kids creative thinking
The creativity crisis (Newsweek)
Speaking in Chicago: Monday May 21st 2pm, Creativity
How Yoga destroys creativity: Niemann on working with ideas

What should you do when stranger sends high priority email?

I asked this question on twitter – here are the best responses:

“Hey, thanks for the email; please enjoy this viral cat video.” (Daniel)
forward it to someone else (you don’t like), w/ explanation “too important for me to handle, you should really take this” … :-) (Dossy)
I’ve got an auto reply for messages sent high pri: “thanks for your high priority message. http://bukk.it/tldr.gif ” (Lincoln)
Delete / No Response / Ignore (5 votes)

Have another entertaining suggestion? Leave a comment.

Related posts:
MLK, technology and inspiration
Munich advice?
What do you miss from the past?
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Fermat and ideas are made of other ideas

A nice email from Ro about how the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is an example of ‘ideas are made of other ideas‘:

Hi Scott, My name is Ro, I’m from Italy and currently a graduate student in computer science from the University of California Irvine. On a monthly base I catch up with your essays, that I found really sharp-serious-funny (plus, I try to learn something more about being a good writer). Recently – like last night, I had dinner with a friend, a quite well known name in math (cryptography), who, not surprisingly, likes to tell jokes and stories about math and other mathematicians.

During the dinner he explained the Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (a.k.a. the FLT) in a few steps involving theorems from other fields of math. Each of these theorems were developed in adjacent fields of number theory and never meant to proof the FLT. Nevertheless, a composition of these theorems inspired Andre Wiles and a few other contemporary mathematicians to first draft a proof of the FLT (the idea from other ideas) and subsequently proof that their draft proof was correct.

All of this happened from ~1997 to ~2005, after 350 years passed from the original claim by Fermat. When my friend was done talking, your claim “ideas are made of other ideas” came to my mind and I thought to tell the story and provide a reference to you. A summary of such a short but inspiring description about proof of FLT can be found here.

The author of the theorem died 350 years before the proof was provided and there has been a long wave of mathematicians obsessing on this problem, whose solution has been composed from other solutions from other fields. Hope the above can be helpful as an additional example about “ideas are made of other ideas” for your future inspiring essays and talks. Keep up with your dream – filling up your shelf with your books :) Cheers, – Ro

Thanks Ro!

 

Related posts:
All ideas are made of other ideas
How to diagnose creative failures
Speaking at American Society for Interior Designers
Creativity: Supply vs. Demand
Wednesday linkfest

Is ‘being spiritual’ a cop-out?

A recent op-ed piece on CNN by Alan Miller critiques the trend of people identifying themselves as spiritual, rather than of a specific denomination. It’s an interesting position:

The increasingly common refrain that “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” represents some of the most retrogressive aspects of contemporary society. The spiritual but not religious “movement” – an inappropriate term as that would suggest some collective, organizational aspect – highlights the implosion of belief that has struck at the heart of Western society.

Spiritual but not religious people are especially prevalent in the younger population in the United States, although a recent study has argued that it is not so much that people have stopped believing in God, but rather have drifted from formal institutions.

It seems that just being a part of a religious institution is nowadays associated negatively, with everything from the Religious Right to child abuse, back to the Crusades and of course with terrorism today.

Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent – by choosing an “individual relationship” to some concept of “higher power”, energy, oneness or something-or-other – they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.

That attitude fits with the message we are receiving more and more that “feeling” something somehow is more pure and perhaps, more “true” than having to fit in with the doctrine, practices, rules and observations of a formal institution that are handed down to us. The trouble is that “spiritual but not religious” offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.

Miller doesn’t pull punches. To call anyone’s beliefs retrogressive in a first sentence is not a invitation from an open mind. I don’t know what an implosion of belief would be like, but I assume he’s trying to say fewer people believe in what he believes, and that’s bad.

Yet the spiritual-but-not-religious outlook sees the human as one that simply wants to experience “nice things” and “feel better.” There is little of transformation here and nothing that points to any kind of project that can inspire or transform us.

At the heart of the spiritual but not religious attitude is an unwillingness to take a real position…

Theirs is a world of fence-sitting, not-knowingess, but not-trying-ness either. Take a stand, I say. Which one is it? A belief in God and Scripture or a commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of human-based knowledge, reason and action? Being spiritual but not religious avoids having to think too hard about having to decide.

I agree with Miller than having conviction is good. Until you are fully committed to an idea or belief you can’t fully understand it.  However beliefs shouldn’t be formed merely because someone in authority told you to believe something. I don’t think it is a real position for someone to be told their beliefs from the day they are born, with intense social and familial pressure not to question that belief. To take a real position means you have made a real, free choice. But we don’t chose our parents and few of us chose our religions. I’m happy to critique the “I am spiritual crowd” for their lack of conviction if the same critique applies to everyone who didn’t choose their religion or belief system.

My fantasy is everyone should learn about every major belief. At least a handful of different ones. Each belief can even be taught by a leader from that denomination. The ‘student’ learns about them all and is free to make comparisons and ask questions on their own terms. No matter what they decided, they’d actually be making a choice, even if it was to believe what their parents do.  Few religions would agree to this as it raises too many questions they are afraid to answer.

Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living. I agree, at least as far as examination is good. If we critique the unexamined spiritualists, we must critique the unexamined faithful, and faithless, too.

Related posts:
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The founding fathers and their faith
quote of the week
Favorite MLK quote on tech innovation
Innovation vs. Tradition: Christianity, the Vatican and Sin

Site news: new design coming soon (sneak preview)

As a design minded person I’ve had a long list of fixes, improvements and updates I’ve wanted for scottberkun.com. I had some false starts and stops in hiring folks to do the work, and somehow it’s been years since the site has seen much love. I’m so sad about that. You readers deserve better.

I’m proud to report a new design is almost finished and should be live soon.

The main goals for the redesign were:

Simplify, simplify, simplify: more whitespace, more attention to easy reading
Make it easier to find ways to follow (Twitter, Facebook, mailing list)
Better visibility to videos of my best talks and lectures

Here’s a preview of what the new home page will look like. I’ll have more details on the rest of the design soon.

Related posts:
The final cover is here, plus a sneak peek
Two kinds of people: complexifiers and simplifiers
Design games (or learning and playing at the same time)
Sneak preview of my new book
#3 – The essential bookshelf for UI design

Innovation is an illusion

Here is a great thought experiment:

Consider the last time you walked into a convenience store to get a soda.
Perhaps you grabbed a snack or two, waited in line to pay, and left.
Did anything in the experience seem interesting? Probably not.

Now magically transport that same little convenience store to a poor shanty town in Ethiopia or India, where there’s extreme poverty.

Suddenly that same convenience store is an oasis of innovation.

It has many world changing breakthroughs: fresh water, electricity, working toilets, air conditioning, cold drinks and stockpiles of food. There are magazines to learn from and basic medicines to use. Their lives would be instantly transformed by access to such things.

The big question: How can the same technology be a breakthrough in one place, and meaningless in another?

The only answer is that the true deciding factor for whether something is innovative or not is not in the technology itself, but in the point of view of the person using it.  Innovation is not a static quality, but a relative one.

William Gibson said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” but there’s more to it than that. The value of any idea or invention is variable, not static. And it varies not only through time but from person to person. It can also move backwards and forwards, as organic food is now seen as an innovation, but yet before 1950 that’s all there was in the world.

Related posts:
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How to kill innovation hype
Understanding Apple (Apple now the #1 Music retailer)
What do you miss from the past?

I answer MBA student questions about Innovation

Liz Barclay at Oakland University, is using the Myths of Innovation in a MBA course on creativity. I offer to teachers who use my books that if they send in a list of student questions, I’m happy to answer here. Here’s some Q&A with her class:

Kevin: A key component of innovation is failure, and it is the overcoming of repeated failures that often lead to breakthroughs. Today’s children are being taught at a young age that failure is a bad word and that participatory success is to be shared and valued by all. If you agree, will decades of this collectivist methodology lead to a technology and innovation gap in the US sometime in the future?

Human culture has good reasons for making failure a bad word. For (civilized) cultures to work, most people need to follow at least sone of the same rules, and that’s supported by instilling values for fitting in and doing the right things (as defined by everyone else). Even the most innovative culture in the universe some conformity is needed: stop signs, traffic lights driving on the same side of the road (not to mention speaking the same language). Institutions like schools, churches and armies will always emphasize rigidity and conformity in at least some ways.

But to your point, children need regular experience with subjects where there is no singular right answer: drawing, painting, writing, making music… these are all activities where creativity is almost unavoidable provided the assignments aren’t merely to copy what someone else is doing. English and history also have lots of room for creativity provided the teacher’s goal is to expose students to their own thoughts, rather than memorizing someone else’s. And regardless of what schools do, parents are free to emphasize creativity and free thinking in their children, if they choose.

I don’t think the U.S. is at particular risk here -we have far less institutional  conformity than many other nations, and we also have far more dropouts :) Not that I’m advocating dropping out, but it is potentially a creative act that leads to many other creative acts.

Anna: I am curious whether Mr. Berkun is familiar with TRIZ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ), and if yes, what he thinks about it. Has he had any chance to apply TRIZ in his own practice? In a nutshell, from what I remember from my father’s lectures back in Russia, TRIZ was invented as a “scientific method to help an average person to make inventions”. TRIZ offers series of tools which could be applied to a “technical problem” to generate variety of solutions to “eliminate the contradiction” and therefore solve the problem by changing something about the “technical system”.

I’m familiar with TRIZ. It’s vaguely similar to other idea generation toolkits, like IDEO’s method cards. Both systems offer short bits of advice on different ways to think about a problem. This can of course be helpful, as framing a problem differently is often what leads to a step forward. But there’s nothing exceptional about any of these systems. They can help find different ideas, but for very difficult problems the likelihood of finding a working idea simply by using one of these systems is small.

But ideas are easy. Having the idea is very different from being wiling to spend 5 years or $50,000 refining it to the point that anyone will believe the idea works.  TRIZ, nor any idea generation aid, can do that for you. TRIZ also emphasizes physical inventions, as in machinery and gadgets, rather than ideas for other things. You can play with one version of TRIZ here and you’ll quickly see some of its limitations. Try using it to invent a time machine, or a car that gets 500mpg –  You’ll see how limited the help it offers can be.

Linda: Does he see any place in our traditional education system for a more accurate depiction of the work of inventors or the real story of historical people/ events or does he see this as something strictly for those who intend to be seen in their jobs as ‘innovators’? I’m wondering because I can see some useful learnings even for someone like me in a traditional field (Finance).

Formalized education tends to be dull and gravitates towards making everything seem predictable and obvious. If you have to build a system to teach courses again and again and again, it’s inevitable to tend towards an illusion of dull certainty: “This happened, which led to this, which led to what I am teaching you now, therefore it is all obvious and credible.”  History, which is a huge part of every subject taught everywhere, is partially just a story we tell ourselves to make us feel good in the present. It steers clear of topics we are uncertain about, even though we know these subjects will be taught very differently 100 years from now, just as they were taught very differently 100 years ago.

The best recommendation I can give is to read a early history of whatever subject you care about. If you go back far enough you will always find a frontier where big bets and high drama took place to define the basic concepts we all take for granted now. Finance has a fascinating history of innovation. Who made the first bank? How did they convince anyone to let them hold their money? When did paper money start (and how did they convince anyone paper had value?) When you go back you will find many important ideas that modern experts do not know, or have misinterpreted, or take for granted. Innovation is everywhere – you just have to look a little deeper to find it. I hope my book helped you believe that’s true.

In all fields there are people who push at the boundaries and are asking big fundamental questions. Every field has its own encyclopedia of ignorance, you just might need to do some looking before you find professors and experts working to answer those big questions.

Have a question you’d like me to answer? Leave a comment.

Related posts:
Thursday Linkfest
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Questions on Innovation from Microsoft: Answered!
Questions on Innovation from Microsoft
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News: I’m working on a UX book with Jackson Fish

When my friends Hillel Cooperman and Jenny Lam started their UX company JacksonFish, I thought, how awesome. Every designer dreams of working on their own terms, where they can make great things. JacksonFish has delivered on their vision, and you can see plenty of examples of their amazing work here.

When they told me they were working on a book, called Making Things Special (no intentional connection to my management book, though I’m sure they’ll be friends), I was excited for them. And then when they ask if I’d take on the role as the book’s editor, I was flattered and thrilled.

The book is a kickstarter project and they’re looking for support to get the project funded:

Making Things Special is a book about creating standout user experiences. The authors, Hillel Cooperman and Jenny Lam (us), have been designing user experiences collectively for over 25 years… We’ve worked with clients like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, as well as several small to mid-size startups and tech companies. Clients come to us when they want to create an experience that’s not just intuitive, not just usable, but something that their audience can fall in love with.

Here’s their fun Wes Andersonesque kickstarter video for the project about what it means to make special things, something the book will teach (Look for the donut robot cameo at 2:09):

Please head over here to learn more about the project and how you can help it along.

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Update on my next book
On working for free
Update on my next book

Haiku Deck: a simple way to make better presentations (review)

I recently wrote a harsh review of Prezi, focusing on how that tool makes it easy to make distracting, annoying presentations. On the other end of the spectrum is a new iPad app called Haiku Deck.

Haiku Deck takes a radically simple approach. The tool has very few features. It lets you pick background images and then write a sentence of two of text over them. That’s it. It’s incredibly simple, but this is very good for audiences everywhere. A major problem in most presentations is how complex and overwrought they are. Most people start by making elaborate, complex slides, believing it’s the slide that makes the talk, rather than their clarity of thinking.

Using Haiku Deck will help many speakers avoid many of the common traps. You can’t cram your slides full of bullets. You can’t make complex flowcharts with tiny 8pt font labels. Haiku pretty much ensures you’ll follow much of the advice in Garr Reynold’s classic Presentation Zen. Simply put, you are forced to keep your slides clean and simple, meaning you have to do the heavy lifting of thinking through who your audience is, and what they need to learn from you, which is the only way to make a better presentation anyway.

A major time sink in making good slide decks is finding images to use, but Haiku helps there too. It automatically queries rights free image databases, allowing you to confidently include images that you have permission to use. Of course you can use your own photos too.

An easy complaint die-hard Powerpoint/Keynote users will have is how many features, from flowcharts, to shapes, to graphs, they may think they depend on are not in Haiku Deck. In most cases they will be better off, as all of those things were less effective than they think anyway. Haiku does support exporting to Powerpoint (which I have not tried).

My major complaint is entirely selfish: the basic style Haiku deck uses, with full screen images covered by a single point in an easy to read font, is the core style I’ve used in my own talks for years (especially at Ignite talks). I fear if Haiku deck becomes popular I’ll look more like a follower than someone a little ahead of the curve.

The app is free. You can share your presentations on Twitter, Facebook, and by email.  I’d guess they’re planning to offer style packs and add-ons for cost in the future, but the core app is free.

Download Haiku Deck for iPad here.

Related posts:
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Why I hate Prezi
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Why we’re wrong about the phone of the future

I recently read a fine article in the Atlantic called iPhone 5? Yawn. What Will the ‘Phone’ of 2022 Look Like?. It does a good job of summaring what some excellent engineers and designers believe will be coming next. It’s a fun and inspiring read.

The problem is the odds are very good we’re all wrong.

The trap is when we think about the future, we assume the best idea wins. This is a myth of innovation: it’s chapter 8 in the book. The quality of the ideas involved is certainly a factor, but often not the most important one.

Consider how many human interfaces throughout history were chosen:

Silverware
The QWERTY keyboard
Car steering wheels and gas/brake pedals
Doorknobs / handles
Bathroom faucets
Electrical outlets

These paradigms became standard primarily because they were the idea in use at a key time in the development of the technology. Better ideas came along later, but it didn’t matter. It was either too expensive, too hard to teach, or there was no market incentive to drive a shift to something new. So no change came.

Odds are very good we will have many of the same UI paradigms a decade, or even a century, from now. (the motion detection bathroom faucets are an interesting counter example, but they’re not dominant and they may be more annoying than they’re worth).

And when change does come it will likely be not because of some master plan to make a better phone, or a better outlet. It will be because an entirely new concept comes along that disrupts the very idea of these devices, and that change will likely bring along with it entirely new flaws that were impossible to predict at the time, but that we’ll be stuck with for much longer than anyone expects.

Also see: The future of UI will be boring

 

 

Related posts:
The untold story of the i-phone
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Luddite news: My new cell phone is…
Why today is not the future
Research on how to pitch ideas