Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 5

Is creativity something that can be taught?

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this question that largely stems from the question of degree. I’d say yes, people’s creative abilities can be improved. However, it’s unlikely you’re going to become a creative genius like Einstein or Mozart without some natural talent.

Is everyone creative? Sure they are, but in very different ways and to varying degrees. Our democratic longing to make everyone and everything equal has led us to make creative greatness indistinguishable from an act of personal expression. What is lacking is meaningful appreciation of the different levels of creativity and how we can use them as steps for increasing our own creative potential. Below are the five levels and types of creativity, from the easiest to the most difficult to master, along with suggestions for building creative muscle:

Mimetic Creativity: Mimesis is a term passed down to us from the Ancient Greeks meaning to imitate or mimic. This is the most rudimentary form of creativity. To improve mimetic creativity, travel to new places and meet new people. Be sure to look for patterns and benchmarks, as well as indicators of success or failure so that you have good ideas about what really works and doesn’t and why.

Biosociative Creativity: Biosociative is a term coined by the novelist Arthur Koestler in his celebrated book The Art of Creation to describe how our conscious mind, when relaxed, can connect rational with intuitive thoughts to produce eureka moments. Biosociative creativity occurs when a familiar idea is connected to an unfamiliar one to produce a novel hybrid. Brainstorming is an excellent example of biosociative creativity. You can find a variety of brainstorming methods to boost biosociative creativity on my website .

Analogical Creativity: Analogical creativity uses analogies to transfer information that we believe we understand in one domain, the source, to help resolve a challenge in an unfamiliar area, the target. In essence, analogies are bridges that allow our cognitive processes to quickly transport clusters of information from the unknown to the known, and back again. Analogies can also be used to disrupt habit-bound thinking to make way for new ideas. You can develop your analogical creativity through the “imaginary friend” role storming method whereby you imagine what someone might say or do if faced with a particular challenge.

Narratological Creativity: At its essence, narratological creativity is the art of storytelling. Our personal stories are perhaps the ultimate use of narratological creativity as we invent and reinvent the story of our life. In this way something that is deeply personal becomes allegorical or of mythic significance. You can improve your narratological creativity by practicing the art of storyboarding or by engaging in scenario making to project potential courses of action.

Intuitive Creativity: This final and most challenging level of creativity has often been promoted to the realm of spiritual and wisdom traditions. This is where creativity becomes bigger and possibly beyond us; it transcends our individuality. There are several methods for freeing and emptying the mind – meditation, yoga and chanting to name a few. The basic idea is to distract and relax the mind to create a flow state of consciousness where ideas come easily. The approaches to developing intuitive creativity are too numerous to chronicle here; however, free writing is straightforward way to connect us with our intuitive self by simply observing what flows out of the pen or the tapping of the keys.

As with any learned ability, you have to practice. Even creative geniuses practice all the time. The following article from Fortune Magazine is a good place to find out more. This video about the five levels of creativity may also be helpful.

This question originally appeared on Quora .

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

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What misconceptions do people have about innovation and creativity?

The greatest misconception about innovation and creativity is that they can be generated on demand. Creativity will never be an item on a pull-down menu you can click to activate when you need it. But that doesn’t mean you should just sit around waiting for a creative impulse.

In a world where a single touch on a screen can bring us any service or product imaginable whenever we want it, creativity still runs at its own pace. It’s the one thing we’ll never be able to get on-demand: the spark of inspiration that puts us into a creative mindset. Even the most brilliant artists and writers don’t decide when they are at their most creative. Rather, they understand the internal and external dynamics that shape their productivity and adjust their processes accordingly.

There are times of the day, outside of our control, when we enter states of being conducive to intense creativity. These are called flow states, famously identified and described by University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Some of us work best early in the morning, while others come up with their greatest ideas late at night. But just because we’re slaves to our own biorhythms when it comes to achieving the perfect innovative state of mind, doesn’t mean we can’t control our own creativity habits. Here are three things you can do to facilitate and take advantage of your flow states:

Build flow states into your day. Incorporate breaks for reflection and rest in your everyday work habits. Even brief periods of relaxation–a pause for meditation or a short nap–can encourage creative behavior. Try closing your door and putting your head down on your desk for fifteen minutes. You’ll emerge recharged, rejuvenated, ready to look at your world anew.

Get up and go outside. Just as regular relaxation is a proven catalyst for creativity, so too is stimulation. Goethe and Kant used to take afternoon constitutions–midday walks to break up their thinking and writing. Energizing yourself and getting adrenaline pumping is a great way to reset and see a problem from a fresh perspective. It’s not about merely performing these stimulation or relaxation activities. It’s about understanding the rhythms of your flow states and seeing where and how these exercises can enhance them.

Recreate the environments you’re most creative in. Once you become attuned to the environmental factors that trigger your creativity, you can recreate them and integrate them into your natural workspace. Whether it’s sunlight or darkness, cool spaces or warm spots, music in your earbuds or total silence that gets your creative groove going, find it and capture it. These minor adjustments in ambience can make a major difference in your innovation flow.

Creativity will never be an item on a pull-down menu you can click to activate on-demand–creativity demands you. That doesn’t mean you should just sit around waiting for a creative impulse. You may not be able to control the arrival of your flow state, but you can build your routine around it. This way, when it does come, you’ll be ready for it.

I go more into detail in other articles from my blog . You may also want to take a look at this YouTube video about the myth of creativity on demand.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Jeff-ism Video: How America can be the World’s most Creative Country

Watch Jeff talk about how America can be the world’s most creative country here.

How can people become more creative in their everyday lives?

The gifted amateur as a heroic innovator is one of the great American myths. Stories about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and even Steve Jobs conveniently overlook their unique brilliance and years of experience. If anyone could do it, they would. We learn by doing and all learning is developmental. The same holds true for creative brainstorming. Research on creative thinking gives us three simple suggestions that will greatly aid in generating great ideas in a short period of time.

Fluency: Whoever said that one good idea is better than a thousand mediocre ones probably never invented anything. More is better. One of the inhibitors of creative thinking is your voice of judgment that kicks in when you think too long about the viability of your idea. The key is to generate ideas faster than you can evaluate them. This will produce some unusual and impractical ideas that will serve as triggers for novel ideas that work.
Flexibility: Steve Jobs remarked, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Creating a breakthrough idea may simply be a matter of reapplying an idea from one situation to another. For example, to improve their patients’ hospital stay experience, a medical center sent their doctors to live in a posh hotel one week and their own hospital the next. The center simply applied the practices of the hotel to the hospital to completely transform the patient experience.
Flow: Most of us have experienced a feeling of effortlessness and timelessness when doing something creative like painting. Researchers call this our flow state: when we are the most creative and “in the zone.” Some people are creative in the morning, while others are more so at night. Some people are most creative when listening to music while others need contemplative silence. The key is to find a time and a place where you typically enter this flow state.

Be an anthropologist and keep track of your life for a couple weeks. Pay attention to where and when you are most creative and the people you are most creative with. That will tell you how to be more creative.

I have a number of strategies and articles on creativity on my blog at Inc. Magazine. Also check out the following YouTube video about how to improve your brainstorming techniques: How to Improve Brainstorming – The Dean of Innovation

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Roundhouse Radio Interview

Listen to Jeff speak about his new book The Innovation Code on Roundhouse Radio here.

Idea to Value Podcast

Listen to Jeff talk with Nick Skillicorn about why you need conflict to succeed at innovation here.

Jeff-ism Video: Culture Creates the Economics of Innovation

Watch Jeff explain how culture creates the economics of innovation here.

Skip Prichard Interview

Read Jeff’s interview about his new book with Skip Prichard here.

How NASA is responding to increased probability of Armageddon asteroids

One afternoon while waiting for my flight to board, a headline caught my eye: “Civilization-Destroying Comets Are More Common Than We Thought.” I assumed it was one of those flashy clickbait attention-grabbers like the ones about how researchers have discovered how you can lose ten pounds just by drinking dandelion tea. Much to my surprise, it wasn’t one of those smarmy websites you’ve never heard of. It was Popular Mechanics. Yes, that do-it-yourself periodical for the pocket-protector jet set that has all the panache of your dad’s brown shoes. So why the hyperbole?

Well, last February a video of an asteroid that flew over the University of Wisconsinmade its way around the internet. At first, I thought it was just viral marketing gimmick for another end-of-days flick. Apparently not. Scientists have known that we have been in harm’s way for some time. Now, computer simulation models suggest that our chance of being collateral damage in some catastrophic collision with asteroids is seven times greater than previously reported.

OK, so now what? Stop saving for retirement? Forget the whole climate change thing? No worries, NASA is on it. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART for short, is the space agency’s way back to relevance with the general public. Okay, the moon landing thing was spectacular 50 years ago. But it will take more than the stuff we see now, like psychedelic photos of nebulas in deep space, to justify NASA’s $20 billion budget. That requires something big, like, say, saving humanity.

From an innovation standpoint, this meteor-deflecting technology is right out of science fiction. NASA plans to test it in 2022 on a pair of asteroids called Didymos A and Didymos B. A pool-table-sized craft will careen into space, locate the asteroids using an on-board autonomous targeting system, and crash into the smaller one at a speed nine times faster than a bullet. This interstellar demolition derby will be monitored via a complex array of computer networks and telescopes, with artificial intelligence doing the play by play. Observing the outcome of the kinetic impact will help NASA understand how this strategy could work on Earth, threatening asteroids in the future.

Our friendly neighborhood geniuses at NASA assure us that there is no chance that this little experiment could accidently create a hazard for those of us down here on the Blue Planet. Still, I’m a little troubled by some of the descriptions of DART as a weapon. You need only imagine what such a spacecraft could do given a military application. Satellites, space stations, and all types of lunar modules currently in development could be possible targets. Coincidentally, conservative columnist George Will recently published a provocative piece in the Washington Post suggesting that the U.S. Air Force needs to refocus its efforts beyond our exosphere. Of course, the mission of NASA is scientific and humanitarian, but I can’t help but wonder if DART is being carefully watched as a possible way of advancing American superiority in space.

This all leads to my underlying suspicion about the whole matter. Is DART just a proof of concept experiment, like any innovation prototype, or is our space agency trying to tell us something? If so, I’d really like to know what it is so I can stop worrying about counting calories and whether my next flight will actually depart on time.

This article was originally published on The Next Idea.

Inside Launchstreet Podcast

Listen to Jeff talk about what makes you innovative on the Inside Launchstreet podcast here.