Assessing the Class

So I sat down to finish the Class Assessment document tonight. Some of the questions were straightforward enough to answer – what did each of the creative techniques consist of, and how did we apply it to our project? – but others gave me pause. When I reached the questions about limitation on human learning and creativity, I had to stop and look back at the class as a whole while still boiling the results down to a sentence or two each. I don't know about the rest of you, but I found that to be a challenge.

Defining the limits wasn't difficult, but it also wasn't the task at hand: instead, I had to take both what I'd learned about the limitation and (at least as I understood the question) what I'd learned about how to transcend it and boil that down to a single line. For all except the first question, I found that to be daunting. To get it done, I eventually found myself working through an abbreviated version of the 6 hats exercise… you could call it the "two hats," since I was a Blue Hat by default and only approached the questions of 'what facts do I have about these limits?' and 'what are the pitfalls of these limits?' – with pitfalls here being the things that might negate them. Matching up an aspect of a limit with its 'pitfall' gave me an insight into how I thought about it and how my thinking had changed as a result of the class, and that I could turn into a sentence. For limits to cognition, a fact about it – 'I can only concentrate on one problem at a time' – and its pitfall/solution – 'multiple people working on the problem' – led me to the core concept and takeaway for me: that no innovation happens in a vacuum, and that real successes incorporate the contributions of many people (even if some of them aren't actively working on this particular product.)

The 'models of innovation' section also required me to stretch my thinking a bit, as the vast majority of the class focus, as you'd expect from an entrepreneurship course, was on new businesses and business models. By phrasing the question as 'how might you use this in your professional work,' the form made me reassess the tools we've been working on in a new light: where exactly could I take these and apply them in my existing environment? I'm not sure about how that question fell out for the rest of you, or even if you read it in the same way, but for me the fifteen minutes I spent on that section was some of the most immediately-valuable time of the summer. I've played with the possibilities a bit already in one of my creative exercises in isolation, but thinking about how the entire innovation process can be transferred into a fairly traditional environment was an eye-opener for me.

Upending the Org Structure

Work gave me an exciting opportunity for stretching my creative muscles recently. I was drawn into a meeting which had the specific purpose of laying out a strategic plan for the coming years. It's a clean slate with nothing off the table and an ambitious goal – raising the Annual Fund's income by 40% in 5 years – and my group's task is to hash out a plan for achieving it.
What made me decide to write about it, though, and what makes it a creative opportunity for me is that I was put in the lead role of the group… which otherwise consists entirely of people above me in the hierarchy. There's almost certainly a couple of good reasons for this, but I believe the primary one might be one of the concepts we've talked about in class: too much input from an authority figure can stifle creativity. Putting the person with the least actual authority in the lead role is an extremely direct way of avoiding that issue, particularly when the authority actually assigning the task isn't part of the group at all. Sadly, I can't take credit for that creative choice. But it does lend me the opportunity to use some of the tools we've been working with.
To help me prepare for this project, I've taken the creativity tools we learned in class together and walked through each of them to see how they might be applicable to our task. The funny thing is that the tools I'm finding most relevant for this in terms of my own preparation are the ones I found least useful in our actual class work. Take one of the perennial problems of annual fundraising: do you put time, effort, and money into raising larger gifts from the people who already support you? Or do you sink energy into engaging new donors and bringing them on board? I've lined up the Innovation Matrix to address this question, with our current array of appeal methods filling in the 'existing products' section and new initiatives like crowdfunding filling the 'new product' gap. It's possible to see at a glance all the possible intersections of appeal methods with existing or new donor populations, and I'm hoping that the clear picture will help us decide on the proper balance going forward. For me, the matrix tools are turning out to be ideal for independent work where I found them less than useful in a group environment. It's my hope that the tools I found useful in a group environment will prove their worth going forward as well:

TED Talks on Innovation – Reversing My Conception of Creativity

So for today's project I decided to expand on the talks we watched in class and explore more of what some of the creative minds out there have to say about creativity. I watched three talks today that were about different aspects of creativity and innovation, but found an underlying theme that surprised me. They're well worth watching.

The first talk was with Dan Pink – The Puzzle of Motivation. His talk involves the idea that our modern business environments, with a strong focus on creativity, have a fundamental misunderstanding about how to motivate create work. External rewards, like increased financial compensation, can actually have a negative effect on creativity: by holding out a reward in front of someone, you actually narrow their vision right when they need to have their mind open and receptive to creative approaches. He backs the argument up with an impressive array of examples and studies about projects ranging from Wikipedia to Google, but his fundamental argument is that intrinsic motivations – feeling that a project is important, feeling a sense of personal investment, having a sense of autonomy in solving it – are productive in creative tasks, while extrinsic motivations are not.

I moved from there to Elizabeth Gilbert's talk Your Elusive Creative Genius. She wasn't talking about rewards here, but about the creative process itself and how creative people experience it. Even as a successful author, she's haunted by the fear of failure. She's concerned about how our culture links creativity and suffering as related concepts. And her suggestion for addressing it is to externalize the concept of creativity and separating from the artist. Referring back to ancient Greek and Roman concepts of creative spirits – external 'geniuses' – she makes the argument that treating the creative exercise as an external factor useful both for humbling the ego and for relieving the stress of performance.

Between the two of them, a couple of unconscious assumptions I had about creative work were flipped and inverted: rather than an external motivation driving creativity, it looks more productive to draw motivation from within. Rather than looking inward to find creativity, it might make more sense to turn your attention out.

That's only reinforced by the third talk: Steve Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. Johnson is setting out to rebut the idea of a Eureka moment as the key of the creative process in favor of the gradual accumulation of ideas into a useful innovation. Whether it's the free exchange of ideas in a coffeehouse in England in the 1600s, the combination of a high-tech incubator with low-tech car parts to provide service to less affluent countries, or the much-disdained meetings that follow scientific lab work, he argues that the final form of a creative idea comes out of the combination of many everyday occurrences – but those examples are all cases where the ideas are coming together because the people involved have a passion for their ideas and a desire to exchange them or make them work in a new context, not because of an outside factor rewarding them for creating.

If you break the creative process apart and separate the HOW and the WHY of it, these three talks make a pretty compelling argument that a healthy creative environment (and by that I mean healthy both for creativity and for the creator) comes from looking outward – always, being constantly open and receptive – for the HOW, and looking inward for the WHY.

Smarter Than You Think and how Innovation Creates Room for More Innovation

I picked up a book at the library the other day called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, by Clive Thompson. For today's project, I read a chapter from it ("The Art Of Finding") that focused on how the growth of information technology from rote memorization to writing to printing to electronic storage, and how that development has changed how we think. There were a lot of useful takeaways about human thinking in general in this chapter – our tendency to store information outside our brains, whether it's on paper or in digital form or in the brain of another person – but a common theme jumped out at me as I read it that I felt was worthy of further exploration: the way that innovation can solve one unmet need but create a new one in the process.

The overall trend the chapter describes is the transition from internal storage to external: with the progression of technology, we've gradually chosen to retain fewer hard facts and instead shifted to remembering where the facts we want can be found. But what's interesting about that is that each transition came with its own opportunity for new innovation. When printing became widespread, the sheer volume of written material available to a serious reader became more than any single person could remember – even the book which any single fact could be found in was too much to recall, let alone what page it might be found on. So a sixteenth-century scholar named Jeremias Drexel began keeping notebooks whose only purpose was to record that information: he had created an index to solve a need that wasn't just unmet but which hadn't actually existed until print became widespread. Dewey extended the idea from a single person's knowledge to books as a whole when he created the Dewey Decimal system. Vannevar Bush envisioned the memex as a personalized index / record-keeper / searching tool: a mechanical aid customized to a single person. With each significant innovation that expands our capacity to store information, a new need is created: a greater capacity to organize and retrieve that information.

Having read this chapter and seen the pattern forming in it, I have started to see it elsewhere as well. Even in my group's project: the idea we eventually chose to run with is based on it. One great innovation (smart phones that are all-purpose communications devices / computers / phones / personal records-keepers) has become so useful and ubiquitous that it has become a primary target of thieves. That creates the need for a way to protect the phones from theft. And an opportunity for innovation is born!

Finding Inspiration In Others: Exposing Yourself to Risk.

It was while I was typing up my thoughts in response to The Art of Innovation that I realized that, somewhere along the way, I seem to have developed an aversion to risk. When I was reading Kelley's thoughts on prototyping and product development, I kept finding myself asking "but how do you know which ideas are the ones worth expanding on?" I realized that even after finishing the book, I still didn't feel confident that I could forge ahead on some ideas and leave others behind without worrying that I'd chosen the wrong ones.

Howard Gardner's piece felt almost too on-target when I watched it soon after finishing the book. Among many other topics, he touched on the idea that the current generation is risk-averse, both in school and in life. Rather than putting ourselves out there first and gauging the response, he says, we want to know how we'll be judged and what metrics are being used to measure us. If I was worried about it in myself, and others thought that it was a growing trend, how could I combat it? How can we work against this trend in general?

The first answer I found is to look for inspiration from others - look to those people I admire, the people operating in business or in art (or both, or neither) who put themselves forward and take risks on ideas that sometimes pan out and sometimes don't. This is a list that I'll continue to build on as I move forward, and I expect I'll be looking back to it every so often as I try to build a new habit in myself of accepting risk.

- Out of every four restaurants Gordon Ramsay has opened, one of them has failed.
- Author J.K. Rowling left behind a successful YA fantasy series to publish books in adult fiction, one of them under a pseudonym.
- One of my colleagues in Advancement is leaving the office after a decade of service to the school in order to pursue her own business.
- My parents owned four different businesses over the course of their careers, one of them an outright financial failure. But they rebuilt and moved on to new opportunities.
- Steve Jobs came back to a company that had stagnated in an attempt to get it back in gear, and succeeded.

If I look to these people as inspiration when I'm hesitant to take a risk, perhaps it will help me to take the necessary leap.

What risk-takers inspire you?

Finding the Random in Everyday Life

My group was surprised by the effectiveness of random stimuli in the creative process, but over the weeks since our class I recognized that I should not have been: it’s been something that I’ve been depending on for years already.

One difficulty of following a vegan diet that isn’t necessarily obvious is the risk of falling into a rut. Veganism requires that you incorporate a healthy variety of foods into your diet in order to get proper, balanced nutrition… but it’s easy to get comfortable with a small variety of staple dishes and repeat them over and over again. For me, cooking is one of my major creative outlets, and I stumbled accidentally into the technique of random-stimulus-to-inspire-creativity when I started to receive a farm share order through a CSA.

When you don’t know from week to week what you’ll be cooking with, it inspires you. If you get watermelon radishes in the box of vegetables, and you’ve never in your life eaten them before (let alone cooked with them!) you have to just dive in and make an effort. Maybe you can find a recipe to start from, and maybe you can’t… but it’s watermelon radishes you have to work with, and that’s what you’re going to eat. It’s not that different from having rubber bands to work with, when you come right down to it. 

And sometimes, you end up with a great big piles of greens and you have to find a way to keep them interesting.

Playing with the numbers

Creativity in my work is all about finding the story in a sea of numbers. I work with a group of fundraisers, taking stock of their efforts and the gifts they have brought in and reporting out to them so that they can tell how they are doing.

The difficulty of this is that numbers aren't all that exciting to many people. Particularly numbers which they see week in and week out, year after year, following the same basic patterns. Hearing that the Annual Fund made $12,348 more this month than last year may be important, but it doesn't succeed in doing either of the things that a good report should do: it doesn't give them anything specific to act upon, and it doesn't do a good job of motivating them to continue doing their work with passion.

So effective reporting requires playing with the numbers. Not changing them, of course, but poking at them and rearranging them, displaying them in new arrangements, looking for the story that they have to tell. It's not unlike the brainstorming activity that we did in class - I can't go in with the answer I want already fixed in my head, but instead I need to use the data as inspiration and continue tossing possibilities at it until some solid ideas begin to show themselves in the array of possibilities.

As often as not, it's a question of finding the right visualization for me - putting the numbers into different types of charts and grouping them by different categories until something stands out so clearly that it has an impact and a meaning that can be immediately grasped.

To take a real example of this, I was recently reporting on the progress of an annual fundraising effort, but to most of our standard reports it appeared to be performing exactly the same as it had the year before despite the fact that several things had changed dramatically - a different group was being appealed to, different events were being held, and so on. Did that mean that the changes had no effect on our population of potential donors? Or was something else going on? I began to chart the gifts in as many ways as I could, organizing the data year-to-year by type of donor, by the types of gifts they made... but when I charted the data by the circumstances of how we asked them, an important story practically leaped off the page at me: last year's events had been hugely successful, and this year's lagged far behind - but we had made up that gap entirely in personal face-to-face asks. It was a story that mattered for two reasons: first off, it was something I could show the gift officers that energized them and made them feel like their efforts had paid off. But it was important in its own right to know - our approach had changed, and it had a dramatic effect on our donors. Rather than assuming that efforts hadn't changed things, we knew that we had strengthened one area dramatically and it was time to find ways to shore up the other area that had slipped.