How to help a group of teenagers to achieve a creative peak

Russian writer and teacher Dmitry Bykov shares his method of helping teenagers maximize their creative potential:

(Russian version) Есть два способа добиться от детей абсолютного творческого максимума: во-первых, умеренная невротизация (все зависит от вас, доверяем только вам, больше никто не справится и т.д.). Во-вторых — сопутствующее ей, идущее в ногу с ней повышение самооценки: вы лучшие, вы сможете, вас собрали не просто так.

(a shortened English version)

To get a peak creative performance from a group of teenagers, tell them:

- everything depends on you (the children); nobody else can do it.
- you are the best; it's no accident that we included you in this elite group.

Bykov's recommendation aims at producing among the group members a moderate level of neuroticism and raise their self esteem at the same time. We know from a recent study that elevated neuroticism helps increase creativity, by stimulating divergent thinking. Most likely, adding high self-esteem to the psychological mix  extends idea generation into the realm of "impossible", further increasing the divergence and extra effort.

Should work for adults too.

tags: psychology, creativity, brainstorming, divergent

Intuition: quick answers to wrong questions.

Poetry makes meanings jump at you because the poet makes an effort to split the verse in such a way as  to empasize his intentions. It is much more difficult to do this with prose. In this regard, ppt presentations are closer to poetry than to prose. This passage from Kahneman and Klein (2009) is important, so I'm going to rewrite it as poetry:

Attribute substitution has been described as
an automatic process.
It produces
intuitive judgments in which  

difficult question
is answered by substituting
for an easier one—

the essence of heuristic thinking (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002).

Of course, the mechanisms that produce
incorrect intuitions
will only operate in
the absence of skill.
If people have a skilled response to the task with which they are charged, they will apply their skill. But even

in the absence of skill
an intuitive response may come
to their minds.

The difficulty
is that people have
no way to know where their intuitions came from. 

There is no subjective marker
that distinguishes correct intuitions

from 

intuitions that are produced
by highly imperfect heuristics.

An important characteristic of intuitive judgments, which they share with perceptual impressions, is that 

a single response
initially comes to mind. 

Most of the time
we have to trust this first impulse,
and most of the time we are right or are able to make the necessary corrections if we turn out to be wrong, but 

high subjective confidence is
not a good indication
of validity (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1978). 

Checking
one’s intuition is
an effortful operation

of System 2, which people
do not always perform
—sometimes because

it is difficult
to do so and sometimes because 

they do not bother.

This is related to the question why creative thinking is slow thinking (you have to engage System 2) and why in a brainstorming sessions you never know what you missed with your solution.

tags: psychology, brainstorming, thinking, mind

Kahneman D., Klein G. 2009. Conditions for Intuitive Expertise. DOI: 10.1037/a0016755.

Trade-off of the Day: Creativity vs Self-Control

A few years ago there was a research article showing that simple walks in a park, sleeping, gardening, and meditation restore people's thinking and self-control abilities, while a walk on a busy street does not. The key to restorative brain activities is low requirements for attention.

Today’s world presents numerous challenges to maintaining one’s focus. It offers a plentiful supply of interesting but unimportant stimulation, whereas many important stimuli lack interest.


Thus, people must ignore much of what surrounds them. This act seems to require frontal and parietal brain mechanisms that mediate cognitive control and are susceptible to fatigue.


In order to replenish these resources, a person should engage in activities high in soft fascination that will activate involuntary attention in non-conflicting ways.


...what makes an environment restorative is the combination of attracting involuntary attention softly while at the same time limiting the need for directing attention.

Watching TV or browsing the web are not restorative activities because the media is designed to draw our attention.

Along the same lines, two days ago, NYT published a general interest article: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? Among other things, it talks about how our brain resources are depleted by attention-demanding tasks, with self-control being one of the more important ones.

Since problem-solving and willpower draw on the same resource, it probably makes sense that people come up with creative ideas, i.e. experience an aha moment, in soft fascination environments. How can we break the trade-off and improve our creativity? One way would be to routinize creative efforts, so that they require minimal involvement of will power. Another, would be to intersperse information acquisition (learning) or focused thinking/writing with low-attention activities, e.g. walking in a park, etc. One more, engage in free-form, divergent thinking "what if" exercises, e.g. "if we could solve any problem, which problem would be worth our blood, sweat, and tears?"


tags: creativity, psychology, trade-off, dilemma, separation, reverse brainstorm, brainstorming, control

How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming (part 3). concept diagram.

This diagram (from the electronic version of my upcoming book) shows the conceptual difference between Reverse Brainstorming (circled in red on the left) and Standard Brainstorming (in blue).

Traditional (standard) brainstorming starts with the assumption that the problem has already been selected. It's explicitly recommended that for a brainstorming session to be effective there should be a single well-defined problem for participants eventually to solve (by generating lots of ideas).

The trouble with this approach is that if a wrong problem is selected all ideas turn out to be ... well, not good at all. This happens not because the participants are not creative enough, but because a wrong approach is used for problem definition, which is a common occurrence in uncertain situations.

Reverse Brainstorming addresses this issue by making people starting earlier in the thought process, making sure the right problem is identified for solving.

tags: reverse brainstorm, brainstorming,  book, method,  course

Previous posts on Reverse Brainstorming Howto:
1. How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming.
2. It may look like this

½ + ½ > 1

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005.full DOI: 10.1126/science.1121629

Due to mind's relatively slow background information analysis processes, splitting an invention or a problem-solving session into two parts may help you come up with a better solution.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the “deliberation-without-attention” hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.

Dijksterhuis et al., On Making the Right Choice. Science 311 (5763): 1005-1007.

This approach is especially helpful when running a reverse brainstorming session on the first day and a problem-solving session on the next.

tags: creativity, mind, brain, brainstorming, reverse brainstorm, research, psychology, efficiency

Collective intelligence factor

Summary: for best results from creative group work, DO NOT compose the group randomly because it will negatively affect participants' performance. Unless, maybe, they happen to be socially sensitive to each other.
---

Having finished teaching my class at Stanford CSP, I'm back at blogging! Today's topic is a research paper in Science about Collective Intelligence. An excerpt from its abstract:

In two studies with 699 individuals, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group's performance on a wide variety of tasks. This "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

This is consistent with my experience moderating multiple brainstorms and invention sessions. The important lessons from the paper are:
a) random groups perform worse than individuals;
b) the group's social dynamics is more important than participants' intelligence;
c) having women in the group helps the dynamics.

Also note the type of tasks the researchers used for measuring performance:

Tasks included solving visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources.

From what I understand reading the paper's references, another task was:

to work on a creative, open-ended task together with their team members during a one-hour laboratory session. Specifically, they were asked to use a set of building blocks to build a house, garage, and swimming pool, which were scored according to a set of complex scoring criteria (see Appendix A). The scoring of the task was intentionally complex and devised to force trade-offs.

Working on open-ended problems is better than solving puzzles, but the approach still follows the good old path of standard engineering and management training practices where people take trade-offs for granted. As we know from the history of innovation, best solutions emerge when problem solvers break through trade-offs, which would impossible to re-create and measure in this type of experiments.

tags: trade-off, psychology, brainstorming, social, research

Evolution of the Hamburger.

I just finished reading The Hamburger, by Josh Ozersky, and wanted to capture key inventions and innovations in the evolution of this remarkable food item, which in many ways rhymes with the evolution of the Personal Computer.

- Ground meat on a bun instead of bread (fast food) - Walter Anderson, White Castle. p. 29
- Cooking process standardized across tens of restaurants to guarantee quality and sanitation of the food - Billy Ingram, White Castle. p. 30.

- Double-size burger ("Big Boy") - Bob Wian. p.46.

"...a bass player came in one night and asked for something different. Taking up the challenge, Wian took a sesame seed bun, sliced it in thirds, and proceeded to make the first designed double-decker hamburger. (This could never happen today, when all buns are presliced.)"

- Big Boy franchise - Bob Wian. p.48.

- US government gets into the burger picture, p. 91.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1946 did an inestimable service to the beef industry, and its tireless lobby, by decreeing that hamburger could contain only beef and beef fat—that even the slightest bit of pork or pork fat disqualified it from the dignity of being called hamburger. This was a decisive blow for the beef men in the eternal war against the pork men, since it meant that they had an effective monopoly on the most popular meat product in America.

- Large-scale, limited menu, continuous high-speed burger cooking and service operation; drive-in restaurant (social networking) - McDonald brothers. p.53.
- McDonald's franchise, with uniform cooking and service process - Ray Croc. p.58.
: a combination of conformity and enterprise:

"...it was a franchisee who invented the Big Mac, a fran- chisee who invented the Egg McMuffin, a franchisee who invented the point-of-sale protocol (“May I have your order, please?”). A franchisee invented Ronald McDonald! Franchisees have conceived and developed most of the marketing and product innovations that have propelled McDonald’s to fast-food supremacy." p. 64.

- McDonald's financial model: lease restaurant from a real estate owner, sub-lease to the franchisee at 40% markup, use as a financial leverage to enforce process conformity - Harry Sonnenborn. p.78.

"McDonald’s became what it is for two reasons. One, because it was the first and the best hamburger franchise restaurant, with the most far-sighted senior management. And two, because Harry Sonneborn figured out a way to finance a multibillion-dollar empire without cash, collateral, or even a significant show of profitability.
Sonneborn would frequently go so far as to tell investors that McDonald’s was a real estate company, not a hamburger company."

- Hamburger University, rigorous training for McDonald's franchise managers - Ray Croc. p. 78.

"...the system was invaluable. It made McDonald’s predictable and productive, and a veritable moneymaking machine in the best franchises."

- Fully automated broiled burger cooking ("insta-burger") - Burger King, p.98.
- "Whopper" - a large burger - Burger King, p. 99.

- Meal combo of soda, fries, and burger for one price - Burger Chief. p. 100.
- Automated conveyor-belt broiled hamburgers - Burger Chief. p. 101.
- Giveaway toy with a meal; movie tie-in (Star Wars in 1977) - Burger Chief. p.101.

- Global expansion of the franchise - McDonald's, p. 118.

- Drive-through window - Wendy's, p. 121.
- Half-pounder, three-quarters pounder, salads, and baked potatoes - Wendy's, p. 121

- The gourmet burger - various NY restaurants. p. 130.
 
To add the most recent developments,
- McCafe - "gourmet" coffee to compete with Starbucks - McDonalds
- a "social networking" burger recipe restaurant - 4food.com

tags: health, payload, finance, evolution, system, infrastructure, brainstorming, social, control, 10x

Creative thinking is slow thinking

Once again, our education and job experiences that emphasize timed tests and quick solutions during brainstorming sessions may hinder our creative abilities. Moreover, the education system may discriminate against creative students.
Here's some brain research evidence for that:

AS FAR as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.

Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

The volunteers' capacity for divergent thinking - a factor in creativity that includes coming up with new ideas - had already been tested. Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009818).

tags: creativity, science, brain, mind, education, brainstorming, distribution, biology

Use your head!

A wilder version of brainstorming:




tags: brainstorming, battle, video, youtube

One of many interesting insights from an "in vivo" experiment with the real-life scientific method:

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

It is a very difficult task indeed to recognize your own assumptions. That is why systematic methods-metaphors that force you to look at the situation from various perspectives often help us find novel solutions. My own role as a moderator during an ideation session is to shake people out of their normal ways of thinking.

tags: method, metaphor, creativity, example, book, brainstorming, magicians

William J. Bernstein in The Birth of Plenty:

Markets work best when all of the buyers and sellers of a particular item are confined to the same place at the same time. In such a situation, the pricing of that item becomes very "efficient", that is to say, everyone buys and sells at nearly the same price. (p. 43)

This is quite similar to the original brainstorming technique developed by Alex F.Osborn. He envisioned that during a brainstorming session people wouldn't go into analysis or problem solving right away. Rather, they would try to come up with as many ideas as possible in a judgment-free environment. Only later, when a good number of potential solutions is collected [or the time runs out], the same or a completely different group of people would do an evaluation session. As the result of the whole exercise, brainstormers would create a market for ideas and solutions.

Over time, the original brainstorming evolved into problem-solving meetings, and the free-wheeling idea market approach got lost along the way. Too many ideas, too little time.

"Neuroeconomics: cross-currents in research on decision-making" Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 10, Issue 3, March 2006, Pages 108-116
Alan G. Sanfey, George Loewenstein, Samuel M. McClure, Jonathan D. Cohen

psychologists make between automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are fast and efficient, can often be carried out in parallel, but are highly specialized for domain-specific operations and therefore relatively inflexible. They are thought to reflect the operation of highly over-trained (and, in some cases, possibly ‘hardwired’) mechanisms. However, humans also have a capability for controlled processing underlying our higher cognitive faculties. Controlled processes are highly flexible, and thus able to support a wide variety of goals, but are relatively slow to engage and rely on limited capacity mechanisms – that is, they can support only a small number of pursuits at a time.

Creative thinking and problem solving when they lie outside of domain-specific expertise is a slow process. As G.Altshuller used to say, "Good thinking is slow thinking." This may also relate to the social facilitation effect studied extensively by Robert Zajonc.

From this perspective, effective brainstorm is an information exchange exercise rather than a problem solving session.