Flash of insight moments often materialize unexpectedly “through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem.”
Researchers have found that sudden insights “are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning.”
It seems that our brains may be the most active when our minds are wandering, when we’re just daydreaming, and we’ll spend maybe around a third of our day daydreaming.
Daydreaming may be a more creative state than an active, focused, and methodical reasoning state as the unfocused mind may more readily allow new ideas and different, unexpected associations between ideas.
EEG recordings show a distinctive burst of gamma waves from the right hemisphere of the brain one-third of a second before a person consciously experienced their moment of insight.
No one really knows why problems sometimes trigger an insight or what makes one person more inclined to one and someone else not, but a prepared mind does favor flashes on insight.
People in a positive mood were more likely to experience a flash of insight.
The importance of daydreaming was also written about in a book I’ve referenced before in podcast episodes, The Creative Spirit, by Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman, and Michael Ray, in the section titled “Perchance to Daydream.” They wrotethat daydreaming and relaxation is useful in the creative process, but it can be hard to get away from other people trying to control your attention, either at school, work, or even just watching television. It’s important to get away from the noise, turn off the TV or radio, relax without intereference, and just let your mind wander.
In the current issue of Inc Magazine, there’s an article on how a company got its employees to come up with product ideas: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/managing-unleashing-employee-creativity.html.
The company first tried to get emloyees to offer suggestions on the company’s wiki and on forms in their break room, but when that didn’t produce the results they desired, they held a company-wide competition which did produce an idea pipeline. The groundrules they established were:
Make participation mandatory as ideas can come from even the unlikiest of employees.
Pick a slow time of the year to minimize lost productivity.
Assemble small, diverse teams of employees, ideally from different parts of the company. They created teams of three people by randomly picking names out of a bowl.
Keep the rules of the contest short and simple while providing guidelines to keep the contestants on track.
Give specific feedback, explaining why each idea works or doesn’t work, while emphasizing their positive attributes.
Let the contestants vote for their favorite submission and reward the winners with a small prize (e.g., a $100 gift card for the team to share) and lots of recognition.
Establish a system for vetting the ideas thoroughly after the contest.
This episode discusses the “dark side” of creativity–things to be aware of and cautious about. Everything we do in life has risks and rewards, and creativity is no different. Things that potentially have the highest highs carry the highest risks and therefore the possibility of the lowest lows.
Creativity is morally neutral; it is neither inherently moral or immoral. It is how you use it that gives it its moral character. Morality is usually subjective, depending on the person making the judgment and when they make it.
Some possible dark sides, or down sides, of creativity or of being creative:
Collaborating with the wrong person. Be careful who you collaborate with and how you collaborate with them. The podcast episode offers some suggestions on how to avoid partering with the wrong person:
Look for obvious red flags: do they have a history of being active, do they have basic business behavior, do they network, do they have the energy to contribute, are they overly paranoid or defensive.
Do a background check and a credit check.
Use the services of a good business attorney (not some other kind of attorney) to get a buy-sell agreement in place, corporate by-laws indicating what the expectations of everyone is, etc.
When in doubt, just don’t do it. Other opportunities will come.
Working when tired, creating more problems than you solve.
Drug use to be creative, whether sleeping pills or other drugs.
Being open to bad or harmful ideas.
Being affected by over-negative or over-positive emotions. Be careful of “Compliance Practitioners” who try to manipulate you.
Lack of critical thinking. It’s good to inhibit critical thinking for creativity purposes, just don’t turn it off permanently.
References used in this episode:
Leaders, by Richard Nixon, page 330 on leadership and morality.
SCAMPER is a tool to help you think about manipulating your subject in various ways. It can be used by yourself as well as with a group. You can use it, for example, when brainstorming to stimulate new ideas.
The various techniques aren’t necessarily exclusive of each other — a substitution might also be a modification, for example — and the techniques can be used together, for example, applying a combination idea along with an elimination idea.
To use SCAMPER, first isolate your subject, e.g., by stating the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. Then go through the SCAMPER list and ask questions about your subject.
For what can be substituted, think about things such as: process, procedure, rule, person or people, place, time, color, approach, part, shape, texture, sound, smell, name, people’s feelings or attitudes towards the subject, power, force.
For combination, think about things such as: what ideas, purposes, or parts can be combined or merged, what assortments, materials, people, or appeals can be combined; can a blend be created with something else that will create additional uses; can different talents be combined.
For adaptation, think of such things as: what else is like your subject, but in a different context; what other ideas are suggested; how can circumstances be adapted to; what ideas can be incorporated, what can be copied or imitated, who can be emulated, what different contexts can the subject be put in to.
For magnification, think of such things as: what can be made larger, extended, exaggerated, overstated; can more time be added; can it be made higher, longer, stronger, more frequent, thicker; can additional features or value be added; can something be duplicated.
For minification, think of such things as: what can be made smaller, more restricted, understated, streamlined; can something need less time, go slower, be made lighter, can it be made lower in height, weaker, less frequent; can a feature be removed or less value added and have the thing be used for a new purpose; how can costs, time, effort, or waste be minimized.
For modification, think of such things as: what can be altered for the better; can the meaning, color, motion, shape, package be changed; can the name change; can some plan or process be modified.
For putting to other uses, think of such things as: what else can the product, process, or idea can be used for; what new ways can the thing can be used as it already is, or any other uses if the thing is modified somehow; how can it be used by people other than those it was originally intended for, or by a child, an older person, or a person with disabilities; what other markets or industries could it be used by, perhaps with modifications.
For elimination, think of such things as: what’s not necessary, what can be omitted, divided, split-up, separated into different components; what rules or processes can be eliminated; how can it be simplified; what can be removed without altering its basic function; how can waste be eliminated.
For reversing, think of such things as: what are the opposites of the idea; what are the negatives; can you turn something around or backwards or upside down; can roles be reversed; can something unexpected be done; what if the subject was used for the exact opposite of what it was intended for.
For rearranging, think of such ideas as: what ways can another arrangement be better; what parts can be interchanged; can another pattern or layout or sequence be created; can the pace or schedule of something be changed.
In podcast episode 2, I discussed how creativity can be thought of as a “flash of insight” (a moment when a creative thought occurs; the ability to think of a new, original, innovative thought) as well as a process, in which the flash of insight is one step in the process.
The June 2008 issue of Inc Magazine had two articles, Making Inspiration Routine, by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan, which is more about creativity as a process, and How the Creative Stay Creative, by Leigh Buchanan, which is more about how to help those flashes of insight more likely to happen.
Look for an underserved market. Segmenting your market can be a creative exercise itself. Try to identify a segment that is rarely treated as a segment.
Use social networks to bring in ideas, as opposed to just using them to push out marketing messages.
Brainstorm with employees’ network members to generate ideas; the more diverse the members the better. Promising ideas are flushed, written up, and submitted by a pair of employees who team up for collaboration on the idea.
Ideas are formally evaluated based on their projected revenue and profit goals.
For ideas that are chosen to go forward with, the ideas are prototyped and tested with the employees’ social networks.
As the company grows, the innovation process scales upwards, e.g., with additional training on the creative process, hiring of more creative people, team structure, feedback.
In the How The Creative Stay Creative Article, Inc gives some insight on how top innovation consultants stay creative:
Get multicultural
Encourage risky behavior
Provide lots of free time to think
Hire people with good problem solving skills and who are open to criticism
Have a way for employees to share their ideas
Bring in outside experts to get their perspectives
Be very flexible in how a team organizes itself and how it operates
The June 2008 issue of Inc Magazine had an article, The Customer is the Company, about Threadless, a multi-million dollar tee-shirt company that has attracted venture capital and has ideas for expanding into other products. Threadless maintains an on-line community where users can submit their tee-shirt designs, rate others’ designs, and of course buy shirts. The people whose designs are chosen to be printed win prizes.
Collaborating with others is a fundamental principle of creativity. In this blog, you’ll find many references to this — just click on the tags “Brainstorming”, “Decision Making”, “Diversity”, and “Innovation”, for a sample.
Threadless is a great example of this, where the “customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting.”
This is also an example of Creativity as a Process, where Threadless’s process is maintaining the on-line community, and having the community members submit and choose the designs to be printed.
Engage employees from all departments in brainstorming sessions. I addressed this in the episode on brainstorming.
Encourage and enable employees to pursue outside interests. This was touched on in the episode on leadership.
Create an inspiring work space. This was mentioned a bit in the brainstorming episode in relation to the environment for the brainstorming session. And of course, having an inspiring work space in general helps spur creativity.
Fund extracurricular projects or classes. Related to encouraging and enabling employees to have outside interests.
Lower cubicle walls. This is similar to the traditional Japanese model where there are no cubicles, where peoples’ desks are just put together in a large room. The idea here is that it helps foster teamwork. (I would note that’s it’s also nice to have a quiet, private place to work.)
Mind mapping is a creativity drawing technique that’s used to capture and organize ideas and the relationships between the ideas related to some central theme.
A mind map helps you visualize the challenge at hand: some problem you’re trying to solve, some plan you’re trying to develop, something you’re trying to understand better or look for new ideas for. It helps you formulate and remember things to do. It may be used as-is for remembering and organizing things, or it can be used as the basis for other things, like to-do lists, or a more formal type of plan, like a project management plan or a marketing. Mind mapping can be used in problem solving, decision making, and writing. You can do mind mapping alone or with other people in a collaborative brainstorming session.
The FOXNews.com article ‘Audio Aquarium’ Technology Helps Blind ‘See’ Fish writes about how scientists at Georgia Tech have created an automated music generation program that creates music based on the size, color, position, and speed of fish in an aquarium tank so that the visually impaired can enjoy the aquarium. They’re now trying to get their invention in other aquariums and zoos. I just thought that was very creative.
