Creating the right atmosphere
Editor’s note: Sharon Livingston is with The Looking Glass, a Syosset, N.Y., focus group facility.
Suppose instead of viewing creativity as an accident, we looked at it as a process. What if we viewed creative insight and invention as the products of a series of smaller and less spectacular combinations and reintegrations of concepts or perceptual patterns? And instead of thinking of ingenious ideas as magically formed, what if we viewed them as a result of a concrete process? Remember, magic is only technology before its time!
While perhaps less romantic, the benefit of such reductionism is that we can then study the various elements of the creative process and manipulate them to increase innovation and inventive thinking.
There is vast literature on the facilitation of creative problem-solving. What most all experiments have in common is an emphasis on the optimal structuring of the environment. These surroundings, which will be outlined shortly, induce the most effective, most productive emotional states for creative thinking. When combined with carefully chosen, evocative stimulus input, these conditions make novel insights inevitable.
Relaxed setting
A creative environment most importantly should be structured as a kind of a holding tank - a relaxed setting which fosters a sense of security and acceptance of all emotions and ideas. This safe climate encourages participants to explore the undercurrent recesses and grottos of their minds and to take the risks of meshing unusual connections.
Ideally, the creative session is conducted off campus, away from the interruptions of everyday business life like phone calls and meetings. Participants are encouraged to dress casually. Off-campus meetings have the additional benefit of novel stimulation, which leads to novel associations, the building blocks of creative production. While hotels often offer rooms and suites for these purposes, facilities known as conference centers tend to be more knowledgeable about the wants and needs of creative teams and therefore better equipped to provide the proper supports.
The walls in the creative environment should welcome the posting of large sheets of easel paper to be tacked up with pushpins or masking tape. This lets people know that many suggestions will be expected, welcomed, and proudly displayed around the room. There should be several flip charts, equipped with markers in a number of colors to highlight unique points as well as different parts of the process. An abundance of colorful paper should be distributed around the table with a variety of writing implements in hues of the rainbow to accelerate unusual connections, even in the actual inscription of ideas.
Plenty of satisfying but light food should be available, particularly warm liquids. Generating ideas requires much more energy than most people think. It’s not unusual for team members to leave a day of sparking ideas feeling happy and exhausted. Individuals have more energy to work with their minds when their stomachs are well-nourished. Along the same lines, lavatories should be close by. While it’s important to schedule a number of stretch breaks throughout the day, it’s also a good idea to be close to the washrooms so a participant can duck out and return quickly. Lastly, people should be asked periodically throughout the session about the comfort level of the room temperature. If the temperature is not optimal, it should err on the side of being a little bit cool to keep people awake (remember, the goal is relaxed wakefulness).
Foster ingenuity
Besides structuring the environment properly, there are several attitudes which must be modeled by the leaders in order to foster ingenuity. Before discussing these, let’s briefly talk a little more about a few of the ways we might define creativity.
As you already know, we see it as a process:
First, we have to confront the conflict of wanting to hold onto, but needing to let go of, the ideas that have already been considered.
Second, it’s a systematic creation of confusion and encouraging of oxymorons and other ideas which at first are apparently unrelated.
And finally it’s the reintegration and restructuring of thoughts and feelings into original invention.
To accomplish this during the working program there are several postures that must be adopted by the leaders and emulated by team members. In order to bolster the generation of great ideas, research shows agreement by experts in the field on several dimensions.
The team should:
- defer judgment and accept all ideas until the assigned period of evaluation;
- go for quantity;
- invite wild and crazy reveries;
- build on and modify each other’s ideas; and
- enlist unconscious processes.
The most important and most empirically validated of these attitudes is that of deferred judgment. This is because (and many may disagree) there is actually no such thing as a bad idea. There are only imperfect ideas. Every idea is the seed for a geometric progression of associations, any one of which may hold the key to the solution sought after. Negative connotations can be reversed by associating antonyms, or finding a synonym which filters out the problem connotation. Additionally, prematurely judging an idea not only deprives one of the idea’s progeny, but of the rest of the group’s associations to that idea.
In addition to good leadership, a structured environment, and proper attitude, there are a multitude of exercises designed to facilitate what is referred to in psychoanalysis as a combination of both primary and secondary process. In our firm’s creative problem-solving approach, these range from forced associations, metaphorical interpretations, and improvisational techniques borrowed from the theater and behavioral sciences, to synethesia - the forced representation of a stimulus presented in one medium, such as visual, in another, such as olfactory. For example: What does a sunset smell like? How about when you see it descending over the Grand Canyon? What if you were sitting on a deck overlooking Long Island Sound? Or standing a top of snowy Mount Everest?
The next time you look at an abstract painting, listen to how it sounds. Get a sense of how the artist felt when planning the composition. Was he tired, joyful, annoyed, bored, making a joke? What facets of the shape, line hues and tones told you that?
Divergent thinking
Another concept central to creativity is that of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking involves the suspension of logical analysis for a period of time in order to get a view of all the possibilities. It is simple to describe, yet hard to accomplish. We are all accustomed to organizing our thoughts into neat little units. Even as you consider what is being said here, you are organizing the sentences into larger arguments, relating those arguments to what was said before, and trying to anticipate where the line of reasoning is going. This is adaptive; the world would be a frightening place if we were unable to anticipate at all.
The need for anticipation and order in the world must be suspended for a while in order to engage in divergent thinking. This is why the environment and attitudes described above are so important, as are leaders who are comfortable with the confusion and anxiety generated during the divergent thinking stage of the session. It is always helpful to remember the ancient Chinese adage, “Out of chaos comes opportunity.”
Better ideas
There is one more important element - expectations. Over and over again, people told to expect they will be exceptionally creative turn out to produce more and better ideas than those who are not given this mindset. In the creative session, this is accomplished primarily by an extremely confident, experienced leader who encourages an atmosphere in which there is little room for modesty. As Muhammad Ali once said: “I am the greatest! I said that even before I knew I was!”