Jonah Lehrer offers an epidemiologist view of creativity starting from the neurons in the brain and ending with strong praise for the creativity produced from high density interactions with a wide variety of people and places. He credits the compulsory military service of the Israeli army with the recent high tech boom in that country. The high density of the population in the country provides for the rapid exchange of ideas. The mixing in the military allows for collaboration between people of different backgrounds. This can be achieved at an office by having single central locations for restrooms and cafeterias.
The central theme of the book is that creativity is hard work. It requires different parts of the brain for different segments of the creative process. We need to hit the wall and experience the frustration of a seemly unsolvable problem. At this point we can back off and let the right hemisphere do its work. The right hemisphere provides the flash of incite when we are calm relaxed almost day dreaming. The left hemisphere and portions of the prefrontal cortex are needed to provide the critique and the grit needed to perfect and complete the creation.
He offers a well referenced criticism of the inadequacies of brainstorming. People's brains shut down when they can not criticize or evaluate the contribution of another person. The process works much better if each individual person contributes separately and others critique the idea often producing a "yes and" solution found in the discipline of improv comedy. We recently used this tactic when doing a job hazard analysis for cooling tower workers at the U of MN. Each person at the table contributed one idea and people were encouraged to discuss and build off of the contribution. This process is used by Pixar animation when they review the previous day's work.
Successful projects work best when there is some degree of familiarity between the people on the project and there are a few new contributors brought into keep the collaboration fresh. He illustrates this with an extensive analysis of successful vs. unsuccessful Broadway productions. I've found this works by having different age groups and people with different levels of experience working on a problem.
Jonah mentions InnoCentive as an excellent website that rewards creative problem solvers. Most creative solutions arrive from people working at the edge of their expertise. The individuals know enough about the problem to be able to help but aren't locked into the orthodoxy of the discipline which prevents them from coming up with a creative solution.
Designing cities, workplaces, immigration policies and research grants with the expressed purpose of maximizing creativity is part of the designing an environment where creativity flourishes. He advocates developing a support structure for creativity similar to the support structure for athletics in the United States. He advocates HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) grants over NIH grants because they produce more fundamental breakthroughs. The HHMI grants also produce more failures and we need to accept that risk.
Creation is maximized when there if a free flow and mixing of ideas. Non-compete clauses in corporations kill innovation and allow the corporations engaging in it to become insular and die slow deaths. He compares the closed East Coast corporate culture of Wang Computers and similar companies to the more open corporate cultures of Silicon Valley California.
 |
| Summary of the book from Collectivenext - http://collectivenext.com/blog/transcribe-live-lab-1 |
How Creativity Works -Jonah Leher -1 min.
No comments:
Post a Comment