Ramblemuse Touch Points

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’
— Isaac Asimov.

This piece got its immediate stimulus when I read a recent Opposed Systems Design (OSD) post on “Watts, intuition, ‘ahas’ and go”. What caught my eye and mind was the distinction being made between intuitive responses and the “aha” moments in which a perceptual change occurs.

As mentioned in OSD, the concept of intuitive responses have been well characterized by Gary Klein’s field-based research presented in Sources of Power. Klein attributes much of intuitional decision making to two factors: unconscious recognition of a pattern similar to one previously experienced, and perceptional changes that allow the experienced practitioner to see situational changes and anomalies missed by the novice. A course of action is not chosen because of rational comparison between options, but because a pattern is unconsciously recognized that also yields a workable course of action.

In Think Again, Sidney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell note that, while such Recognition Primed Decisions are most often correct, they can occasionally lead to bad decisions. Such a “one-plan-at-a-time” decision process can exclude better solutions if the situational recognition isn’t correct. The three authors attribute a number of inherently bad decsions to the inability of later cross-checks to catch and stop an initially faulty intuitive decision. In some cases, the failure to stop a bad decision stems from the strength of the associated emotional tagging.

Now onto the second part of ‘aha’ moments. A bit of serendipty, a lot of hard work and background knowledge, and the flexibility of perspective to notice something unexpected are thought to be major factors in creativity and innovation. A number of accidental inventions are highlighted in the Smithsonian article Eureka!, including the discovery of Teflon® by Roy Plunkett and Post-It® notes by Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry. As with my opening quote by Isaac Asimov, however, most of these discoveries didn’t start with “I found it”, but with “Huh! That’s funny”. It was the experience and flexibility of mind to both notice that something unexpected had occurred and not to simply discount it or toss it out as a failure that resulted in innovation.

Back in the unnetworked year of 1983, I had read (and saved) a paper copy of “Profile of the Creative Individual”, Part I and Part II, in which Eugene Raudsepp looked at the personal characteristics associated with creativity. Among his thoughts was the extent to which we hammer creativity out of people.

Perhaps the chief danger of specialization, however, is that it emphasizes and demands strict conformity to the accepted dogmas and conventions of a field. Learning to comply with the established dogmas starts early in a person’s educational career. By the time he is ready to graduate into original production, he frequently finds that he cannot free himself from its bondage.

Relatively few individuals find the courage to tackle new problems in a new, unconventional manner; only a few transcend their subjugation to the traditional and jump beyond the orthodox to original viewpoints and approaches. The renowned physicist and father of operationalism, P.W. Bridgman, advises that the most important thing for the creative peson to remember is merely “to do his utmost with his mind, no holds barred.”

It may be that the question is not so much how we train creativity into people as it is how we stop early training that hammers it out of them.

Jerry Hirschberg, in The Creative Priority, talks about four creative themes: polarities, unprecedented thinking, boundaries, and synthesis. I’ve found his explanation of the latter two, in particular, to be a strong statement of creative requirements.

Boundaries are the lines between disconnected planes of thought. making them, clarifying them, and protecting them have been a principal preoccupation of business as well as education and society. Creative activity, however, does not confine itself to in-bounds play. It comes to life at the edges, whether by blurring, abrading, overlapping or breaking through the partitions. The creative priority embraces and utilizes the chasms and the barriers that separate departments, disciplines, cultures, personalities, and zones of responsibility.

It is perhaps the last theme, synthesis, that is most lacking in corporate thinking. Synthesis is the principal impulse of the act of creation. In a world obsessed with analysis, with the taking apart of things and issues into their component parts, creativity is the impulse to integrate, unify, and bring together. It tolerates (and at the early stages even prefers) higher levels of disorder and disintegration so that it can reorder at newer and higher levels of integration.

Hirshberg’s comments bear a striking resemblance to ideas developed by the late military strategist John Boyd. In The Strategic Game of ? and ?, Boyd used a snowmobile as a metaphor for destruction and synthesis. Skis are pulled off of the ski slope, an outboard motor is taken from a motorboat, handlebars are grabbed from a bicycle, and the idea of rubber treads is taken from toy tractors and tanks. Reassembled, they become a snowmobile. In terms of a strategic application, in The John Boyd Roundtable Boyd is noted to have written:

A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.

A winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.

Finally, I’ll simply add a couple of additional resources I’ve found to be insightful in looking for the sources of creativity and the change of perspective (in many cases also a change in mode from the symbolic/verbal to the visual/spatial) that lead to those moments of ‘aha’.

• James L. Adam’s Conceptual Blockbusting
• Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art