Continual Innovation

I live in a world that exposes me to some of the – in theory at least – most creative minds on the planet. For this I feel extremely fortunate. Or rather, ‘mostly fortunate’. I say this simply because I’ve begun to grow to be acutely aware that some of the individuals (insert image of drum-banging ‘creativity consultant’ here) that purport to be the most creative are actually amongst the least creative individuals I’ve ever met. For some time the dawning has caused me a deal of strife: how can people who earn their living by teaching folks to be creative turn out to be so un-creative? As is so usually the case, the problem centres around a poor definition of what we mean when we talk about ‘creativity’.

My five year old niece was, in classical terms, ‘being creative’ when she found a new location to store 1 of her crayons. The fact that she subsequently spent four hours in the Casualty department at the local hospital having it removed was a pretty strong hint that, though it certainly came into the category of ‘novel’, it wasn’t a especially successful answer to the crayon-storage difficulty. At least in terms of, I’ll bet she’ll by no means do it again. So, we may possibly ask, has she now learned to be less creative as a result of the experience?

The question is an essential one because there is an unfortunate modern trend in which any suggestion that 1 individual is much more or much less anything than any person else is deemed politically incorrect. Although it may possibly be the case that everyone is born with exactly the identical creative possible (‘nature’), it is surely also true that the manner in which we are raised (‘nurture’) plays a substantial role in whether or not a person is viewed as really ‘creative’. This write-up is about the fight between nature and nurture, but also, far more importantly about the want not just for ‘creativity’ in the classic interpretation of the word, but rather for ‘effective creativity’ – creativity that delivers a new and demonstrably helpful outcome rather than merely a new outcome.

Our fifteen year programme of analysis into ‘effective creativity’ (also known as ‘innovation’) has revealed a number of critical insights into the creative method. From that study we see a require to separate two essential aspects of intelligence: firstly there is what we may possibly think of as our ‘creative intelligence’ second is the much more traditional interpretation of the word, which we may define as ‘knowledge intelligence’. In basic terms, ‘knowledge intelligence’ is how much stuff we know, and thus how well we perform in school exams and general knowledge quizzes.

Our hypothesis is that, as we all live our lives there is an innate transfer of intelligence from one of these types to the other:

Figure 1: ‘Creative’ Versus ‘Knowledge’ Intelligence

Thus, when we are born, we are all fundamentally born with lots of unconnected neurons inside our brain. Because they are unconnected, we have a lot of, a lot of methods in which they can be connected. Our creative potential – and consequently, we propose, our creative intelligence – is, in this state, at its peak. By no means again will we expertise such plasticity and flexibility. And a very good thing too, because, as we rapidly discover, having a particular quantity of knowledge about the world is useful for our survival (‘don’t put your hand in the fire’). Certain neurons get connected to others and get reinforced into immovable, concrete pathways as our knowledge increases. But there is a definite trade-off occurring when this essential advance happens: the a lot more knowledge we acquire, the more neural pathways we make rigid, and hence the much less creative prospective we have…

…until, ultimately, after, say, finishing a PhD in ‘high Nusselt Number, particle-laden supersonic aerodynamics’ (insert image of one of my finest buddies here) we have an awful lot of actually useful specialised knowledge and quite little potential to produce new supersonic aerodynamic solutions.

The knowledge-versus-creative-potential trade-off is inherent. Inherent, but, fortunately, not unsolvable. ‘Effective Creativity’, then, is about solving the contradiction:

Figure 2: Solving The Creative-Knowledge Intelligence Contradiction

And it is a contradiction that genuinely has to be resolved: the designers of Concorde, for example, were stuck when it came to decreasing noise because their excess of domain knowledge prevented them from seeing out of the box. Conversely, although I’m pretty confident my niece would be excellent at generating brand spanking new ideas for a supersonic aeroplane, I don’t feel any of us will be setting foot inside one of them anytime soon. What is necessary here and everywhere else are techniques and indicates of thinking that successfully combine the greatest attributes of both high knowledge and high creative intelligence.

This article is initial and foremost about identifying a excellent contradiction to solve. Being aware of the (inherent, bear in mind) trade-off between creative and knowledge intelligences represents a solid step towards generating viable – ‘effective’! – solutions. But then again, articles that don’t give any type of remedy are often criticised for leaving folks hanging in a don’t-know-what-to-do-next no-man’s land.

The central difficulty that now leaves us with is that an actual answer to the difficulty depends on the actual context present. For a start, we know from our research that it is extremely connected to Spiral Dynamics and the Level at which a person is thinking.

That problem aside (!), let’s have a fast look at what the Contradiction Matrix has to say on the subject, and let me take the example of a project I worked on with a group this month on stacking and un-stacking sheets of paper.

Here was my attempt to get to the root contradiction, which for me gets us proper into a neuron-level look at the brain and the simultaneous dilemma of wanting both fixed and ‘plastic’ neural connections:

Figure three: Mapping The Knowledge-v-Creative Intelligence Contradiction

And here’s how I mapped the issue onto the latest version of our Contradiction Matrix tool, now a tool containing over three.2 million data-points relating to how other folks have already discovered step-change solutions to conflict and trade-off troubles like ours:

Figure 4: The Knowledge-v-Creative Intelligence Contradiction On The Matrix

Available time in the session was limited (we were there to generate answers to the actual difficulty not indulge me in my desire to solve a creativity contradiction!), the search for solutions was limited to the ‘most likely’ suggested Principles. As it occurs, the really initial one performed the trick we were searching for…

…a trick that represents a subtle variation on what SI is attempting to do all the time. My ‘Intermediary’ in this case was asking the team with all of their collective knowledge about stacking and un-stacking paper (which, across the groups totaled around 100 person- years) to aid me with the problem of picking up single sheets of aluminium in an automotive body-panel press shop. All I had completed here was give the group an analogous problem (‘separate sheet’), but 1 that deliberately forced them to feel out of their usual box, due to the fact all of the solutions they had traditionally utilized to solve the paper version of the dilemma no longer worked. At the precise identical time, the team were now both domain professionals and domain newcomers. And within thirty minutes we had a host of previously unimaginedsolutions to the aluminium difficulty, numerous of which, later on had an awful lot to tell us about solving our actual paper issue. And, hey presto, a definite step towards ‘effective’ creativity. At least for this group.

The – your – real challenge now is to solve the same (inherent, keep in mind) conflict in your next issue solving context.