Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Creativity Templates – 1
I’m pretty good at leading brainstorming sessions. I can get people involved, gin up the excitement, and lead a rollicking session. They’re a lot of fun. But are they productive?
Traditional brainstorming techniques derive from the concepts of free association and divergent thinking which, as Wikipedia notes, “… is a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.” By exploring many different options, we may come up with something useful.
At the very least, it sounds inefficient – like the random programming of computers. Indeed, I rarely find useful ideas in traditional brainstorming sessions. A session may generate a lot of ideas but many of them of them are either trite or just plain silly.
So I was pleased to find a set of “creativity templates” in an article published in 1999 by Jacob Goldenburg, David Mazursky, and Sorin Solomon of the Jerusalem Scool of Business Administration.
The article investigates high quality advertisements. Do they have common features (templates) and can we use those commonalities to create better ads? The authors studied 200 award-winning ads and identified six basic templates (and several sub-templates). The researchers then compared the award-winning ads (let’s call it Group 1) to two other groups:
- Group 2 — 200 ads that had been selected for The One Show Album, a book of well-respected ads. Though selected for the album, these ads had not won other awards.
- Group 3 – 200 ads selected from the same publications and the same product categories as Groups 1 and 2, but that had not been selected for a collection and had not won awards.
Independent judges could classify 89% of the Group 1 ads into one of the six templates. Of the Group 2 ads, 50% used one of the templates. In Group 3, only 2.5% of the ads used one of the templates. So, the templates correlate to higher quality ads.
The researchers then tested whether their insights could be used to create new ads. They established three separate “creative teams” and asked each to create ads for fictional products. The teams were:
- Team 1 – “… was requested to generate ads based only on a brief (without additional training)…”
- Team 2 – received the same briefs as Team 1 but was also taught classic brainstorming techniques, including free association, before generating ads.
- Team 3 – also received the same briefs but was trained to use the creativity templates before generating ads.
Twenty participants were randomly assigned to the three teams and received the designated training. Each group then generated ads for several product categories.
The ads thus produced were then randomized and evaluated in a number of ways. The researchers recruited judges who did not know the objectives of the study and who used well-established criteria for advertising quality.
The findings were quite straightforward. “First, ‘template training’ was found to be superior to ‘no training’ and ‘free association” training and in all the comparisons pertaining to … ad quality measures. … In all cases, template training was superior to training in free association.”
Additionally, the research cast doubt on the efficacy of the free association method used by Team 2. “No clear indication was found that the free association method heightens creativity or brand attitude.” In other words, my frustration with brainstorming may well be justified – it doesn’t increase creativity.
So what are the six templates? We’ll get to that tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Super Sad Clockwork Orange
What would happen if we mashed up Super Sad True Love Story and A Clockwork Orange?
Published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange was set in the not-so-distant future when a gang composed of Alex and his droogs (friends) could wreak ultra-violence all about them. Super Sad True Love Story, published in 2010, was set in a “near-future dystopian New York … dominated by media and retail.” Could they be the same story?
I read A Clockwork Orange in college and re-read it last year when the 50th anniversary edition came out (with the missing last chapter). The author, Anthony Burgess, worried that a novel about the future would age badly if he used contemporary language. Just imagine reading about mods and rockers flipping you the bird while shouting, Climb it, Tarzan. It’s so 60’s
So Burgess famously invented a language – called Nadsat – that included roughly 600 words derived from Russian. Droogs are friends, a britva is a blade or razor, chepooka is nonsense, devotchka is a girl, polezny is useful, rot is a mouth, zheena is a wife, and horrorshow is cool, great, or super. It takes a little while to get used to Nadsat but, once you do, it flows easily.
I re-read A Clockwork Orange because I wanted to see how it had held up. Did Burgess’s trick work? Did Nadsat still sound futuristic? I have to say that it did; it still seemed to be a future language in an undefined but somewhat familiar landscape.
While the language held up, everything else seemed so 60’s. At one point, Alex and his droogs invade a house where an author has nearly finished typing a novel (called A Clockwork Orange). The gang seizes the typescript and shreds it in front of the author. It’s the only copy. The work is forever lost. But wait … a typewriter in the not-so-distant future? How lame is that? The language worked but the technology forecast didn’t.
Gary Shteyngart, the author of Super Sad True Love Story, may have the opposite problem, which is why a mash-up might work. I got to thinking of this when I read Shteyngart’s article, “O.K., Glass” in a recent issue of The New Yorker. The article recounts Shteyngart’s adventures as he wanders around New York wearing Google Glasses. (Shteyngart is one of the Google Glass Explorers, who are sometimes known as Glassholes).
Shteyngart uses his Glass experience to ruminate on Super Sad True Love Story. He notes, for instance that he set the novel in the near future because “…setting [it] in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed … shortsighted.”
Shteyngart is addressing the same problem as Burgess: how do you keep a novel fresh? Burgess approached it through language, Shteyngart through technology.
As Shteyngart admits, he didn’t solve the problem of predicting the far future. A lot of what he wrote has already come to pass. He writes that he feels like a “…very limited Nostradamus, the Nostradamus of two weeks from now.”
Still, I submit that Shteyngart did a better job on future technology than Burgess, while Burgess did a better job on future language. That’s why I’m proposing a mashup. Burgess died in 1993 so any mashup will have to come from Shteyngart. Plus, Shteyngart was born in Russia so Nadsat should be a snap for him. So what do you say, Gary? Would you give us a mashup of two great novels? It would be totally horrorshow.
Was Leonardo Da Vinci Innovative?
Let’s tweak it, Leo.
We all know that Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius. But was he innovative?
The question draws a distinction between invention and innovation and between creativity and construction. As Wikipedia puts it, “[Da Vinci] conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime….”
In other words, Leonardo had great ideas but many of them were never implemented. So, were they innovations?
That leads to another question: why did Britain lead the way in the Industrial Revolution? Other countries – notably France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden – had great universities and well established scientists and laboratories. Why did Britain create the industrial surge while others followed?
That’s the question that Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr address in their working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Their short answer: Britain didn’t have more geniuses than other countries, but it did have more tweakers and implementers.
Meisenzahl and Mokyr argue that Britain certainly had its fair share of “hall-of-fame” inventors. But many of those genius ideas would not have been turned into practical innovations if not for “…a group of skilled workmen who possessed the training and natural dexterity to … carry out the ‘instructions’ contained in the … blueprints, … build the parts … with very low degrees of tolerance, and … fill in the blanks when the instructions were inevitably incomplete.”
Meisenzahl and Mokyr try to distinguish between tweakers and implementers. Tweakers “…improved and debugged an existing invention.” Implementers were “…skilled workmen capable of building, installing, operating and maintaining, new and complex equipment.”
Meisenzahl and Mokyr identified 758 men and one woman (Elenor Coade “who invented a new process for making artificial stone…”) whom they could classify as tweakers or implementers. Each person in the database was born between 1660 and 1830. Meisenzahl and Mokyr studied the industries they worked in, what they did, how they were incented, and how they acquired their skills. Among their key findings:
- The apprenticeship system was critical – it produced not only knowledge but also the skill to produce finely tuned machines. It also provided talented youngsters with a stable environment while they acquired and honed their skills.
- Multiple incentives were available. Much has been made of the British patent system in spurring innovation. But the authors argue that a system of prizes was equally or more important. Organizations such as the Society of Arts offered prizes for the development of specific devices, such as a machine to manufacture lace. Many such prizes were awarded “on the condition … that no patent was taken out” – which allowed the innovation to spread more rapidly.
- A “mechanical culture” – the authors point out that, “The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the maturing of the Baconian program, which postulated that useful knowledge was the key to social improvement. In that culture, technological progress could thrive.”
So Britain not only had its fair share of geniuses but also had a well organized cadre of people who could tweak, improve, and implement the ideas the geniuses handed on. Just think what Leonardo might have done.
Brain Porn
This is your brain on brain porn.
I like to think about our brains. The way the brain functions influences our creativity and communication. These influence our ability to innovate. Innovation influences our business success. It’s all linked together in one continuum, though teasing out how the links actually work is exceedingly difficult.
Since I’m not a neuroscientist by training, I read science-for-the-layperson materials. I enjoy Oliver Sacks, Daniel Kahneman, Peter Facione, Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons, James Surowiecki, Steven Pinker, and James Gleick to name a few. But I often wonder just how much of what I read is accurate. Is some of it dumbed down for the non-scientist? What can we trust and what should we be suspicious of?
It turns out that there’s a lot of “brain porn” out there. Also known as “folk neuroscience”, this stuff oversimplifies and gives a false sense of certitude. It seems so clear, for instance, that a man who is short on oxytocin will have a rocky romantic life. After all, oxytocin is the “love hormone”. If you don’t have enough, how good a lover can you be?
We humans love to make up stories to explain cause and effect. Some of our stories are even true. In many cases, however, we don’t really know what causes what. It’s complicated. Still, we have a deep-seated need to create backstories that explain why we are the way we are. Neuroscience fits our need perfectly; it appears to give ultimate explanations. We behave a certain way because we’re “hardwired” to do so. We have an imbalance in our brain chemistry and therefore we behave antisocially (or immaturely or irrationally or generously, etc.)
Our desire for an explanation is also a desire for a cure. If an imbalance in our brain chemistry causes antisocial behavior, then all we have to do is learn how to rebalance our brain chemistry. As in A Clockwork Orange, we might turn ultraviolent criminals into well-behaved citizens. All we need to do is understand the brain better and we can make ourselves “better”. A fundamental question is: who gets to define “better”?
So how wrong is brain porn? Vaughan Bell wrote an excellent article in The Guardian that itemizes some basic misunderstandings. For instance, it’s not true that the left-brain is rational and the right-brain creative. We really do need both sides of our brains if we want to be either rational or creative. Similarly, video games don’t “rewire” our brains into some permanently demented state. The brain is constantly changing. Video games may contribute some new connections but so does everything else we do. We can’t get stuck in video game dementia any more than our eyes can get stuck when we cross them.
Despite the brain porn out there, we can still learn a lot about behavior and creativity from neuroscience. In the next few days, for instance, I’ll review an article titled “Your Brain At Work” that really can teach us how to be more effective leaders and managers. I’ll do my best to write about neuroscience that’s well documented and substantiated. I believe there’s a lot of wheat out there. We just need to separate it from the chaff.
Are You Happy? Hedonic or Eudaemonic?
Eudaemonia!
Research on happiness often distinguishes between two types: affective happiness and evaluative happiness. Affective happiness is how you’re feeling now and in the recent past. It’s fairly volatile and can rise or fall quickly. Evaluative happiness measures how happy you are with your life. It tends to be more stable.
Both types of happiness fit into a broader category generally known as the hedonic theory of happiness. This is essentially the pleasure principle – we seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s fairly straightforward and is often considered the ultimate goal in theories of positive thinking.
But let’s think critically about this. Is pleasure really all there is to happiness? When you overcome obstacles in life, doesn’t that make you happy, even if the process is painful? Can you be happy simply by thinking positively and banishing negative thoughts? Indeed, can you truly banish negative thoughts and emotions?
These questions lead to a different theory of happiness that’s often known as the eudaemonic perspective. In Western thought, the concept originated with Aristotle. The basic idea is that we should lead an actively engaged life, colored by virtue and excellent character. It’s often compared to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow – when you’re completely immersed in what you’re doing. You harness your emotions toward a task and become completely absorbed by it.
When you’re fully engaged, negative thoughts may arise just as easily as positive thoughts. Rather than trying to suppress negative thoughts, you simply let them flow by. They’re part of who we are. In fact, they probably have some survival value. They can spur you to take action against an obstacle, do something unpleasant but necessary, or even just take your medicine.
Indeed, it may well be the case that trying to suppress negative thoughts causes us to have more of them rather than fewer. As Tori Rodriguez reports, a phenomenon called dream rebound may come into play. Researchers at the University of New South Wales divided participants into two groups. One group was asked to suppress a negative thought just before falling asleep. The other group did not try to suppress their thoughts. Those who tried to suppress their negative thoughts reported dreaming about it more frequently than those who didn’t. (Though it’s a different realm, this is similar to Jevon’s paradox).
In my experience, negative thinking produces a second-order effect. First, we have a negative thought. Second, we get wound up about having negative thoughts. OMG, am I a negative person? Why do I have such negativity?
In my opinion, the second-order effect is more damaging than the first. Of course we’re going to have negative thoughts. We can’t avoid them. In fact, they probably help us survive. The trick is to let them pass. As the Tibetans say, thinking is like writing on water. It goes away. Allowing negative thoughts to flow may not lead us to hedonic happiness but may very well stimulate eudaemonic happiness.
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