#creativethinking Archives - Page 2 of 4

Chance

While creative talent and hard work play an obvious role, chance and randomness also influence problem solving and creative discovery. Countless inventions and discoveries are accidental. The difference between what happens to us, and what happens to those chance inventors, is that they notice things, stop, take a step back, and reflect on what they have just witnessed, ask why and how, and use their curiosity to wonder what else.

While we brush it off, grab our coffee and run to continue what we planned to do.

It’s how you say it

In his books, Nonverbal Communication and Silent Messages, Albert Mehrabian shares the findings of a study he conducted years ago that as little as 7 percent of people’s impact in the communications of feelings and attitudes was in the words they said; the other 93 percent was in their body language: 55 percent in facial expression and 38 percent in how they said it.

This is your presence and energy speaking. Your tone of voice, posture, how you’re taking care of yourself and your thoughts, your attitude and beliefs, physical and emotional intentions. The energy you bring into the room and how alive is your presence is also contagious. It all shows up.

Invisible

I read a recent post by Seth Godin on the invisibility paradox. We believe more in what we see, even if it’s a placebo effect, than what we don’t. We’re unsure what to do with things that are invisible.

At work, this translates into focusing more on what we can easily measure than what we cannot. Measuring our effectiveness with hours spent at work, following KPIs to their rabbit holes, calculating profit at the expense of human well-being, are all examples we experience daily. What’s harder to see, or measure, is the culture we work in, the level of trust we have with our colleagues and managers, time spent thinking of, and developing, new ideas, and even how the space we’re working in is helping us, or not, in being more creative or effective at work. When we don’t put the culture on our radar, we tend to forget it exists.

Man and woman using post-it notes and flow charts, on the floor.

Words

Sometimes ideas are better documented as a diagram, or a sketch, rather than words

Creative Flow

Ideation and flow

Put the planet at the heart of your brief

Design and consulting projects start with a brief, an intention on their approach and methodology.

Presentations are formed days before their opening lines, with a clear message to grab the audience’s attention.

Home renovation intentions and plans come to life before taking the trip to buy supplies.

What if the planet is one of your stakeholders? What if it had a say on what you buy and how you discard items after their expiry date? If the planet sat in the chair to view your plans before implementing them, what would it say about the brief?

Remember that 80% of the environmental impact is determined during the design stage.

How Wolves Change Rivers

In the 19^th century, people began the process of eradicating wolves from the Yellowstone park in the US. The main reason was ranchers worried about their grazing livestock. As soon as the last pack was wiped out in 1930, changes came quickly.

The elk populations began to increase steadily, and large areas of the park were stripped bare, especially the riverbanks. The grass as well as the saplings disappeared as elks munched away the resources, Beavers found themselves without their main supply of trees, Willows and Poplars, that grows near rivers. Even birds didn’t find enough food and immigrated away along with many other species.

Things were not looking good for grizzlies either. The sugar and carb-filled berries they eat before winter were being plundered. Riverbanks became wastelands, and because there was no longer any vegetation to protect the ground, seasonal flooding washed away the soil. Erosion advanced rapidly.

As a result, the rivers began to zigzag and follow increasingly winding routes through the landscape. The less protection there is for the underlying layers of soil, the stronger the serpentine effect, especially on flat ground. This continued for decades. Until 1995.

A decision was made and wolves caught in Canada were released back to restore the Yellowstone’s ecological balance. This single action created what could be described as trophic cascade.

With the wolf back at the top of the food chain, they did what wolves do when hungry. They found something to eat. A lot of easy-to-catch elk.

The wolves ate the elk, and the elk avoided open areas along the riverbank. This gave the willow and poplar sapling a chance to grow, and they grew faster than most. Once the riverbank became stable, it slowed the flow of the river, and it carried less soil. This invited the beavers to come back, and those industrious creatures built dams that slowed the flow of water even more, creating ponds that becme homes for amphibians, along with a diversity of bird species who came to check into this new oasis. Here’s an inspiring video that shows how wolves indeed affected the behavior of rivers.

Wolf-Woman,

Randah Taher

Want to be free

“Don’t want to be sweet and neat
Don’t want someone living my life for me
Want to be free.”

Said Toyah in her song “I want to be free”.

The 80s are so last century, but the feeling of wanting to shed our skin to bring our true selves out is always in present tense. We feel like pretending to smile for the picture, not for a moment or two, but for long months and years on end. Ooh that face muscle must hurt so bad.

I was only 4 years old when this song came out. So I can’t say I remember it. Yet I remember clearly the freedom I sought in my childhood to choose my own friends without my parent’s approval, to travel solo to destinations I know nothing about, to experience life without a pre-approved itinerary. I followed mostly my intuition and it served me really well, until I started bringing logic into the picture so that I can explain my creativity better. I ruined a big part of it because of that limited freedom I put myself in.

We take this picture-perfect frame to work. We try to fit in with how we dress, act and even how we think. We don’t feel free to approach problems in new undiscovered ways.

Too risky. Or so we think.

But when someone suggests something radical and it gets approved, we moan and regret not sharing that same idea since we thought about it a week ago. We didn’t feel free enough to share it out loud and ruin that picture. Did you experience this lately?

I sometimes still do.

Here’s your permission to be, and act, free.

Start the day with a new routine. Experiment with your next meeting with a physical exercise. Write on the walls instead of typing on the computer. If it makes you alive and with a sense of freedom, why hold back? After all, the term “leisure time inventions” didn’t come out of nowhere. That’s when a new product or process occurs when the “inventor” is away from the workplace and in contact with people from outside his/her field of work.

Read: free.

And so Toyah continues ..

“We should live and let live
And all live our dreams

I’m going to turn this world inside out
I’m going to turn suburbia upside down
I’m going to walk the streets, scream and shout
I’m going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

I’m gonna be free
I’m gonna be free.”

~ Randah Taher

Trees remember

Trees “remember” that they were shaken in the past.

Plants grown outdoors grow thicker and sturdier than those in greenhouses, even in the same amount of light. They face strong winds, heavy snow and other natural and man-made accidents.

In the example of a Larch tree, it even re-designs itself if it was attacked by caterpillars.

In the year after an assault, the tree remembers its experience and produces leaves that are shorter and stouter than usual. Their new design does not photosynthesize as efficiently as the original thinner & longer one, but it’s better at repelling pests. In the following years, the caterpillars, later becoming moths, will no longer find it a tasty environment and leave, and the tree will revert to normal foliage.

And then there’s the Aspen tree.

At first appearance, the aspen doesn’t look tough.

With its ghostly smooth and greenish-white trunks, long flat stalks that turns melancholic yellow in the autumn. It seems the furthest example from resilience a tree could be. Yet it flourishes where other trees, seemingly stronger and more equipped for resilience, perish.

Those unassuming cloning machines are one of nature’s most resourceful trees. Apart from their ability to bounce back after fire, they reproduce by asexual cloning. They generate copies of themselves and shoot up suckers through their lateral roots. This vast established root system proves itself effective in case of a forest fire. If the fire occurs in winter when the ground is frozen, or in spring when it is still wet, the roots survive and they can reproduce a grove of aspens within months.

In Emulating nature, we need to up our game if we are to think in such agile and creative manner. Faced with challenges, we need to learn methods of self-renewal as well as self-restructuring, as well as find ways to connect our systems with that of the environment we belong to. We need to need to seem strong and powerful, we just need to trust our design that it will persist in face of disturbances.

(This is a short passage from a chapter I’m writing, in an edited book, about biomimicry.

Hang in there Cornelia, it’s coming 😉)

Two women smiling and working in the background, and a post-it note activity in the foreground.

Ethnography for Business

Services Designers use it daily. Market Research use it often, and many business owner use is intuitively.

Ethnography is about knowing people as they are. Understanding their thoughts, feelings and needs by listening, observing, interacting and analyzing.

Immersing yourself in people’s daily lives listening to their stories (and complaints) will provide you with invaluable insights, many of them are surprising or seem nonobvious. To the world they are doing a certain thing, but to them, they are doing it for unique reason. If you are able to crack that code into what is the “reason”, you might have the best insight on other more creative ways of doing “that thing”.

To get to that insight, you need to clear your mind from your own assumptions and focus on what people do, say, and think. Observe everything in their context and notice the location, the spaces between people, & the objects they use. Twitter was not invented by asking people if they wanted to share quick updates in less than 140 characters. It met an unsatisfied need based on ethnographic insights. Whether you like it or not, it’s now worth over USD $5 Billion.

A simple observational research framework is called POEMS. It stands for People, Objects, Environment, Messages and Services. You can examine these elements independently as well as in an interrelated system. Go to the field to observe or ask about people’s activities and objects they use. Pay attention to the environment, the location and what key information and services they interact with. Try to understand the context through PEOMS, immerse yourself in ethnographic research, and take notes of all your insights. Great ideas pop up suddenly and are very context-dependent. You don’t want to wait a minute only to forget that amazing idea.

Happy observing,