Mental Locks

1
Mental Locks

• Jerry Banks
• Creativity and Innovation

2
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.

• Anonymous

3
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you
something (Frank Capra)
4
Mental Locks

• The right answer
• Thats not practical
• Follow the rules
• Be practical
• Avoid ambiguity

• To err is wrong
• Play is frivolous
• Thats not my area
• Dont be foolish
• Im not creative

5
Which is different?
6
The right answer

• Five figures are shown in the slide
• Which is different?
• They all are different!

7
The right answer

• From grade school thru college
• 2600 tests, quizzes, exams
• Life isnt always one answer, it is usually
  ambiguous
• If you always look for one right answer
• Then you will stop as soon as you find one

8
What is it?
9
What is it?

• Some say its a big dot
• Kindergarten kids might answer differently
• An owl
• A rock
• The top of a telephone pole
• A star
• Etc.

10
What is it?

• We lose the ability to look for more than one
  answer
• Children enter school as question marks and
  leave as periods

11
The Sufi Judge

• Two men had an argument
• Plaintiff makes his case
• When he finishes, the judge says
• Thats right, thats right
• Defendant jumps up and says
• Wait a minute, you havent heard my side
• Defendant states his case

12
The Sufi Judge

• When he finishes, the judge says
• Thats right, thats right
• Clerk of court jumps up and says
• Judge, they both cant be right
• Judge says
• Thats right, thats right
• Moral Truth is all around you what matters is
  where you put the focus

13
How many seconds in a year?
14
Second right answer

• How many seconds in a year?
• Answer 12
• 2nd of Jan, 2nd of Feb,
• Only one idea can cause lots of problems
• Only the sure thing is proposed
• Need to take a chance on an off-beat idea

15
One technique is to change the question

• Instead of Whats the answer, say
• What are the answers?
• What are the meanings?
• What are the possible results?

16
Reword the question

• Several centuries ago, there was a plague in
  Lithuania
• The victim went into a very deep, deathlike coma
• Usually succumbed within 24 hours
• Occasionally, a hardy soul would survive
• Was a person dead or alive
• Most were dead

17
Dead or alive?

• Discovered that someone was buried alive
• Alarmed the town
• Called a meeting
• Came up with two solutions

18
Solution 1

• Air tube, bread, water in the casket
• Expensive, but worthwhile

19
Solution 2

• Less expensive idea
• 12 sharpened stake
• Over the heart
• As soon as the lid was closed, no question about
  dead or alive

20
The two questions were different

• 1 What should we do in the event we bury
  someone alive?
• 2 How can we make sure that someone is dead?

21
Order is heavens first law

• Alexander Pope

22
Follow the rules

• A person walks into the room where youre
  watching TV, trips over a chair and knocks it
  down
• Whats your impression of the person?
• A clumsy person
• 10 minutes later - same thing happens
• 20 minutes later - same thing happens
• Now, whats your opinion?

23
Follow the rules

• Chairs in the wrong place!
• You recognized a pattern
• Rule Anybody walking into the room will trip
  over the chair (unless its moved)

24
1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, ?

• Whats the pattern?
• Xi2

25
Much of intelligence is the ability to recognize
a pattern

• Sequences
• Order clothes are put on
• Cycles
• Ducks fly south in the winter, north for the
  summer
• Processes
• Flour, sugar, and eggs make a cake

26
More examples

• Tendencies
• When I smile at you, you smile at me
• Distributions
• 32 of ITLA students are females
• Movements
• Downtown Santo Domingo is crowded at 530 PM
• Cultural rites
• We dont kiss on the first date

27
More examples

• Probabilities
• P(7 at craps) 1/6

28
The spring sky

• Patterns are seen everywhere, even when they
  dont exist!

29
A portion of the spring sky
30
The Constellation Leo!
31
Every act of creation is first of all an act of
destruction

• Picasso

32
If constructing patterns were all that was
necessary for creativity, wed all be geniuses

• Creative thinking is not only constructive, its
  destructive
• You may have to break out of a pattern to create
  a new one

33
Pattern breakers

• Copernicus
• Broke the rule that the Earth was the center of
  the universe
• Napoleon
• Broke the rule on the proper way to conduct a
  military campaign

34
Pattern breakers

• Beethoven
• Broke the rules on how symphonies were written
• Every major advance in art, science, and
  technology has occurred when someone challenged
  the rules

35
In swimming

• Freestyle, backstroke, and breaststroke were the
  only forms until the 1920s
• Each had its own rules
• Breaststroke rule stated that both arms must be
  pulled together underwater and then recovered
  simultaneously back to the start of the pulling
  position to begin the next stroke
• Most people interpreted this to mean underwater
  recovery

36
The successful innovator must challenge the rules!

• In the 1920s, someone challenged the rules
• Out-of-water recovery
• 15 faster
• Butterfly
• Became the 4th swimming stroke in the 1956
  Olympics

37
Why do people follow the rules?

• Cultural pressure
• Children are told
• Dont color outside of the lines
• No orange elephants
• Students are rewarded for regurgitating
  information rather than playing with ideas
• People feel more comfortable following the rules
  than challenging them

38
Some rules are needed

• You dont shout in the library
• You dont yell fire in a crowded theater
• You pull over so a fire truck can pass
• However, if you are trying to generate ideas, you
  have to get rid of the mental lock follow the
  rules

39
Strange phenomenon

• Rules are made on the basis of sound ideas
• We follow the rules
• Time passes, things change
• The original reason for following the rules
  ceases to exist
• We follow the rules

40
QWERTY

• Where did it come from?

41
QWERTY

• 1870s
• Sholes Co.
• Lots of complaints about typewriter keys sticking
  together if the typists went too fast
• Management asked the engineers what to do
• Engineers decided to make the keyboard inefficient

42
QWERTY

• For instance, O and I are the 3rd and 6th most
  frequently used letters
• The ring and little fingers (both kind of weak)
  have their responsibility way up there on top of
  the keyboard
• This brilliant idea solved the problem
• Now, we cant type faster than our word
  processors
• But, we keep using QWERTY!

43
Markets dont always choose the right technology

• QWERTY spells a saga of market economics, WSJ
  2/25/98
• Dvorak was more efficient
• Recoup the retraining cost in 10 days
• MS-DOS and its follow-ons became a standard
• Apples Mac OS was better
• Path dependence
• Once we start down a path its hard to get off

44
Andy Rooneys, speaking about his office at CBS

• Workspace, WSJ, 2/18/98
• My office is very disorderly. I suspect that
  creativity more often emanates from disorder than
  order.

45
Creative Destruction

• Subtitled Why companies that are built to last
  under perform the market - and how to
  successfully transform them
• (Foster/Kaplan, McKinsey Co., 2001)
• No company, of 1000 in the study over the period
  1962-1998, consistently outperformed the average
  of its industry
• The culprit Corporate rigidity
• Advice A complete business overhaul

46
In summary

• Challenge the rules
• But not too much
• Examine the rules to see if a reason for them
  continues to exist
• Avoid becoming ritualized with your ideas

47
Be practical
48
Be practical

• Human beings are not limited to the present
• Suppose it rains tomorrow. What would happen
  to the picnic?
• We can think about the future
• We can spark our imagination by asking What if
  questions
• What if people didnt need sleep?

49
Be practical

• Asking what-if questions allows us to be free
  from the deeply ingrained assumptions that we
  have formulated
• Designers might ask
• What if we make our products uglier and less
  reliable?
• Engineers might ask
• What if one of the main parts breaks?

50
Be practical

• What if I were a toaster? How would I receive a
  bagel?
• How would I feel if all of those sesame seeds
  fell in my insides?

51
The Stepping Stone

• What if questions may not produce practical,
  creative ideas
• We may need a stepping stone

52
Example 1

• What if gunpowder were placed in our outdoor
  house paint?
• Then we could just blow it off after it starts
  cracking
• This actually lead to an additive placed in house
  paint
• This additive is inert until a catalyst is
  applied
• Chemical reaction sets up and causes the paint to
  strip off

53
Example 2

• A Netherlands city became an eyesore because of
  cigarette butts, beer bottles, scrap newspapers,
  etc.
• One idea was to punish the litterer by
• Doubling the littering fine
• Increasing the number of littering agents
• Another idea was to reward the law abider
• Let the trash cans pay money, but too costly
• Stepping stone
• Let the trash can dispense jokes!

54
Throwaway phrases Taiwans new way to pick up
English, (WSJ, 9/25/02)

• Musical trash trucks deliver drive-by lessons
• Lets talk in English, exclaims the truck
• Perplexed residents eye the truck quizzically
• Usually, the trucks play music announcing their
  arrival
• A signal to bring trash to the curb
• The trucks are supposed to help in the Asian
  enthusiasm to learn English
• Key to future financial success

55
Why dont people use what if and the stepping
stone more?

• 1. As they grow older, they become prisoners of
  familiarity
• 2. These tools have a low probability of success
• Many what-if questions have to be asked
• 3. We have been trained to say
• Thats not practical
• Instead we should say
• Hey, thats interesting. I wonder where it will
  lead our thinking?

56
There is a time to be practical and a time to be
impractical

• Dont say
• What if I dont use my brakes all the way home?
• What if I stop eating for a week?

57
Synectics
58
Synectics
59
Everything is relevant Making things relevant is
the creative process.

• Wm. J. J. Gordon

60
Avoid ambiguity
61
Avoid ambiguity

• J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI director, 1960s
• Dictated a letter to his secretary
• Didnt like the format
• Wrote on the bottom
• Watch the borders!
• Instructed his secretary to retype the letter and
  send it out
• She did so and sent it to the top agents

62
Avoid ambiguity

• For the next two weeks, the FBI was on top alert
  along the Canadian and Mexican borders

63
Avoid ambiguity

• For most practical situations, we try to avoid
  ambiguity
• Draw map to my house
• Document my programs

64
Ambiguity can stimulate creativity

• What is 1/2 of 8?
• 4, 0, 3, E, M, eig
• Depends on how you define half

65
Look at things ambiguously

• Picasso saw the bicycle bars as bulls horns
• A brick can be used as a door stop
• A ball point pen can be used as a hole punch

66
The Oracle of Delphi

• One of the Oracles best known prophecies
• 480 BCE
• Persians had invaded the Greek mainland
• Conquered 2/3rds of the country
• Athenians werent sure what to do
• Decided to send some suppliants to Delphi

67
The Oracle said

• O ksylinos techos tha sosi esas ke ta pedia sas
• The wooden wall will save you and your children

68
What could this mean?

• Perhaps, wall up the Acropolis and take a
  defensive stand behind the barrier
• Thats too direct
• The Oracle always talked ambiguously
• Must go beyond the right answer

69
Another idea

• Maybe the Oracle was talking about wooden-hulled
  ships lined up next to each other
• From a distance, the ships would look like a
  wooden wall
• Aha!
• The battle should be naval rather than on land
• In 479 BCE, the Athenians routed the Persians in
  the Battle of Salamis

70
Draw a picture of yourself in a position of
movement, and then provide a device (of plastic,
wood, paper, metal) to support that position
71
You have been designing furniture!

• If I told you to design a chair or bed, you would
  have performed on the basis of a prior memory
• We have a paradox here
• Ambiguity causes communication problems
• Ambiguity helps to create ideas
• Paradoxes can force you to question assumptions

72
Advice

• Be spontaneous
• We cant leave the haphazard to chance
• A bank will lend you money only if you prove that
  you dont need it!

73
Summary

• Too much emphasis on one answer
• Creativity can be stimulated
• Blocks can be recognized and eliminated
• Techniques can be learned
• Exercises can strengthen creative muscle

74
Invention of Post-It Notes

• http//www.3m.com/about3M/pioneers/fry.html

75
Invention of Post-It Notes
76
Invention of Post-It Notes
77
Invention of Post-It Notes
78
Invention of Post-It Notes
79
Invention of Post-It Notes
The result is, as they say, history. In 1981,
one year after its introduction, Post-it Notes
were named the company's Outstanding New Product.
Fry was named a 3M corporate scientist in 1986.
Now retired, Fry looks back on the many
innovative products - such as the Post-it Pop-up
Note Dispenser and the Post-it Flag - that have
followed upon the original Post-it Note. "It is
like having your children grow up and turn out to
be happy and successful," he beamed.
80
End