Ideas of the Future - Accelerate your creativity!

Yes, we are going on again. I just want to say that because the whole thing will be live streamed and so on, the presentations are also on film on the site. So you can go in there if there is anyone in the country, what the hell was it he just said, or what was it she said, what was that number or something, then you can go back there and find it afterwards. Now we are a little bit on the day and when I was at the London conference, there was also Daniel Kahneman to hold an interview. It is him who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. I got to think about, I think he refers in his book about a fantastic study that was done in Israel, about how many prisoners are being released without trial, depending on when they come in on the day in front of this parole board. And if you try to search for Economist Israel Parole Board, then you get the wildest graph. Because it turns out that if you come in to search for trial release that morning, then there is a chance of 60-70% that you will be released without trial. Just before breakfast, what are you saying? Yes, there is also, but across this, across all things, across the beers that are also there. If you come in just before breakfast, when the blood sugar is all the way at the bottom of the parole board, then there is almost 0% probability of being released without trial. And what Kahneman writes is that when we are tired, when we are hungry, when we do not have our basic Maslow pyramid needs satisfied, then we do not dare to take any chances, we do not dare to think new, we do not dare to be creative and so on. And therefore it is really, really good that we just got cake. Because after the cake break in the afternoon, there are again a lot of people who get to be released without trial. And now you have got cake, so now you have to think new. Now you have to be inspired by creativity. And to do that, we have got Dagny Valgeersdottir from DTU to come. And you understand Danish, but you speak English. So Dagny will talk in English and afterwards you can ask some questions. You can ask them in Danish or in English and you will answer in English. But please give a hand to Dagny, coming here and learning us about creativity. So thank you for inviting me to come here to speak about creativity. It is a passionate subject for me, so I am looking forward to hopefully inspiring you a little bit and teaching you maybe how to accelerate your creativity. So my name is Dagny Valgeersdottir, as I was just introduced. And currently I am working for DTU Management Engineering and Copenhagen Institute of Neurocreativity, where I am developing creativity training programs. And for the last four years I have been studying creativity and working with creativity. I have been doing creativity training, I have been teaching creativity, facilitating creative workshops, creative processes, etc. So I know quite a lot about the subject and I hope to share it with you today. Okay, but let's start with what is creativity. Creativity has a very simple definition. It is something new and something useful. And it can be whatever you can think of literally. It can be a solution, an idea, a product, a product concept, whatever. Just as long as it is something new and useful. It cannot only be new for new and sick. It also has to be appropriate for a specific function or give someone or something value. So that is the standard definition of creativity. And when I talk about creativity, I focus on the functional, practical values of creativity. So it is not the aesthetic value or the artistic value. It is the functional, how you can actually use creativity. So that is why I highlight the functioning product. I am not maybe a gun advocate, but I just thought it was a fun comparison. But why creativity? Why is creativity important? And that is a thing that I get a lot of people asking about that quite a lot. Because creativity is commonly seen as a pretty fluffy concept. It is surrounded with a lot of confusion and people put their subjective meanings into it. Meaning that they kind of have very personal opinions about what creativity actually is. And usually when I tell people that I am working with creativity, I get the question, okay, so you are working with the arts. Which I am not. Not at all. I actually have come from a very scientific standpoint when looking at creativity. So today I hope to kind of move the shift of focus away from the funny clown and the artistic side and teach you a little bit about how creativity can be useful for you. Because creativity is a basic human skill. It is something that we are all born with. It is pre-wired in our brains when we are born. Meaning that our genes create the first draft. And then our life experience is later edited. So as you probably all know, children are very creative at a young age. And then as we grow older, we kind of lose our ability to be creative. But that is kind of not all bad news because you have this potential. And because it is pre-wired, so even though you kind of start or stop using all of it, you can train it. You can train it so you can reach your full potential again. So that is kind of the good news because creativity is a very important thing that you can apply in your work. It is a problem solving skill that you use in every domain you can think of. Because in essence, the practical application of creativity is when you tackle problems in every level of society. Whether it is in work or in your personal life. Just whatever you can think of. Whether it is a surgeon trying to find a new approach for a complex surgery. Or a lawyer trying to build a case. Or you as communication people trying to build new media plans or communication strategies and so on. You always have to figure out new and useful ways to kind of advance your work. So creativity is very applicable in many domains. And that kind of brings me to something that me and my colleagues term as the creativity battle. Because as I said, people always associate with the arts. So they always think about the clown version of creativity. Whereas we are kind of advocating the scientific view on creativity. We want people to learn that everybody can be creative. Because if people think that it is only something artistic or something funny or just for fun, that kind of divides the waters in a way. Because then you either belong in the creative class and have a license to be creative. Or you are deemed to be uncreative for the rest of your life. But what we want everybody to know is that you are all creative. And you can all maintain your creativity. And you should maintain your creativity. So yeah, no more clown. But when we talk about creativity, it is very useful to talk about it from the four P's of creativity. So you have the creative person. Which kind of covers the cognitive functions like your creativity. And your personality traits. And then you have the creative process. Which is kind of where the creative persons are working within. That is where the teams are. So it is kind of the close environment and actually where creativity happens. And then once you have the creative person working in the process, you have a creative product. Which is the output from the process. And as I said earlier, it doesn't have to be a tangible product or a specific... idea. It can be something. It is basically just the output from the process. It can be a solution. It can be an amended process. Just once you come up with whatever you are working on, then that is the creative product. Then you have the creative place. Which is where all of the first three kind of reside in. And that is something that we can't really control. It is the laws and legislations. And it is your top level management that you can't really have any control over. So when I work with creativity, I focus on person and process. At least in my work. Because those are the two things that you can actually train. You can train the person to become more creative. And you can advance the process or enhance it to make it a little bit better for you. And I will be talking for the remainder of my talk about the first person and then the process. And give you some hints and pointers on how to maybe be more aware of it. And become better at it. But when we talk about individual creativity or the creative person. You have achievement creativity. Which is typically what we want to improve. Because that is the successes of our creative outputs. So it is kind of what we put out there. And of course everybody wants more success. But in order to get better at achievement creativity. You want to increase your trait creativity. That is your creative potential. And there are multiple ways to do that. But first in terms of ideas. Because now we are talking about ideas of the future. And how you can get better at producing more ideas. Some people think that an idea is kind of the start of creativity. That is creativity. But before an idea arises. A lot of things have to take place. It doesn't just arise from an intellectual vacuum. So to say. So first you have to seek out a lot of input. Both in the form of just practical knowledge. Getting expertise in the domain that you are working with. Or more information about the problem that you are working on. And then you seek inspiration from all sorts of places. And then when you have kind of gotten all the inputs that you need. A process goes on in your mind. So that is kind of the mental process. And that process can take from a minute to an hour. To day. To weeks. And it can sometimes be quite frustrating. Because it is kind of iterative. You seek input. Then something happens. And then you kind of want to learn more. But the process actually kind of follows this frustration line. So when you are very frustrated in your work. And you feel very agitated. That is usually when an idea is kind of about to happen. That is when your brain is digesting all the information so heavily. And then finally all the pieces come together. And then you have the output. So that is when the idea comes out. And now I will first focus on the person. And tell you about a few things that can kind of help you reach that point. Hopefully more efficiently. So first of all. As I talked about input. So it is inspiration. And there are quite a lot of ways for you to seek inspiration. It is for instance just looking at your close surroundings. So be observant about the things around you. Your family. Your colleagues. Things in the culture. Or you can use special techniques. For instance a colleague of mine. Which I think is quite brilliant. He sometimes when he is working on a problem. And he feels that he kind of needs something new. Then he goes to Wikipedia. And he just presses the random button. And then he just gets some random piece of information. And by doing that. That sometimes triggers something new. So you might go in a different direction than you might normally do. So just a simple thing like that. Just be creative. And then another thing. Priming. That is something that is neurological to our brains. And that is by doing. Seeking inspiration. You are in a sense priming yourself. But priming is also a tricky thing. So I think that is why I wanted to talk to you about it. Because you need inspiration. But you don't want too much of it. Because if you have too much priming. Then you risk getting fixated. And that is definitely something that you all know. Because that is when you are kind of stuck in a rut. You are super frustrated. You don't really know how to continue. You can't come up with anything new. And you are just focusing on the same thing all the time. And that is when you become too heavily primed. And the roots in your brain have become too rigid. So it is just impossible for your brain to kind of diverge more from the fixation. And there are ways to do that. Very simple ways actually to relieve the fixation. And that is by taking a break. So by taking a break. It is actually called incubation. So you should incubate. But in lay terms it is just take a break. And there are actually two ways. Or many ways of course. To take a break. But I want to talk to you about two specific ways. A study by Stanford that was published quite recently. Showed that by walking for 20 minutes. That is a really good way to relieve fixation. And they tested different ways of walking. And they figured that there is no difference between walking outside. Or walking around a building. Or in a specific room. Just the motion of walking. Made when people returned. They were more creative and less fixated. And the thing also about fixation. Is that it is negatively correlated with idea generation. So the more fixated you are. The less ideas you come up with. And that is scientifically proven. So once you become aware of this. You can better manage it in your work. Another way to take a break. Is to actually stay active. Cognitively active. So not necessarily taking a walk. But just working on something. And I read somewhere that. Just cleaning out your desk drawer. Or going through your emails. Keeping your brain active. That increased the idea production after the break. By 40%. So that has proved to be quite effective. And that brings me to associations. Because that is in general. How you are creative. You have this stimuli. That your brain responds to. And you make this associativity. A very simple example could be. If you think of fire. And then you might have a fire. A fire truck. A gun. You are fired. So you make a lot of close associations. But the further you get away from the source. The more creative you are. So for instance. If you have fire. Fire truck. Red. And lipstick. So just a very stupid example. But that is in general how it works. And you can train yourself. At making associations. Because if you become better at it. You become quicker at coming up with new alternative ways. To tackle your work. And one way to do that is for instance. Just to use the time. When you are brushing your teeth in the evening. Use your brush. And just think. Try to think of as many different words. That are not related to toothbrush at all. And that is stimulating your brain. In a way that you become better at. Making these remote associations. And then constraints. Constraints are basically the rules. That you apply to your work. Everybody has their sweet spot of creativity. And that is individual. Not everybody has the same. Some people like to work with less constraints. And others want to work with more constraints. And there are ways to kind of manage that. So once. If you feel that you are under constraint. You all know the feeling of kind of working with a blank page. It is not very good. You kind of need to construct it more. And you need to make it more tangible. And then you can for instance do assumption. Which is a technique that kind of formalizes. What you are working on. So you just write down all the assumptions. That you have on a problem. And then you kind of say. Okay is this relevant. Is this irrelevant. Should I maybe investigate this more. So that is a way to kind of put some constraints on your work. If you are over constraint. Then maybe you just choose. Okay I can't really change anything about the constraints. That I am working within. But I choose to black box one thing. And just see where that leads me. So I won't think about this specific thing for a while. Yeah. So those are kind of the things for the person. Then that takes me to the process. And the first thing about the process. Is awareness. Awareness of the things that I was telling you about. Because by being aware of those things. If you know about priming or fixation. That kind of allows you to manage your process better. So for instance if you now know about fixation. And you notice that you or one of your colleagues. Is just totally focused on one thing. That kind of gives you the opportunity to say. Okay hey let's just take a small break. Because then you will kind of be more productive when you return. And then the different stages of the process. It's kind of the creative process. Has these underlying mental processes. Called divergent and convergent thinking. Which is opening up and closing down in a sense. You kind of create a lot of choices. In order to be able to make a choice. But people tend to have difficulties. Staying in the opening phases. Because as you grow older. You kind of you're very solution oriented. So you just jump to solution mode. Right away and kind of just want to. Okay let's just work on this. Rather than kind of staying open for a while. And then you have more to choose from. When you actually will form the solution. And to do that there's a lot of techniques. You probably all have worked with. A lot of different creativity tools. Like bad ideas. Or the six thinking hats. Or taking on different personas. When you're in a workshop. But I want to talk about brainstorming. Because brainstorming is a classical method. That is very misused. People rarely use it in the most optimal way. Because the thing about brainstorming. Is that people tend to do it in a group thinking way. And that kind of minimizes the output. That you can get out of it. So when I'm typically running a workshop. And I do brainstorming. Then I always start with an individual round. Because and that relates to priming. Because you want to get everybody's unprimed ideas out there first. So you want everybody to write down their thoughts. Then you kind of do a short round of sharing. Where everybody kind of puts out their post-its. And then you do another individual round. Where you ask them to be primed by the others. Because first you want to get everybody's output. And this is also a good way to deal with introverts. Versus extroverts. So you get everybody out there. And then you still want to kind of gain from the group thinking in a way. So doing these alternate rounds of individual and group. Have proven to be very beneficial when you're doing ideation. And that brings me to my last point about the process. Which is creativity training. And that's what I'm currently working on. And have been for a while. But creativity training has been proven to work. You can train yourself. Both just by maintaining it with simple techniques. Like the toothbrush. And just being aware of the different things and so on. But you can also take a training course. And at Copenhagen Institute of Neurocreativity. Where I've been working as well. We have this course called Applied Neurocreativity. Which is based on the neurological foundations of the brain. When you're actually being creative. But we've more or less been working with universities. So the one on this side. This is when we actually took it out in a professional setting for the first time. So we wanted to try to see if we could do it with people working in industry. So we did a training course with a big organization here in Copenhagen. And as you can see we did pre and post testing. So we tested creativity before and after. And then you can see that they were quite low when we started. But after six weeks of training. We had one session every week. Which was three hours. They had significantly increased their creativity. It was a 68% increase. Which is very substantial. And you can see compared to the university students. Which is the red line. So the professionals they started lower. But they ended up higher. And this is a work in progress still. We haven't had the final conclusions. But we kind of speculate that it has something to do with both. Age and expertise. Because the professionals they are older than the students. So their creativity must have dropped since they were in school. But instead they have a lot of practical knowledge and expertise. And that kind of propels the creativity level even more. Which I think is very exciting. Because that kind of shows us that you can actually train creativity for professionals. With a really good result. So what I want you to take away from this talk. Hopefully is the knowledge. That you can all be creative. I think it's very important to realize that. And there are multiple ways to become more creative. Both just by you training yourselves. Or doing creativity training. Just being aware of all of these things. But what does the future hold for creativity? Now we have this knowledge that everybody can be creative. And you can train it. But what's next? And that's something that I think is very exciting. Because it's the trend of wearables. And this is not a product that I'm affiliated with. But it's a product that is a non-invasive technique. So you put these notes on your head. And this product that is up there is to kind of induce focus. But what we at Sync are developing now is a similar device. But that induces creativity. So we have a neuroscientist in our company. Which of course has made substantial research on the topic. And then we have all the creativity experts. So combining those two forces. We're very excited. But I can't really go into details. Because we're applying for a patent at the moment. But I could show you. This is from the first round of prototyping. So it's much more advanced. But this was from the very early stages of our development. So if you want to get more information about any of these things. Or are curious to learn more. You can find me on LinkedIn. Or email me. Or go to these websites. To get more information. So thank you for your attention. So the creativity hat is actually coming up. Or the creativity lap or something. I wanted to get an idea for a question. So I did your colleagues' wiki random thing here. And came up with an article about the hail storm in India in 1888. Where 230 people died. And what I thought about that was the hail storm thing. Are you saying that if we get together at a workshop. And we brainstorm. And we get ten ideas. And at another workshop we get a hundred. A hail storm of ideas. A hundred ideas. The end solution is better. Because we have. Is there a correlation between the number. Of ideas and the greatness of creativity? There is. Because the more ideas or more choices you have to choose from. You have much. Then you have more ways to kind of combine them. Because creativity is in a sense just coming up with new combinations of already existing elements. So the more you have to choose from. The more likely you are to come up with something more creative. So it actually works that way. Great. The next thing I want to add. I think it's what I really like about your presentation. Or your whole approach to this. Is that you don't have this. We got this 1% very creative people who are just popping out ideas all the time. And the rest of us can do nothing. You have another approach to it. I really love that. But the rest of us. All the ones of us who have to work. And with the processes. And all your steps. What's the most common mistake. We make. You said one thing. We brainstorming groups. We shouldn't do that. We should start brainstorming individually. Yeah. But what's. Could you give some other common mistakes we make. Well. That's the most common thing that I encounter in my work. The second thing is this tendency to jump into solution mode. And that actually. In my experience. Facilitating workshops with university students. Then it's not a problem. But once you get into companies. And they want you to facilitate. A creative workshop. They always tend to just jump to solutions. So you have to be very much aware. So like okay. No we're not thinking in that way. And then sometimes we just tell them. Okay just write it down. Put it in the parking lot. So people won't feel that we're just dismissing their inputs. So that's another very common thing. That you kind of. Yeah. You feel uncomfortable in this diverging space. Because you've gone through like 19 years of education. And you've just become. Yeah. Taught that. And then you're always just aiming for one solution. Or one correct answer. So that's kind of just because we're used to that. And then it's tricky to keep people in the opening up stage. For sure. Is there a question from the audience? Anyone wants to stimulate your processes or persons of creativity? Nope. Then we'll just give you a hand. Thank you very much for coming and sharing. Thank you.