UNLOCK YOUR OWN CREATIVITY - ROGER VON OECH (TEXT)

Text for III Semester B.A./ B. Com./ B. Sc. Additional English 

UNLOCK YOUR OWN CREATIVITY

ROGER VON OECH

If I held up a sheet of white paper and put a black dot on it with my pen, what would you see? I’ve used this demonstration on thousands of adults in the seminars I run, and invariably I get the same answer: ‘A black dot.’ When I tried it on a kindergarten class, a bunch of hands shot up. ‘A Mexican hat,’ called out one kid. ‘No, that’s a burnt hamburger’, said another. ‘A squashed insect,’ observed another. 

When young, we’re naturally creative because we let our minds run free. But as we’re taught to follow the rules, our thinking narrows. For much of life this can be a blessing: it wouldn’t do to create a new way home from work if it meant driving down the wrong side of the road.

But in many areas of our lives, creativity can be a matter of survival. Things are changing too fast to get along simply with old ideas. When I was working for IBM ten years ago, half of what any technical engineer had learnt became obsolete in only three years; it happens even sooner now. And what about our home lives? With, for instance, more and more women opting for careers and independence, couples have to be more creative about their relationships to avoid conflicts. 

Fortunately creativity isn’t all that mysterious. One important creative trait was well-defined by Nobel Prize-winning physician Albert Szent-Gyorgyi when he said, ‘Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.’

‘Mental Locks’

How do we start ‘thinking what nobody has thought’? Usually it takes a whack on the head, like Sir Isaac Newton supposedly has when an apple striking his skull awakened him to the laws of gravity. |Whacks can range from something as major as losing a job to something as trivial as wanting an unusual dish for a dinner party. We’re more likely to respond creatively – which is to say, think of a new ideas – if we’ve already been chipping away at the mental locks’ that close our minds.

What are these locks? As I said in my book A whack in the Side of the Head, for the most part they are our uncritical acceptance of seven common statements:

1.   Find the right answer. Almost from the first day of school, we’re taught that there’s one right answer to every problem. But many important issues are open-ended. Take the question, ‘What do I do now that I’ve lost my job?’ the obvious right answer is: ‘Look for another job.’ There is also a second right answer: ‘Go back to school and learn a new trade.’ Or a third: Start your own business.’

The mere act of looking for a second answer will often produce the new idea you need. As French philosopher Emile Chartier said, ‘Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.’

2.  That’s not logical. Hard, logical thinking can be death to a new idea because it eliminates alternatives that seem contradictory. New ideas germinate faster in the loose soil of soft thinking, which finds similar ties and connections among different things or situations.

In my workshops, I ask people to create metaphors to unlock their thoughts. A manager had been thinking logically about what was wrong with his company, but couldn’t get a grip on it until he came up with his metaphor: ‘Our company is a galley ship without a drummer. We’ve got some people rowing at full beat, some at one-half beat, and some dead beats.’ This man made himself the missing ‘drummer’, with the result that the operation smoothed out.

3.   Follow the rules. To get an idea, you often have to break rules that no longer make sense. My friend Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari Inc. And inventor of the first video game, is a dedicated rule breaker. Once Bushnell was trying to make coin-operated games more fun. For a long time he followed the rule that the playing field had to be 66 cm wide. Only when he threw away that rule and made the field 76 cm was he able to increase the game’s possibilities.

4.    Be practical. To grow, ideas initially need the wide realm of the possible, rather than the narrow one of the practical. You can enter this realm by asking, ‘What if……?’

An engineer in a chemical company startled his colleagues by asking, ‘What if we put gunpowder in our house paint? When it starts peeling in a few years, we just put a match to it and blow it off.’  The house might blow up with such a paint, but this engineer was talking to ‘idea’ men who brushed aside the impracticality and started thinking. Eventually they came up with the idea of an additive that could later be activated and cause paint to be easily stripped off walls. The company is now developing the process.

5.   Don’t be foolish. Humour can show is the ambiguity of situations, revealing a second and often startling answer.

Being foolish is a form of play. If necessity is the mother of invention, play is its father. When faced with a problem, let yourself play, risk being foolish. And write down the ideas that then come to you.

6.    That’s not my area. Fresh ideas almost invariably come from outside one’s field of specialization. Creative people have to be generalists, interested in everything and aware that what they learn in one field might prove useful in another. We’re all generalists at home – chefs, decorators, teachers, gardeners, handymen – and home is where to start being creative. The average homemaker is confronted daily with more creative opportunities than the middle manager in a company sees in a month. 

7.   I’m not creative. Most of us retain the idea that creativity is only for artists and inventors. And when we criticize ourselves as not creative, we set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. A person who thinks he’s not creative in his everyday life won’t try a creative solution to an important problem.

Self-esteem is essential to creativity because any new idea makes you a pioneer. Once you put an idea into action, you’re out there alone taking risks of failure and ridicule.

As management consultant Roy Blitzer had said, ‘The only person who likes change is a wet baby.’ But we need change – the type of change that comes through the creative thinking of all people, not just geniuses.  

Glossary

obsolete:          no longer used; out of date.

trait:                 distinguishing quality or characteristic

Sir Isaac Newton: the Physicist, credited with the formulation of the law of gravity

whack:             strike with a hard blow

trivial:              of small value or importance

germinate:       (cause to) start growth

metaphor:        a descriptive term which is imaginatively but not literally applicable e.g. Ranjit Singh, The Lion of Punjab.

galley:              a long, low-built ship with one deck, propelled by oars; a state barge; a kind of boat attached to a ship of war.

realm:              a sphere or domain

ambiguity:       uncertainty or dubiousness of meaning

esteem:            to have a good opinion of

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