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
*****
No comments:
Post a Comment