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Cracking Creativity

My condensed notes and summaries.

Intro / Overview

The book presents thinking strategies of creative giants from: science, arts, industry.

Advice: Find excellent mentors. It is obvious that creative geniuses successfully transmitted their genius. Fermi's students had 6 nobel prize winners. Bohr's students had 4 nobel prize winners.

Productive Thinking First (stop using reproductive thinking)

Feynman proposed schools should teach productive thinking instead of reproductive thinking.

  • Productive Thinking: Creative. Generate as many approaches as you can no matter how likely. look for all the possible needles by dissecting the haystack.
  • Reproductive Thinking: Not creative. Rehash your experience into solutions. Rigid and narrow. Not competitive, others already thought of it.

Idea Goals: Quantify and Qualify

  • Be Productive: Geniuses set concrete numeric goals for their ideas in the short term. Writers set quotas for writing, Edison set goals for small (1 per 10 days) and big inventions (1 per 6 months).
  • Blind Variations: Produce original and novel variations. This is the core principle.

Selecting Ideas to Invest Time Into

  • Within the mileu of ideas, let natural selection make choices. Evolution finds novel paths with a fitness algorithm.
  • What is the fitness algorithm for our ideas? I suspect the book to be light on this topic.
  • Place to dig deeper on my own?

Practice, Practice, Practice (Productive Thinking)

Organize your thinking by practicing these 9 strategies. Without practice, you will get no benefit.

Intro Summaries

These are summaries of the intro, not the whole book.

Part 1: Seeing what no one else is seeing.

  1. Knowing How to See
  2. Use many unrelated perspectives to reimagine a problem
  3. Don't just solve the existing problem, invent new problems and improve the problem space
  4. Trent: I often find that the solution is obvious if I use my practical skills to enrich the question space
  5. Define new problems as necessary even if they don't seem related.
  6. Making Your Thought Visible
  7. Use diagrams, mock ups, anything to break out of written and verbal (away from language, math, dialogue)
  8. Formulate the subject as many ways as possible, especially with diagrams

Part 2: Thinking What No One Else is Thinking

Strategy 1 is used to produce a quantity of ideas.

Strategies 2-6 are for getting "blind variations" demonstrate how to incorporate chance and randomness to destabilize existing patterns of thinking and reorganize thoughts in new ways.

Strategy 7 is "conditions for effective group brainstorming" and "a selection of world class brainstorm techniques".

  1. Thinking Fluently
  2. The most respected scientists produced the most GREAT works -and- the most BAD works.
  3. Geniuses produce. Period.
  4. Edison had invention quotas: small every 10 days, large every 6 months
  5. Bach wrote a Cantana per week, even when exhausted
  6. Einstein produced 248+ papers
  7. Writers have daily writing quotas, trent: see john steinbeck and stephen king
  8. Making Novel Combinations
  9. "Combinatory Play" - Einstein's self-proclaimed essential feature in productive thought.
  10. Form more novel combinations than anyone else.
  11. Constantly combine and recombine from a large pool of parts (like legos)
  12. The more you do the more success you will have. Go quickly and thoroughly.
  13. Also use your subconscious (diffuse mode) by switching between different idea spaces then entering diffuse mode (meditation, sleep, eating, talking, physical labor, resting, exercise)
  14. Connecting the Unconnected
  15. Force completely unrealistic connections, see where they work, repeat. The winners will come out.
  16. Tesla: the sun aroud the earth and the AC motor (magnet rotates). - example of zany idea yielding creative outcome
  17. Da Vinci: The sound of a bell and a stone hitting water (visual & auditory waves)
  18. Looking at the Other Side
  19. David Bohm: Tolerate ambivalence between opposite or incompatible subjects
  20. Niels Bohr: if you hold opposites together, you suspend your thought and your mind moves to a new level
  21. Niels Bohr imagined light as both a particle and a wave (incompatible, yet it is still true)
  22. Looking in Other Worlds
  23. Analogies between unrelated systems
  24. Inspiration from toys and nature
  25. Finding What You Are Not Looking For
  26. First principle of the Creative Accident
  27. Answering the question in a novel, unexpected way is the essential creative act
  28. B.F. Skinner's first principle for scientific methodologists: "When you find something interesting, drop everything and study it."

  29. Drop your preconcieved plan with conviction and study the new thing.

  30. Awakening the Collaborative Spirit

  31. Principles and conditions for participants to retain their individuality while combining their efforts and talents in a group in ways vital for collaborative synthesis.
  32. Collegial. Open & honest collaboration.

Strategy One: Knowing How to See

  • Da Vinci: "saper vedere" is knowing how to see
  • first perspective is usually wrong
  • move repeatedly to new perspectives, deepen understanding along the way
  • "Invitational Stem" - start problem statement with "In what ways may I..." to avoid narrowing the problem statement to one perspective.
  • Human language plays a role: Verbalize and write out a problem (and other ways) -- do not solve silently -- for better outcomes.
  • Don't persist with any one perspective.
  • Try using a whole different system and terms to express the same relationship
  • Restructuring your problems more makes it more likely you will deepen your perspective

Ways to restructure your problem:

  • Global and Specific Abstractions
  • Separate the parts from the whole
  • Change the words in some fashion
  • Make positive action statements
  • Switch perspective
  • Use Da Vinci's multiple perspectives
  • Use Questions

Global and Specific Abstractions

Quip

"Make it more global and specific."

Tips

  • To widen your perspective use the "5 whys": Ask why 5 times to your answer to the previous why. Find the level of abstraction that fits.
  • Ask "Who, what, when, where, why, how?"
  • The more specifically you define your problem statement, the easier it will be to generate ideas. (tradeoffs)
  • Trent: Specific statements miss solutions, abstraction may be necessary to discover something great.

Summary

  • "Abstraction is a basic principle in restructuring a problem."
  • "Widening the perspective", at the maximum "globalize" the problem
  • Find the APPROPRIATE level of abstaction.
  • "Standard procedure for physical science is abstraction."
  • Galileo "ideal vacuum" thought experiment imagined a large vacuum existed (none was available)
    • all items fall through a vacuum with the same acceleration regardless of their weight
    • More abstract version of "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks?"
    • removes the pound: "what accelerates faster in a vacuum, a feather or a brick?" (neither)
  • Einstein relativity was also unobservable.
  • "More specific problem statements lead to faster solutions with less conceptual clarity."
  • oil spill: driveway vs gulf coast
  • new keyboard design vs new global IT industry niche
  • Shipping industry too focused on reducing costs of ships
  • Perspective change, global problem statement: "In what way can the shipping industry lower reduce costs?"
  • Solution: Separate loading and stowing. Container ships reduced port time, congestion, theft. Ships spend more time traveling
    • ship is "capital equipment" - spends more time doing its unique work of moving)
    • costs down 60%

Separate the Parts from the Whole

Move from one detail to another examining it in isolation from the rest.

  • Fishbone Diagram
  • good for processing a "north star" or large vision
  • find relationships between causes and effects
  • use more than one session to work on a diagram
  • let the diagram cook overnight (in your mind) and then return to find your fresh thoughts & ideas

Words and Word Chains

  • Aristotle work titled "On Interpretation" - words and chains of words are powerful tools of thought
  • both reflect thinking and shape thinking
  • Words crystallize thought, creating precision and rigidity. (both strength and weakness)

Rephrase the Problem / Feynman

  • avoid definitions such as "friction", "energy" (trent: this abstraction can hide important meaning too early)
  • students should rephrase what they learn in their own language
  • example of avoiding "friction": shoe soles go flat because notches and bumps in the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off

  • trent: now we see the sidewalk-shoe interface is more like a slow table saw, scooping a little rubber from various places each step

  • Example: Toyota asked employees a question 2 ways, the 1st failed, the 2nd worked:

  • "How can you be more productive at work?"
  • "How can you make your job easier?"

Change the Words

  • Try changing the verb, it is easier to do.
  • Play with verbs and nouns:
  • Transpose the Words
  • Aristotle "convertibility" - "if every pleasure is good, some good must be pleasure." (questionable)
    • find a "verbal-conceptual chain" to trigger a "different view"
  • "How can I get a promotion?" vs "How can I promote myself?"
    • interesting relationship even though it's just a random transposition.
  • "How can I learn to use the internet?" vs "How can I use the internet to learn?"
    • 21 years later this one hits spot on, that's a major use of the internet.
  • The first word often influences, for example:
  • "skyscraper prayer temple cathedral" = architectural concepts
  • "prayer skyscraper temple cathedral" = religious concepts

One Word Technique