Are We Being Creative Yet?

[n2doc]

by Julia Kirby


“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries,” A.A. Milne, of Winnie-the-Pooh fame, once noted. It’s a quotation that is included in all kinds of books, from Meditations for New Parents to The Girls’ Guide to AD/HD, because it provides such solace to the chaotically inclined. But it’s small consolation to anyone responsible for producing creative ideas on a reliable basis. Wouldn’t it be better if exciting discoveries emerged at the end of an orderly process—in other words, one more susceptible to management?

Instead, we are stuck with mystery and serendipity, a process so vague that serious students of product development call it the “fuzzy front end” of innovation. That is a growing source of anxiety because, to borrow terms made famous by James G. March, firms that used to be organized overwhelmingly for exploitation and only a little for exploration are now finding they need to reverse that ratio. Cutting-edge offerings obsolesce rapidly in today’s markets, and life’s basic needs are thoroughly commoditized. Having spent a century refining the processes, technologies, and performance measures of exploitation, organizations are trying to switch gears and make their explorations—the creative thinking that yields new advantages to exploit—more predictable and productive.

Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, helps us appreciate how tricky it will be to apply more discipline to imagination. Drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, he explains, for example, why amphetamines have helped writers such as W.H. Auden and mathematicians such as Paul Erdös crank out such inspired work. It seems the drugs act on a neuronal feedback loop by which pleasurable stimuli spark the brain’s ability to focus. Speed makes the close-in work of perfecting a poem or a theorem much more captivating. As for the more expansive process of generating conceptual breakthroughs, Lehrer shares proof from research using EEG monitors that it comes down to alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere, which allow connections to be made between formerly remote realms of thought. As in the old ad where peanut butter collides with chocolate, great innovation comes from combinations no one quite intended. In fact, only a mind that lacks intention, that has lapsed into an unfocused state, generates those alpha waves.

more
http://hbr.org/2012/03/are-we-being-creative-yet/ar/1

[saras]

1. Only an American would try to romanticize speed freaks as "inspired"

especially given the spectacularly crappy results that USUALLY appear.

Where's the research talking about what GOES AWAY when someone is on stimulants? Because when you have to WORK with someone on stimulants regularly it becomes REALLY OBVIOUS that there's a couple of rooms with no one home, so to speak. And they're important rooms, with things like empathy and compassion in them.