Creative thinking — how to get out of the box and generate ideas
By Giovanni Corazza at TEDxRoma
Sometimes, easy meets difficult. Have you ever been assigned an easy task which for you it’s actually very difficult to perform and maybe for anybody else. And that is when you experience frustration. I have experienced that when I started to (?) singing lessons and my teacher told me to breathe with my diaphragm. That’s easy to a natural breath, but actually very difficult to do and a secret of a great singer, and it’s similar to what happen when a boss comes in to a meeting and tells you to think out of the box.
“Come on give me creative ideas, think out of the box! I wanna hear that. I need innovation.”
Easy? Simple? But actually very hard to do. You need to practice, you need to know how to get out of the box, where to go, and how you can come back inside the box because that’s where we live. We actually live inside a box. So I wanna ask these questions, I wanna ask those questions to myself, and this presentation is a journey through my answer. I hope some of these will resonate with yours.
So the first thing is to ask why. Why should you really go out of the box? Because inside the box we feel safe, we are agreed by everybody else, and when we go out, we risk out reputation. We work so hard for life to build it up, why should we risk it? Is it something which is a luxury that only few people can do, or is it really a necessity? So why? Think of our life today, we are any byte of the network, we are (?) in the network, we share information here real time, and we in the end, all possess the same information. That’s the end of it. And there is a scary thought: if we all possess the same information, what makes the difference between ourselves? Where (?) or dignity of human being lie? It really depends on what we generate with that common shared information. So to think creatively, to go out of the box is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for us and for a dignity as human being.
So which box are we talking about? We must ever clear the definition so that we’re really talking about something specific. It’s not our minds, we cannot think out of our minds. It’s a boundary within our minds, the boundary between what we know, and what we yet ever still, or yet thought about. What is on mind? What is on knowledge structure? Is it an emerging phenomenon out of the complex mechanism which is the brain. We start with the initial conditions are genetic characters. We have boundary conditions, the environment, we have indirect experience. Years and years spent in school and university to learn what other people left thought, what other people left discovered, what other people left created, and then we have our own direct experience, are successes or failures that really made what we are. All of this built the ant hills within which we live, and we live very well in that, and whatever we think inside that, until that box we feel safe, whatever outside is invisible to us, we don’t know what is outside and that’s risky because now nobody else knows. And so, we are faced with is something necessary to our dignity, but actually it’s very difficult to do.
How do we go out of the box? How do we do that? What are the mechanisms? Do we need to wait for an apple to fall on our head or are there some specific techniques? Well… reality out there for us to perceive it. It’s beautiful. You see these flowers. And we have a lot of ideas, which are convergent to information. The dominant idea, whenever we need to think about an area, a focused area, we have idea on how things should be. We have requirements, we have specification, we know how things are because that’s the way they always have been. But if we want to go out of the box, we need to add something more, a little spice, something which go beyond the convergent information, something wrong, something absurd, something apparently is not relevant, something which takes us far. This is what we called divergent information. We need a little bit of that divergent information to cross the border within our mind from what we know to what we ever thought about. So this is the essential mechanism that’s necessary and it takes us to a place we don’t really know where to go. We are suspended. It’s like the middle game in chess. Where do you go once you’re out of the box, you have no preset direction, so it’s already potential situation that brings us to the feeling that we should immediately go back. This now makes any sense, let’s go back to safe place, let’s go back inside the box. That’s the temptation that we need to resist. We need to value long thinking, normally we talk about brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking but here we’re talking about something different, long thinking. What dose that mean? It’s some thought that takes us far, it’s as if you were reading poetry or listening to music, you don’t judge the single notes, you don’t judge the single words. It’s the (?) that gives you feeling and takes you far. We must do the same thing without concepts. We need to go far. And so we can use association of ideas, combination of ideas, extraction of principle and application of those principles to areas where they never applied before. We need to be open minded, we need to be fluent. Look for alternatives and not for the correct answer because when you think creatively, there’s no single correct answer, there are many possible alternatives.
And suppose now that we are lucky, we land upon a new idea, we are now travel in the exploration out of the box. What is the value that, how do we assess the value of new ideas, it’s very difficult, it is really new because you’ve never seen that before, nobody else has seen that before. It’s as if we planed on a new planet, totally undiscovered territory, and it’s difficult to understand the value of something new. First of all because we don’t feel entitled to be inventors. Who am I to be the generator of that new idea? And probably this was being thought about before, if this is correct, somebody would have done it before me. These are all natural mechanism within which we kill our own ideas. We have to resist that. We need to look for the match between new idea and our initial drive, our initial focus. Or, evaluate the idea per se, for its own value, and maybe that’s something that solve another problem, which was not yours. Several deepities happen all the time, we just need to have the eye to see that, to notice the difference.
Okay but we are social animals, we live in environment, so to think out of the box, bringing new ideas we gonna challenge the environment. When is it a good idea to challenge everybody around you? In your working environment, you’re the boss, you don’t want to upset him or her. When is it a good idea to think out of the box? Well first of all, if the environment punishes mistakes, you will never be tempted to go out of the box, would remain safely in the non environment. So it you want to stimulate an environment which is creative, you need to allow the existence of divergent information, you need to allow your relevant information to come in, you have to mix and match different disciplines, you have to use metaphors in the organizations. Only in that case, you would allow the environment be ready to prone to generation of new ideas.
So I wanna end my talk with a little experience, we want to do interaction with you but the time is scarce so I have indeed prepared a little thing but if you believe me and to be honest this is created in space of few minutes, the generation of ideas travel outside of the box, something which happens very fast. So where should we experiment? Well let’s say we would like to generate new ideas about TEDx conferences, we are here so… focused area is very clear to all of us. Now let’s start from convergent information about TEDx conferences. What is needed to make an excellent, good TEDx conference. Well you need the brilliant speakers that will come up, you need an excellent theme, you need fast speaker to speaker transition, you need grand setting… ok the list can go on and all I’m saying is things that you already know, it is all convergent information, says I’m not generating anything new, I’m inside the box. Now I want to go out so I apply a divergent modifier to any of the convergent elements, start from the last one for example, grand setting. So an example to divergent modifier is to exaggerate, bring it to the limit. So instead of thinking of a TEDx conference in a theater, think of a TEDx conference in a stadium! Does this make any sense? Very difficult to work an (?) but more difficult to work in a stadium. And how do you feel the place? How do you feel the stadium. It’s too difficult. Doesn’t make any sense. I’m tempted to reject that idea, but then I move and I say, “Ok maybe the stadium is a readied field with people, so from that you can get the idea of having a TEDx conference at half time on football matches and next works of speeches which happen at half time football matches, good idea bad idea I leave it for you to assess.
Take another element, good speakers, brilliant speakers, that’s the most from mental elements of a TEDx conference. Let’s tick that away, we eliminate the good brilliant speakers. Does this make any sense? No. We’re out of the box. Well I can say I don’t need the speakers but I need the speeches, the talks, the scripts. From this (?) of one speaker delivering the speak to somebody else, we exchange speakers. So a coorporative TEDx conference, maybe we have duets on stage instead of (?) single element or we have people speaking about somebody else topic, and in that way we have (?) at least, we take away the element of eagle, there’s no eagle anymore, just speaking, with somebody else just script.
So these are just example to show you that it’s possible and not too (?) actually to think out of the box. I hope this journey, in a way was interesting for you and now you want to do more of that so thank you very much for your…
Wow! Lots of (?)!! And there might be some unseen mistaken words too. Hope my listening skill gets better next time. What should I practice with next?
