Are there different steps in the creative process?
A creative problem-solving process actually encompasses two processes, an idea generation process and a decision-making process.
Principle 1: A new idea is a combination of old ideas.
Principle 2: The ability to retrieve old ideas for new combinations depends largely on data that we have in memory and the ability to see relationships.
Step 1: Data collection. This step is primarily associated with the left side of the brain and includes:
Look for specific information related to the objects and subjects involved with the problem and be informed about data and facts that a priori would seem indecipherable or not related to the problem
Step 2: Analysis and synthesis.-Alternative use of the left and right side of the brain that includes, Chewing the information. Examine, reexamine, join, separate, invert, so that there is no angle from which it has not been visualized. It requires sequential and non-sequential, individual and group processes.
Then successively develop and synthesize the information as if it were a dialectical process.
Step 3: Pause and momentarily abandon the subject. This requires suspending the process on the left side of the brain to move to the right and taking the issue out of the conscious plane for the unconscious to work.
Step 4: Enlightenment or experience the discovery and emergence of ideas
It generally occurs at times when activity is necessarily concentrated on the right side of the brain.
Step 5: Action, that is, lower the idea to the real world and here we enter into innovation. In general, it requires some steps prior to implementation.
1. Register the idea. Many are lost due to lack of registration and forgetfulness.
2. Submit the idea to third parties. Although it can operate as a block (excessive negative criticism), many times it is reinforced or new ideas are originated.
Understanding blockages and the idea generation process leads directly to a consideration of creativity techniques. What to do to improve the production of ideas?
The growth of creativity in a group or organization is achieved by increasing the potential for individual creativity and improving the group processes of generating ideas.
All classical teaching is nourished by concepts, techniques and tools mainly based on analysis, logic and structuring. Consequently, many of us find ourselves blocked from generating creative alternatives.
Knowing the creative process and its techniques will allow us to develop a part of our potential capacity that will result in creative proposals.
However, being creative is not being innovative. Innovation is applied creativity.
To be creative and innovative it is necessary that we go beyond the creative process and its techniques. Innovation is directly related to implementation and the Market.
What is the difference between creativity and innovation?
Theodore Levitt referred to creativity and innovation saying: Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Ideas are useless unless they are used. The proof of its value is in its implementation.
The creative process and innovation are closely related to the decision-making process.
In general, we could say that creativity is most important in the early stages, when the divergent process is most necessary.
Then, when we go into action, creativity becomes innovation, this is part of implementation.
In organizations there are creative individuals and innovative individuals, but sometimes they are not the same person. There are innovators who take ideas from others and put them into practice.
The innovative individual is based on the theory that change is normal and healthy. He doesn't see it as a threat, an enemy that he has to fight against. Adopting innovation implies a continuous and systematic search for change in order to adapt strategies and plans to the new reality.
A concrete example of the risk in optimizing what exists, instead of aiming towards new needs, we have in the computer market.
IBM kept its sights on hardware and Microsoft targeted software. One is oriented to optimize the existing, the other to innovate.
I left Harvard because I had a vision, I saw a computer on every desk, said Bill Gates.
Does the creative process have a historical background?
There are numerous antecedents, for example it is said in the Encyclopedia Britannica that many psychoactive substances have been historically associated with creativity.
Ancient Persians drank wine when making decisions, but the process consisted of two parts: at night they got drunk and threw their ideas out; the next day, already serene, they selected those that seemed appropriate.
The Romans made decisions using a methodology similar to De Bono's PNI, that is, defining which instructions or commands were positive, which were negative, and which were interesting and should be reinforced.
In the Renaissance many artists used tools similar to the SCAMPER to modify their sculptures or improve the synthesis and composition of their paintings and frescoes.
Even due to the large number of illiterate people, it was common since medieval times, the use of banners and posters with graphics to mark canteens, inns and tax collecting offices.
Around 1900 Freud developed most of his creative ideas based on using psychotropic drugs and using hypnosis to extract data and analyze results.
Advertising has developed numerous tools that still need to be studied since the storyboard, despite being used in Hollywood in 1920, has already known antecedents in China 300 BC.
How do you learn best?
One must have Knowledge but knowing is not the same as doing. Then you must also know how to implement something valuable to your context.
Has someone become a good cook by watching a television program? I doubt it.
So you learn with knowledge and its implementation.
Although I would tell you three conclusions about learning related to Innovation.
The first is that to innovate, you have to see life "through the eyes of a child."
The second is that one of your goals should be for all the managers in your company to teach classes at the university, since the best way to learn is when you have to teach others.
The third is that the game is a great way to learn because in a short space of time it allows you to condense many of the experiences, many of them irrational, that occur in the usual dynamics of a company and draw invaluable conclusions.
In fact, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned by watching a soccer team.
One recognizes the skills that I learned on the court that neither the school nor the university were able to teach me: teamwork, leadership (especially if you are a coach), communication, problem and conflict resolution, decision-making, strategy, perseverance, motivation, commitment, time management and frustration…
How does the college or university address these competencies? Could a teacher show them to me?
I doubt it.
And what is the relationship between learning and innovation?
There are two factors: the error and the questions
I do not believe that the recipes in the books (not even for cooking are a guarantee of success) and even less that the behavior or the skills of a person change by the act of reading a book.
You do not learn something until you do it (it is not enough to know it) and especially if you remember it in the future and know how to do it again.
That is, it is difficult to forget how to swim or ride a bike even if you go several years without doing it.
Innovating requires that you know how to do something very well and that you have defined the context for your innovation. There is no innovation if the market does not accept your product or service.
What is the best way to learn?
Let's think about what you do when you want someone, for example your son, to really learn something… You teach him and, if you don't know, you give him a private teacher. The 1 to 1 is without a doubt the best option. The 1 to 30, although Education massifies, it damages the quality.
Alexander the Great knew this perfectly well and had at his disposal a privileged tutor like Aristotle.
If you do not understand how people learn, then you will never know how to teach and most people involved in learning processes do not.
Tell me how you teach and I'll tell you how you think people learn.
Studying does not mean learning, listening or reading does not mean learning.
Although each person is different and therefore we can talk that there are different styles, there are those who prefer to document themselves first, there are those who prefer to try, there are those who prefer to see how someone else does it, there are those who prefer to be accompanied step by step during the process, we all learn the same way: by doing.
KNOWING is the result of practice, it comes after DOING, not before.
Having the best teachers in the world is not a guarantee of anything as long as the 2 main obstacles that have education on its knees and systematically turning its back on reality are not knocked down:
1. What we teach. Teachers and their students are prisoners and conditioned by the curriculum within which they must teach. A retrograde resume that no one has the courage to throw away and thank you for your services.
There cannot be a single resume. How many of us could pass the university entrance exam today?
2. How we teach. In line with what happens with the Curriculum, the teaching methods currently used by universities are not the most effective for our children to learn what is necessary to successfully live their lives.
Having the teacher recite lessons and the students listening and taking tests is the antithesis of learning by doing.
The human brain is not designed to listen to a teacher for 1 hour.
It doesn't absorb information that way.
Adults have forgotten 100% of what we heard or read while we were in school. And this is important because learning is remembering, if today you don't remember how to do an Integral, then you didn't learn it.
Nor does it help that the teacher is a feared figure to please rather than a tutor who accompanies you and helps you learn.
And as long as the students do not have the possibility to choose according to their interests, curiosities and needs, it will be very difficult to convince them that school is an important place.
Is it easy to innovate?
Innovating is unpredictable and means learning to do things differently or to do things that have never been done before.
Why does a person want to innovate?
Can you teach how to innovate?
Can it be learned?
How?
Where do they teach you to innovate?
Did Leonardo da Vinció or Steve Jobs do masters to learn to innovate?
It seems that one does not choose to be innovative, unlike when we are forced to choose whether we want to be doctors or lawyers.
Innovating is not a profession but rather a trait, a quality. To verify if a person is innovative, you have to check how he relates to failure, because before being successful, you are going to suffer countless disappointments and therefore you should not be afraid of anything.
As an answer to Can't or Has Always Been Done That Way, the main question innovators ask themselves is Why not? Knowledge and Innovation have a common nexus, which is learning.
Will education make us happier?
Education and school evade the fundamental question: All mathematics, all physics, or all the history of the world will not help make people happier, it will not make them better citizens or better professionals.
Society continues to promote application and study as virtues and considers English, computing and geometry as education. Forcing to learn and to study is like forcing to profess a religion, something that hardly succeeds.
It just isn't real.
Learning is like going to the gym, now that we live in the age of fitness.
It is a long process, it requires sacrifice, perseverance. No one would expect any kind of aesthetic or health result from going to the gym for a week and never coming back.
In the same way, no one should expect results from attending a course, no matter how sophisticated and attractive it may seem.
What is for you then a person educated for the future?
Our concept of the educated person, which is not the antithesis of rude, remains the same as in the 19th century.
Just take a look at what our children have to learn in school: Literature, poetry, philosophy, history, mathematics,… But the world has changed a lot since then.
We continue to consider intellectuals those especially enlightened in literature, history and humanities who maintain the reputation of cultured and, therefore, better educated. This influences the way we educate our young people.
Thousands of graduates are graduated in geography and history, philosophy, art or philology because we continue to think that this is what educated citizens consists of. We decided that in schools algebra and trigonometry should be learned instead of basic notions of business / company, medicine / health and emotional intelligence.
And this happens because we think that trigonometry is more important. It seems as if we do not realize that the mission of education is to prepare and give tools to our young people to face the life that lies ahead with guarantees.
When we place more emphasis on intellectual aspects (Latin, chemistry, grammar) instead of human aspects such as interpersonal relationships (partner, children, friends, colleagues), communication, self-management, critical thinking, creativity, innovation, invention or imagination, It is because we continue to carry the vision of education from remote elitist times.
What other explanation is there but?
Some time ago, someone used to say a meaningful phrase to me after a funeral, "At school they never told us that these things happen and they never taught us to handle these situations."
But in school, confidence or self-esteem are nothing compared to learning integrals or Newton's laws
Ultimately, I believe that we are not educating for the future, although we know that education always presents the dilemma that it is not known what will be needed in the future.
But with curricula and teacher training from 1950, the future cannot be faced.
So does studying for a degree make sense?
At this point I dare to make an overwhelming statement: Very few professionals would be able to pass even one of the exams that we did during the career today.
The funny thing is that this fact does not seem to have had a decisive influence on our professional career. Why is this happening?
The bad thing is not that we have forgotten almost everything we studied in college, the bad thing is that we didn't even learn it, although many will not want to recognize it.
The brain has an enormous facility to eliminate the useless, everything that we do not use again in our lives.
Memory and learning are closely linked to emotions and what we need in our professional and family life.
You will have to take and try to know the concepts of the subjects of the career you choose but later you will really see that the work practice will teach you the rest.
You must be willing to learn every day. The university should be concerned with evaluating how students exit their classrooms and not how they enter.
In life, we are evaluated every day by clients, bosses, competitors, colleagues, family, etc. So who needs the exams? It would not be better to check how tasks are done rather than pure theory.
And what about Knowledge?
The most important problems of a country and its companies have their origin in the lack of knowledge.
It is not that these problems (Education, Health, Transportation, etc.) cannot be solved, but rather that the responsible persons do not have the necessary knowledge to solve them.
300 years ago, to move on land, the horse was the fastest means of transport. The automobile was not an option, simply because the proper knowledge to invent it did not yet exist. And when the car was a reality, there was still no knowledge to invent the airplane and so on. And tomorrow? There is no choice but to innovate because it is obvious that we lack knowledge.
Knowledge is already the currency of exchange and has very particular characteristics since it expires and depreciates much more quickly than money.
Knowledge is not an asset of companies since people have it and since companies do not own people, they have to invest in them if they do not want them to devalue.
If you have knowledge, you have money. However, if you have money, you do not necessarily have knowledge, you must buy it, which is not easy since it is not a product that is sold in supermarkets, especially in this era of talent shortage.
Is all the knowledge in the books?
No, more and more there is knowledge and skills, which weigh as much as knowledge, that are outside the books or when it reaches magazines and books it is not properly updated.
And other times the knowledge is unconscious.
For example, let's see the phases of the process to learn to drive your car.
1. I DON'T KNOW I DON'T KNOW: When we are 4 years old, we are not even aware of it since we get in the car and someone moves us from one place to another.
2. I KNOW I DON'T KNOW: At 17, we are fully aware of our lack of knowledge as we want to stop depending on our parents to be able to move freely. At that moment, motivation leads us to be prepared to learn.
3. I KNOW I KNOW: When we first get a driver's license, we are supposed to know but we need to think about every action we take because we are still very unskilled and lacking in dexterity.
4. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I KNOW: Several years later and thousands of hours and miles later, we don't even think about what we're doing when we're driving, but rather we talk on the phone, listen to the radio, or get lost in thought.
The knowledge has been internalized and is in our hands, feet and head.
I recently posed this question: We are pedaling our bike and suddenly we are slightly off balance to the left. Which way would we turn to avoid falling?
Most people respond incorrectly (to the right) while riding the bike would do the right thing (to turn left).
Today companies know that the main raw material with which they work is knowledge. One of the main problems is that knowledge is transparent, it is not seen, it is not known how much it measures, or how much it weighs, or how much it is worth, it cannot be packaged or stored.
Thus, while all companies have a strategy to take advantage of their physical assets (buildings, products, money, infrastructure), almost none is capable of managing that intangible asset that is so elusive but at the same time so essential as knowledge.
It seems elementary that if companies want to manage knowledge, they need to do it in the same way that people do, but for that they first need to understand how they do it.
It happens that to manage knowledge, you must first have knowledge to manage and the way to acquire knowledge is… by learning.
There can be no knowledge without learning and learning something is available to everyone. But learning depends on what you already know and it is like a ladder that you have to go up little by little and in succession.
It is not enough to know something but it is necessary to know how to do with that knowledge.
How is it possible that we think the wrong thing and at the same time do the right thing?
That's the goodness of internalized knowledge-
What differentiates a creative problem from an inventive problem?
The uniqueness of inventive problems over creative problems is that in inventive problems there is always a contradiction, be it physical or administrative or technical.
In creative problems one uses techniques at random, or analogical or antithetical, but without having strictly defined the objective, allowing oneself to be carried away by imagination and intuition, and then hundreds of ideas are collected and the best ones are filtered. They are valid methods, but also highly inefficient.
Instead, TRIZ focuses on the different contradictions and eliminates them without reaching compromise solutions. Hence its use in companies.
Because ultimately a contradiction, be it administrative, technical or physical, is a problem that affects the business, and therefore the company itself, since another company can occupy part of the market if it works without contradictions. There are numerous inventive examples in history and all derive from eliminating mostly physical or managerial contradictions.
Examples of inventions are the carts that in Sumerian times, 4000 years ago, used completely solid wheels to transport goods. But the Greeks had to make war and streamline logistics and so they invented spokes on the wheels to make them lighter and added metal rims to make them more durable.
Notice the medieval double entry accounting summaries of the Templars, who were the forerunners of the banks. They eliminated the contradiction of using one variable instead of two.
The Egyptians 5000 years ago, to build their pyramids they needed large blocks of rock and to make them easily transportable over long distances, they invented wooden platforms with waxed trunks to slide on the sand, that is, they saw the contradiction between doing a lot of mechanical work by the rubbing of the rocks to the ground and minimized it in their own way.
Are there differences between creativity, innovation and invention?
Yes, there are big differences and they have different studies and principles.
Most of the courses, Masters and seminars only get to introduce themselves in creativity but Innovation and invention are practically unknown in Argentina.
And even within the creative seminars that are given locally, alternatives are available, but the treatment of the different creative ideas and their commercial viability, in what would come to be the Innovation of a product, is not considered.
The creativity is the identification of a problem and the generation and development of several alternative ideas to fix it.
The innovation is the selection, development and commercialization of a creative idea that solves a problem in a given time. In other words, it is inextricably linked to the market.
Finally, the Invention occurs when all the technical and physical contradictions of an object, system or process are overcome.
Innovation and invention are studied with Triz, the Inventive Problem Solving Theory, which makes it possible to optimize products based on successful patents, resolve technical or physical contradictions and forecast new generations of products and processes.
Unfortunately, these topics of Innovation and Invention are not yet studied in Argentina.
