Synopsis
Thumbnail descriptions of the thinking
strategies commonly used by creative geniuses.
By Michael Michalko
How
do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that
produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of
relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins,
Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and
Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?
For
years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital
statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study
of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older
than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other
scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless
(Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated
nothing.
Academics
also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But
intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest
ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much to science or art. She is,
instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. Run-of-the-mill
physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who
many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely
respectable 122).
Genius
is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age
of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily
high I.Q., or even about being smart. After considerable debate initiated by J.
P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on
creativity in the sixties, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity
is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he
or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.
Most
people of average intelligence, given data or some problem, can figure out the
expected conventional response. For example, when asked, "What is one-half
of 13?" most of us immediately answer six and one-half. You probably
reached the answer in a few seconds and then turned your attention back to the
text.
Typically,
we think reproductively, that is on the basis of similar problems encountered
in the past. When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in our past
that has worked before. We ask, "What have I been taught in life,
education or work on how to solve the problem?" Then we analytically
select the most promising approach based on past experiences, excluding all
other approaches, and work within a clearly defined direction towards the
solution of the problem. Because of the soundness of the steps based on past
experiences, we become arrogantly certain of the correctness of our conclusion.
In
contrast, geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with
a problem, they ask "How many different ways can I look at it?",
"How can I rethink the way I see it?", and "How many different
ways can I solve it?" instead of "What have I been taught by someone
else on how to solve this?" They tend to come up with many different
responses, some of which are unconventional and possibly unique. A productive
thinker would say that there are many different ways to express "thirteen"
and many different ways to halve something. Following are some examples.
6.513 = 1 and 3
THIR TEEN = 4
XIII = 11 and 2
XIII = 8
(Note:
As you can see, in addition to six and one half, by expressing 13 in different
ways and halving it in different ways, one could say one-half of thirteen is
6.5, or 1 and 3, or 4, or 11 and 2, or 8, and so on.)With productive thinking,
one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. You consider the least
obvious as well as the most likely approaches. It is the willingness to explore
all approaches that is important, even after one has found a promising one.
Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average
person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in the
haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other
hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all the possible
needles.)
How
do creative geniuses generate so many alternatives and conjectures? Why are so
many of their ideas so rich and varied? How do they produce the
"blind" variations that lead to the original and novel? A growing
cadre of scholars are offering evidence that one can characterize the way
geniuses think. By studying the notebooks, correspondence, conversations and
ideas of the world's greatest thinkers, they have teased out particular common
thinking strategies and styles of thought that enabled geniuses to generate a
prodigious variety of novel and original ideas.
STRATEGIES
Following
are thumbnail descriptions of strategies that are common to the thinking styles
of creative geniuses in science, art and industry throughout history.
GENIUSES
LOOK AT PROBLEMS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. Genius often comes from finding a new
perspective that no one else has taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain
knowledge about the form of problems, you begin by learning how to restructure
it in many different ways. He felt the first way he looked at a problem was too
biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem
by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still
another. With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to
understand the essence of the problem. Einstein's theory of relativity is, in
essence, a description of the interaction between different perspectives.
Freud's analytical methods were designed to find details that did not fit with
traditional perspectives in order to find a completely new point of view.
In
order to creatively solve a problem, the thinker must abandon the initial
approach that stems from past experience and re-conceptualize the problem. By
not settling with one perspective, geniuses do not merely solve existing
problems, like inventing an environmentally-friendly fuel. They identify new
ones. It does not take a genius to analyze dreams; it required Freud to ask in
the first place what meaning dreams carry from our psyche.
GENIUSES
MAKE THEIR THOUGHTS VISIBLE. The explosion of creativity in the
Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of a vast
knowledge in a parallel language; a language of drawings, graphs and diagrams —
as, for instance, in the renowned diagrams of daVinci and Galileo. Galileo
revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams, maps, and
drawings while his contemporaries used conventional mathematical and verbal
approaches.
Once
geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop a skill
in visual and spatial abilities which give them the flexibility to display
information in different ways. When Einstein had thought through a problem, he
always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as
possible, including diagrammatically. He had a very visual mind. He thought in
terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along purely
mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning. In fact, he believed that words and
numbers, as they are written or spoken, did not play a significant role in his
thinking process.
GENIUSES
PRODUCE. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense
productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed
productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal
quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six
months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted.
Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein is best known
for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T. S. Elliot's
numerous drafts of "The Waste Land" constitute a jumble of good and
bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece. In a study of 2,036
scientists throughout history, Dean Kean Simonton of the University of
California, Davis found that the most respected produced not only great works,
but also more "bad" ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came
quality. Geniuses produce. Period.
GENIUSES
MAKE NOVEL COMBINATIONS. Dean Keith Simonton, in his 1989 book
Scientific Genius suggests that geniuses are geniuses because they form more
novel combinations than the merely talented. His theory has etymology behind
it: cogito — "I think — originally connoted "shake together":
intelligo the root of "intelligence" means to "select
among." This is a clear early intuition about the utility of permitting
ideas and thoughts to randomly combine with each other and the utility of
selecting from the many the few to retain. Like the highly playful child with a
pailful of Legos, a genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas,
images and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and
subconscious minds. Consider Einstein's equation, E=mc2. Einstein did not
invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light. Rather, by combining these
concepts in a novel way, he was able to look at the same world as everyone else
and see something different. The laws of heredity on which the modern science
of genetics is based are the results of Gregor Mendel who combined mathematics
and biology to create a new science.
GENIUSES
FORCE RELATIONSHIPS. If one particular style of thought
stands out about creative genius, it is the ability to make juxtapositions
between dissimilar subjects. Call it a facility to connect the unconnected that
enables them to see things to which others are blind. Leonardo daVinci forced a
relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This
enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. In 1865, F. A.
Kekule' intuited the shape of the ring-like benzene molecule by forcing a
relationship with a dream of a snake biting its tail. Samuel Morse was stumped
trying to figure out how to produce a telegraphic signal b enough to be
received coast to coast. One day he saw tied horses being exchanged at a relay
station and forced a connection between relay stations for horses and b
signals. The solution was to give the traveling signal periodic boosts of
power. Nickla Tesla forced a connection between the setting sun and a motor
that made the AC motor possible by having the motor's magnetic field rotate
inside the motor just as the sun (from our perspective) rotates.
GENIUSES
THINK IN OPPOSITES. Physicist and philosopher David Bohm
believed geniuses were able to think different thoughts because they could
tolerate ambivalence between opposites or two incompatible subjects. Dr. Albert
Rothenberg, a noted researcher on the creative process, identified this ability
in a wide variety of geniuses including Einstein, Mozart, Edison, Pasteur,
Joseph Conrad, and Picasso in his 1990 book The Emerging Goddess: The Creative
Process in Art, Science and Other Fields. Physicist Niels Bohr believed that if
you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought and your mind moves
to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought
to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions
for a new point of view to bubble freely from your mind. Bohr's ability to
imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the
principle of complementarity. Thomas Edison's invention of a practical system
of lighting involved combining wiring in parallel circuits with high resistance
filaments in his bulbs, two things that were not considered possible by
conventional thinkers, in fact were not considered at all because of an assumed
incompatibility. Because Edison could tolerate the ambivalence between two
incompatible things, he could see the relationship that led to his
breakthrough.
GENIUSES
THINK METAPHORICALLY. Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of
genius, believing that the individual who had the capacity to perceive
resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was
a person of special gifts. If unlike things are really alike in some ways,
perhaps, they are so in others. Alexander Graham Bell observed the comparison
between the inner workings of the ear and the movement of a stout piece of
membrane to move steel and conceived the telephone. Thomas Edison invented the
phonograph, in one day, after developing an analogy between a toy funnel and
the motions of a paper man and sound vibrations. Underwater construction was
made possible by observing how shipworms tunnel into timber by first
constructing tubes. Einstein derived and explained many of his abstract
principles by drawing analogies with everyday occurrences such as rowing a boat
or standing on a platform while a train passed by.
GENIUSES
PREPARE THEMSELVES FOR CHANCE. Whenever we attempt to do something
and fail, we end up doing something else. As simplistic as this statement may
seem, it is the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why
we have failed to do what we intended, and this is the reasonable, expected
thing to do. But the creative accident provokes a different question: What have
we done? Answering that question in a novel, unexpected way is the essential
creative act. It is not luck, but creative insight of the highest order.
Alexander Fleming was not the first physician to notice the mold formed on an
exposed culture while studying deadly bacteria. A less gifted physician would
have trashed this seemingly irrelevant event but Fleming noted it as
"interesting" and wondered if it had potential. This
"interesting" observation led to penicillin which has saved millions
of lives. Thomas Edison, while pondering how to make a carbon filament, was
mindlessly toying with a piece of putty, turning and twisting it in his
fingers, when he looked down at his hands, the answer hit him between the eyes:
twist the carbon, like rope. B. F. Skinner emphasized a first principle of
scientific methodologists: when you find something interesting, drop everything
else and study it. Too many fail to answer opportunity's knock at the door
because they have to finish some preconceived plan. Creative geniuses do not
wait for the gifts of chance; instead, they actively seek the accidental
discovery.
SUMMARY
Recognizing
the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make
you more creative in your work and personal life. Creative geniuses are
geniuses because they know "how" to think, instead of
"what" to think. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman published an
interesting study of the Nobel Prize winners who were living in the United States
in 1977. She discovered that six of Enrico Fermi's students won the prize.
Ernst Lawrence and Niels Bohr each had four. J. J. Thompson and Ernest
Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates. This was no
accident. It is obvious that these Nobel laureates were not only creative in
their own right, but were also able to teach others how to think creatively.
 |
| Michael Michalko |
Michael Michalko is one of the most highly
acclaimed creativity experts in the world and author of the best sellers
Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), ThinkPak (A Brainstorming Card
Deck), and Cracking Creativity (The Secrets Of Creative Genius).
As an officer in the United States Army,
Michael organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international
academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known
inventive-thinking methods. His international team applied those methods
to various NATO military, political, and social problems and in doing so it
produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old
problems. After leaving the military, Michael facilitated CIA think tanks
using his creative thinking techniques.
Michael
later applied these creative-thinking techniques to problems in the corporate
world with outstanding successes. Michael has provided keynote speeches,
workshops, and seminars on fostering creative thinking for clients who range
from Fortune 500 corporations, such as DuPont, Kellogg’s, General Electric,
Kodak, Microsoft, Exxon, General Motors, Ford, USA, AT&T, Wal-Mart,
Gillette, and Hallmark, to associations and governmental agencies. In
addition to his work in the United States, Michael has worked with clients in
countries around the world.
Originally published in The Creativity Post
No comments :
Post a Comment