Creative People Pull from the Resources Around Them | Stanford Professor Tina Seelig

Creativity requires 2 things: motivation and experimentation. Now, what do I mean by this? Motivation. It means you have to be driven to solve a problem. It can be a little tiny motivation. It doesn't have to be a big motivation. It can be something little to just get you started. Unfortunately, most people in the world are puzzle builders. Now, what is a puzzle builder? A puzzle builder is somebody who— I like puzzles. looks at the box top of the puzzle, sees what someone else wants them to make, gathers all the pieces out of the box, and puts them together to do what someone else has essentially designed for them. But let me ask you a question. What happens— what happens if you're a puzzle builder and you're missing a piece or 2 or 3 to the puzzle? What happens?

You have to make your own.

You have— might have to make your own, but what happens to this puzzle? You can't complete it, right? These are the people who say, you know, I'm sorry, that part is out of stock. I'm sorry, the person we need is on vacation. I'm sorry, it can't be done. But you're right. What's your name?

Sean.

Sean. Okay. So Sean, you're right. The real innovators— and I'm going to guess that you're one of them— doesn't stop there, okay? These are folks who are not puzzle builders, they are quilt makers. They're the ones who say, I'm going to basically make all the parts. I'm going to figure out what my goal is and I'm going to do whatever I can. I'm going to gather the resources I have at my disposal to make something amazing. So that's what real creative people are. They're quilt makers as opposed to puzzle builders. But as I said, it doesn't take a lot of motivation to just get started. In fact, one of the things you've probably learned about— have you done any design thinking workshops?

Yes.

Great. What is one of the things you do if you want to test your ideas? What do you do if you want to test an idea?

Sean? Throw them at people.

You throw them at people and what do you throw at people? Do you throw the whole thing or what do you throw?

Whatever you've got so far.

Whatever you've got so far and what you have is maybe a prototype. Prototype.

Right?

You know that word prototype? Okay. You've got something little and quick and dirty to— and in fact, one of the biggest problems I see all over the world, all over the world, is that people are afraid to show their ideas to other folks until they're fully cooked, until they look done, until they look pretty, until they put a lot of time into it. But here's the problem. If you take your idea and you spend a huge amount of time crafting it so it looks beautiful, making a beautiful PowerPoint deck, building a beautiful prototype, you know, something really beautiful, you've put a lot of time into it. time in, you've spent a lot of money, you're really committed to it, and it's much less likely that people are even going to give you feedback. So the key is to do something really quick and dirty to get quick feedback to see if you're doing the right thing. So I'm going to show you a quick video that came from IDEO. Do you know IDEO, the design firm?

Yes.

Okay. They're just down the street in Palo Alto. One of their divisions is the— a toy division. And the toy division is run by a guy named Brendan Boyle. And they're always, every day, trying tons of different things. And if they don't work, they go, fine, let's start all over again. This is an example of one of the prototypes they did for an iPhone app for children. And the idea was that this was going to be called Monster Maker. And I realized that I had audio here. Is there audio by any chance, a plug here? Do we have audio? There should be. There should be? If I have a plug— It should— well— Yeah, you should— done, you're good. Oh, it'll get it? It might work? Oh, it might come through here. Let's see if that works. Okay, I'm going to play this. This is the prototype they did for Monster Maker and I want you to tell me how much money this took to make, how much time it took, how much technology required and how effective it is. Can you guys hear it at all? Don't worry, don't worry. I'm just going to— he's basically— these are dance moves.

Cool.

Okay, could you hear any of that back there? A little bit? A little bit? Okay, anyway, the point is this was a prototype. And it was in fact a prototype, the audio didn't even work. So how did— how much time did that take to do? Not so much, right? They might have had to set it up a little bit, but maybe less than an hour. How much technology did this require?

A camera.

A camera, right? How much money did this cost?

Nothing.

Not so much, right? A little— few people's time. And how effective was this? Probably really effective. I gave a talk and there were some little girls in the room. Afterwards they came up, they wanted to download and buy the app. The fact is with doing something really quick and dirty, you quickly get some results that are going to help you understand if you're even on the right track. So let's say this didn't work. Let's say it didn't work. What would happen if it didn't work? Would they be upset?

No.

No, they would say fine, you know what, okay, throw this out, we'll try something else. So this is the point. If you want to be creative, you need to have a little bit of motivation to get you going with a little bit of experimentation. But here is the fun part. Once you get some good results from your experiments, that's going to lead to more motivation and more experimentation. And it becomes this feed-forward cycle until finally you're really, really motivated once you have a lot of data that are going to help you get to the point to take it to the next level. And then when you get to the next level, now you have to be innovative. The fact is creative ideas— creative ideas are great, but they are usually incremental. For example, I can invent a peanut butter sandwich, that might be creative, but it's not innovative because it's not new to the world. So things that are— ideas that are creative are new to me, but not necessarily new to the world. If you want to come up with ideas that are new to the world, you now need to be innovative. So let's see, what is required to be really innovative? What's required? Focus and reframing. Focus and reframing. This is where you start really focusing on the problem with all of your effort and you start looking at it from different angles. angles. This is super important. Let me give you an example. There's a question, you know, a simple math question. What is the sum of 5 plus 5?

2.

What? What's the sum of 5 plus 5?

10.

10. That was a trick question, okay?

Okay?

Let's see. The sum of 5— how many answers are there? How many answers are there to this problem?

1.

1 answer. Why? You guys all learned this in school. The sum of 5 plus 5. Some of you did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What country are you from?

Holland.

Holland, yeah. They have a different base system. Okay, exactly, exactly. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's all good. So— Remold, what kind of school did you have? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to college in the Netherlands, and I know it's 10. It is 10. I think he was being very creative. So the thing is— this is one right answer— is there a way to teach this? Yes. So in a way that there might be more answers. How could you do it?

You could subdivide the parts. So instead of saying it's 5 and 5 equals 10, you could break them down into groups of 5 equal, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and have subgroups.

Okay, so you could break it apart. Any other ideas? Great. Any other ideas? How could you do that?

Fractions. Oh, it can be another sum, like 7 and 3.

It could be other things, other numbers go with it. What about if we did it this way? Did you have something too? I was going to say like reverse it and say what plus what equals 10. Something like this? Oh, you read my mind. How many answers are there to this?

Several.

Several? How many several?

Infinite.

Infinite number. Negative numbers, fractions, decimals. Isn't that amazing? We went from a problem that had one right answer to one that has an infinite number of solutions by just turning the problem around. This is what I spend most of my time doing in my classes, is teaching students how to reframe problems, look at them differently, so they come up with really unique solutions. This is super important. The way you ask the question determines the type of answers you get. In fact, the question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall. This is quite profound. I'm going to demonstrate it for you right now. It's going to be a little parlor trick, okay? So how many— anyone have a birthday today or this week?

Today.

It's your birthday today? What's your name?

Astra.

Astra? Wonderful. Could we brainstorm to have a great birthday party for Astra? Would that be a good idea?

Yeah.

Should we do that? Great birthday party for Astra. Great. What if we changed one word in that prompt? From let's have a great birthday party for Astra to let's plan a great birthday celebration for Astra. What happened to the set of solutions when we went from a party to a celebration? What happened?

Multiplied.

How much? It totally expanded, right? This is what happened. When we asked the question, let's plan a great birthday party, the answer was baked into the question. Do you realize that? The answer was baked into the question. It assumed it would be a party. When I said let's have a birthday celebration, all of a sudden we expanded the set of solutions. What if we said, what's the best way to mark Astra's birthday? What happens? There. It gets bigger still, right? Maybe she wants a big statue in front of the— would you like that? Maybe a big statue?

No.

So the fact is, the question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall.