Translator: Patricia Aguirre Reviewer: Denise RQ
I like exploring the subject of creativity
and in particular, I like using creativity to solve problems,
that's what I'm going to talk about today.
I've been lucky to spend the last 30 years of my life in creative industries.
Initially, as an exhibit designer, and then as a television director,
and lately as a creative director for an ad agency.
A famous ad guy, George Lois, said,
"Creativity can solve almost any problem.
The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything."
But I love this quote, I absolutely love this quote.
And in fact, I could almost just stop it right here,
because, in a way,
It captures everything I believe
about the power of creativity to solve problems.
But I'm going to unpack it a little bit,
and share just five things I have learnt
about using creativity to solve problems.
The first thing is to define the constraints of the problem.
And this is very important. It's something that is overlooked.
It seems mundane, but before you start engaging in solving a problem,
you need to define the parameters of that problem,
to figure out what you have to solve the problem.
What's available? What resources are available? What time is available?
It's a little hard to see, but that's Apollo 13.
45 years ago,
they faced the problem that was caused by an unexpected explosion.
They were on their way to the Moon;
on the way there, an explosion happened, and it created a lot of problems.
The biggest one was that the CO2 level inside the capsule began to increase.
It was making the air they were breathing more and more poisonous.
They needed to figure that problem out.
In order to figure it out, they really had to think inside the box.
They had to define what they had inside that capsule
that was available to help them solve the problem.
The guys in NASA ground control were scrambling around
trying to figure out what did they have up there,
"What can we put together?
What can we create to help solve this problem?"
They needed to know because there was no use
thinking of something that was outside the capsule, outside the box.
That wasn't going to help them at all. They had to think inside the box.
First thing that is really important is to find the constraints.
I would say that trying to solve a problem without defining the constraints
is like playing squash in a court with no walls.
It just doesn't work.
The second thing I have learnt is that ideas don't just happen.
They need to be provoked. You need to make them happen.
You need to overcome the force of habit in order to make those ideas happen.
I want to talk about forces today.
I am a bit of a science nerd so I don't mind talking about this stuff.
I'm going to talk about Newton's First Law, my favorite.
Newton's First Law is that "a body at rest will remain at rest
unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force."
What does that mean?
That means that this chair here,
which has been sitting here since the beginning of my talk,
will stay there doing nothing
until acted upon by an external unbalanced force.
Simple enough. There are forces at play here.
There are forces at play right now.
There's the force of gravity down, the force of the floor going up.
It's a balanced force.
It's a body at rest. It's not going anywhere.
You could say it's the habitual state of the chair.
It's its habit state.
And then an unbalanced force comes along and moves it.
So I'm going to mash up Newton and George Lois here,
and come up with what I am calling the First Law of Creativity:
a habit will remain a habit unless defeated by originality.
That's what we're going to talk about today: unbalanced forces.
An unbalanced force is an original idea.
This guy, Edward de Bono, gave those unbalanced forces a name.
It's kind of a weird name.
By the way, Edward de Bono is a brilliant guy,
the father of lateral thinking, a kind of creativity guru.
He came up with a name to these unbalanced forces:
Po.
'Po' is an extraction
from words like hypothesis,
suppose,
possible
and poetry.
These words give you a clue as to the nature of the word "Po".
It is also an acronym
and that's the one I like: provocation operation.
It suggests that there's an activity required,
that creativity requires some action in order for it to happen.
A Po is an idea,
but more than that
a Po is a crazy, radical, nonsensical idea.
That's the power of Po.
So how does it work? Let's do a quick brainstorming session.
We've all been in those meeting rooms with a white board.
And today we'll brainstorm ideas for a new restaurant.
On the board we might have listed the restaurants that exist in Regina.
There's lot of Italian places, pizza places, Greek places.
We'll stay away from those. We want new ideas.
We start. People are throwing out ideas.
What about authentic Mexican?
What about Russian? Nepalese? A family-friendly fondue place?
What about a high-end burger place? A low-end sushi place?
That doesn't sound too good.
Then someone shouts out from the back of the room,
"How about a restaurant that doesn't serve food?"
Boom.
That's a Po.
A crazy idea that on the surface of it makes no sense whatsoever.
OK. So what do we do now?
The third thing I've learnt is that you give absurd ideas respect.
You don't toss them out immediately.
In order for that Po to be powerful, you need to let it breathe.
You need to let it live.
You need to consider the possibilities.
What would happen if that actually did exist?
A Po is like a manufactured crisis. It didn't have to happen.
A restaurant that doesn't serve food. That doesn't make any sense.
It's easy to dismiss it, but let's not. Let's let it live.
And the way to treat it is,
"Well, that happened, it's a crisis, it's a restaurant that doesn't sell food.
What are we going to do? How are we gonna make that work?
In Apollo 13, they didn't need another Po because the crisis was the Po.
The crisis was the thing that set up the set of circumstances
that provoke them to have to be creative,
"How are we going to do this? This thing happened.
What are we going to do?
How are we going to solve the problem?"
I know! What about we use the cover from the manual.
We'll cut some hoses from the suits.
We'll use socks. We have some duct tape.
Let's use that. We have some other stuff.
Let's put all the stuff together and make an air filter.
No one would have thought of doing this in any other circumstance.
The crisis, the Po, created the situation
that allowed us to consider those things in a new way,
to consider the creative potential
and bring it up together to solve a particular problem.
They were up against time, as well. They had a deadline.
They had a deadline that involved actual death.
Deadlines are another great kind of Po.
My favorite deadline, by far, is this one:
December 31, 1969.
That's the deadline that was implied when JFK said in his famous speech
that they were going to put a man on the Moon
before the end of the 1960s.
He liked that person at the back of the room that said
"How about a restaurant without food?",
except he said "What about we put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade?"
He didn't manufacture a fake problem or fake crisis,
he manufactured a real one.
He put the US reputation on the line.
And he did it with optimism. And that's important.
That leads us to the forth thing I've learnt.
You need to be optimistically objective.
You need to look at how a problem might work, not how it might not work.
You have to be hopeful and optimistic
that that crazy idea you're going to give consideration
that's going to provoke new ideas, new thoughts could actually work.
So let's go back to our restaurant that doesn't serve food.
How could that work?
The Po is powerful if we give it legitimacy.
We say, "OK, let's make it work. Let's figure out what does that look like.
A restaurant that doesn't serve food. What does that look like?"
It doesn't serve food so were the food come from?
If you go in there, you want to eat. You're not going to get served.
You have to bring the food in yourself.
People go to parks, they bring food with them to the park and have a picnic.
It's kind of like an indoor picnic. That's cool. It's kind of interesting.
What will we do? We'll provide a place for them to have their food.
We'll provide nice tables and chairs, and cutlery and maybe serve drinks.
That's the way we can differentiate.
They bring the food, we provide the drinks.
We give a great variety, great selection.
Maybe we could have a sharing table.
Lots of people bring their own thing.
We have a sharing table over here, and so we can help them with that.
We can heat up the food and provide all those services to make that work.
Maybe we can provide some entertainment.
Maybe the waiters could sing. Actually, maybe people could sing.
Maybe they could bring the food and the entertainment.
We'd provide a little stage.
A little space for them to get together, to connect and to share.
And after a while you start to see the potential of these crazy ideas.
We wouldn't have thought of any of these things,
if hadn't let that crazy idea exist.
And actually treated it with some optimism and some hope
that there might be a solution in there.
And some of the things we discover through that process
could actually be useful when it comes to a restaurant that does serve food.
So in terms of a brainstorming exercise,
in terms of being able to be open to those kinds of possibilities,
it is really,really useful.
This is a little mock-up of what the engineers at NASA built on the ground.
They built it quickly and tried to test it.
They ran off at the beginning when this crisis happen,
"What do these guys have up there?
Let's figure it out and built this thing."
They brought it all together, and here's what they came up with.
And they did it with optimism.
They didn't think, "This is probably not going to work."
No. They were hoping and praying.
They were believing it would work.
It's going to work! We can use the cover from the manual.
We can use socks, we can use this plastic thing,
this hose, we'll cut it off the astronaut suit.
It could work.
There's no creative value in being cynical.
There's no creative value in looking for the reasons something won't work.
It's far more productive, far more powerful
to look at the reasons something will work.
I can tell you as a creative person I think my crazy ideas are going to work.
I really do. All the time.
And there's power in that.
A lot of creative people in the audience feel the same way.
There's a force in that and it's good to tap into that force.
Last thing I've learnt is to celebrate great ideas regardless of who had them.
A lot of the work I do now is a collaborative work.
I rarely work alone. I rarely have to solve problems by myself.
I work with a team. A lot of them are here today.
One of the things I believe about collaboration
is that it isn't great to collaborate with a bunch of people that are just like me.
People that think the same ways as me, that act the same ways as me,
that believe the same ways as me.
It's really great to have a mixed bag,
a whole lot of different kinds of people bringing different kinds of perspectives.
There's value in those different perspectives.
It's a greater potential for that crazy idea,
or the different idea that comes out in those discussions.
Someone with a different experience than me says something
that is put on the board and you have to deal with it.
Now we have to unpack that and try to make it work.
In that process we want to treat other people's ideas with respect.
This is something I've learnt from my wife actually,
and like many husbands, I didn't have a choice in the matter.
I love my wife and we are very similar. She's here in the audience by the way.
We're very similar in lots of ways.
And that's one of the things that gives strength to our relationship,
we share the same values.
But we do think about things in different ways.
We have different ideas sometimes.
Sometimes she'd say things that I think there are kind of nuts.
And then, after a little bit, I realize that's actually a brilliant idea.
This happened a couple of years ago to us.
We have two young children.
We were having a disagreement about a parenting issue,
about how we resolve something.
During the course of the discussion, Laurie made this crazy suggestion.
and I was like, "Well, no. How would that work?"
We talked it through.
Then finally, I got to the point were I said, "You know, you're right."
And then a funny thing happened.
She got mad at me because she thought
that I was just agreeing with her to end the argument.
Then I got mad at her because it wasn't what I was doing.
It was a great idea and I was trying to explain this to her, and I said this.
"It's not important for me to be right. But it is important for us to be right."
Because at the end of the day, what I cared about
what really counted, was what was right for my kids.
Not whether I was right.
This is a picture of the final air filter the Apollo 13 crew built
that saved their lives.
I don't think anyone cared whose idea was to use the cover of the flight plan,
or to use plastic bags or to use the socks.
I don't think anyone cared. It was the idea that counted.
That was what was important. It's the ideas that matter.
Best idea wins. Not who has it.
Just to quickly conclude: the five things I've learnt.
Number one, define the constraints.
Know the parameters you're working within. Don't pretend they are not there.
They're helpful, can actually help you, guide you toward a creative solution.
Number two, provoke ideas. Don't wait for them to happen.
Force them happen, push them. Make outlandish suggestions.
Number three, give absurd ideas respect.
Give them the respect of being plausible, of being possible.
Say, "Well, this happen. We're going to let this happen."
We're going to talk it through. See the ideas that can come out of that.
When you do that, be optimistic. Be optimistically objective.
Look at the possibilities with a notion that it might work.
Not, "Eh... It's probably not going to work, but we'll try it."
Again, there's no creative value in being cynical.
And lastly, celebrate great ideas, regardless of who had them.
And if there is a secret sauce in creativity,
especially collaborative creativity, that's it, that's it right there.
We've got a lot of problems in the world, and they need our attention.
We talked about a few of them today.
I'm going to leave you with a big problem.
We should have a giant brainstorming session, almost like a global one.
It involves a space craft.
It has humans on it.
And the CO2 level is raising.
And the level of CO2 is increasing so dramatically
that we're running out of time.
We need to solve the problem.
Everything we need to solve the problem is right there.
We just have to overcome our force of habit.
We need to be creative and have new ideas.
Best idea wins.
Thank you.
(Applause)