“I was working for Google Maps then as a software engineer,” recalled Tatsuo Nomura in a BBC interview, “and every year Google would do an April Fool’s joke. I did a couple of them and one of them was called Pokemon Challenge. Because I was a huge Pokemon fan when I was a kid… I thought it would be interesting if I put the Pokemon on Google Maps and have the users find them and catch them.”
And so was born one of the great viral ideas of the digital age. In just over a month, Pokemon Go had generated 100 million downloads and earned over $206 million, breaking the record for the highest revenues by a mobile game in its first month of release. The app helped to relaunch a popular brand that had been dormant for more than a decade, opened a new level of interest in augmented reality… and created a whole new field for creative ideas.
Other gaming companies could only have looked on with envy. They might not have had access to a brand that could produce the same kind of nostalgia as Pokemon but they could have worked augmented reality into their products. They just didn’t have the right staff to think of it.
We tend to look at creative thinking as something natural and in-built, an immutable part of our characters that can no more be taught than artistic talent or a good singing voice. Some people, like Tatsuo Nomura, can pull out exciting and original ideas while others are more talented at crunching numbers and analyzing data. Creative types, we’re led to believe, are just a special breed, usually found in art schools and design centers. For the rest of us, it’s a life of Dilbert-like drudgery.
But there is hope.
“I truly believe that anyone can be creative,” says Amy Whitaker, entrepreneur-in-residence at the New Museum Incubator and author of Art Thinking, a guide to using creative approaches in business. “I am continually heartened and impressed by the creativity I see in so many walks of life, including from many analytic people who don’t always feel that art is for them. I think creativity is a human birthright.”
We should hope that Whitaker is right, and not just because no one should have to suffer a lifetime of managing spreadsheets. As the take-up of automation increases, replacing the kind of monotonous jobs that require little innovative thinking, fostering creativity is now more important than ever, both for economies as a whole and for the individuals who work in them. With robots and workers in developing countries managing factory lines around the world, Western economies are now as dependent on the growth of innovation as they used to be on the growth of a successful crop.
It’s no surprise then that “creative” is consistently one of the most common buzzwords to appear on LinkedIn profiles or that a number of workshops and courses have spring up to foster original thinking. In 1967, Alex Osborn, founder of advertising company BBDO, helped to set up the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College. The center offers courses for both undergraduates and graduates designed to cultivate skills in creative thinking, “innovative leadership practices” and problem-solving.
Osborn’s big contribution to creative thinking was brainstorming, a process that allowed anyone to throw out any idea, however outrageous, in the hope that something would work. It’s an example of what psychologist J.P. Guilford called “divergent thinking.” The concept dates back to 1956 and involves solving problems by offering many possible solutions before choosing the best. The alternative is “convergent thinking” in which data and facts converge to produce a single objectively correct response.
The division between those two types of thinking may not be as hard as experts once thought, and today’s creative thinking exercises are certainly more complex than making unfiltered lists of bizarre solutions. Professor Gerard Puccio, the current chair of the International Center for Studies in Creativity teaches a creative process that consists of four stages. “Clarifying” ensures that the question is right; “ideating” aims to raise as many different solutions as possible; “developing” turns a rough idea into a plan; and “implementing” makes sure that the idea is practical and usable.
But that’s not the only way that people can be encouraged to take a fresh look at either a problem in front of them or the world around them. A paper by Lile Jia and Eliot R. Smith found that even spatial distance can have an effect on creativity: the further away the subject of the thought, the more abstract it appears, creating an opening for different ways of thinking about it. Show someone a picture of an ear of corn, explains a report in Scientific American, and they will think first about its physical attributes: its height, color, shape, and particularly its use as food. But ask them to think about corn in general and they might consider the way it’s planted in a field or the speed at which it grows. That could lead to different usage ideas such as corn mazes or ethanol. In a test, people who were told that problems had been set by a research institute 2,000 miles away were better at solving those problems than people who were told that the institute was just two miles away—or people who weren’t given any information about the location of the institute at all. The further away the problems looked, the easier they were to solve.
Other researchers have found equally simple and no less surprising circumstances in which to foster divergent thinking. A 2005 paper in Cognitive Brain Research and reported in Phys.org suggested that lying down can improve creativity. According to Darren Lipnicki of the School of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Australia National University, not standing up reduces the levels of noraldrenaline in the brain, a chemical that he believed inhibits the ability to think creatively and solve problems. Dr. Lipnicki invited a small sample of twenty test subjects to solve anagrams and mathematical puzzles first lying down then standing up, then in reverse order. He found that each anagram took an average of 26.3 seconds to solve while supine but nearly 30 seconds while on their feet. The position made no difference when solving math problems.
“Our finding that postural condition affects how quickly anagrams are solved suggests that body posture may influence insight, which could be facilitated when merely lying down,” Dr. Pinicki told Phys.org, before warning that the study was preliminary, and companies shouldn’t rush out to buy beds for their conference rooms.
Being happy might work too. A 2010 paper by Suzanne K. Vosburg showed that a natural positive mood significantly affected task performance while a negative mood inhibited it. When people were happy, they chose strategies that they found satisfactory but when they were feeling low, they were more concerned about the quality of their ideas.
To put it simply, if you want to increase your chances of producing a creative solution, you could try studying for a degree at Buffalo State College, where you can work on your clarification, ideation, development and implementation. Or you could just wait until you’re in a good mood, then lie down and imagine that your problems are far away.
Looking For Creative Business Solutions
In practice, neither of those options are going to be too practical for most businesses. What business owners want most from the study of creativity is solutions that they might otherwise have missed for problems that are complex. They also want ideas that they might have overlooked and which their competitors have missed.
They also don’t want to rely on a small group of creative employees to come up with those ideas. Advertising firms like those built by Alex Osborn might divide their companies into sales departments, whose cubicles buzz with the sound of telephones and contract negotiations, and creative departments whose staff sit on bean bags and are permanently buzzed, but tech firms and others expect everyone to chip in with good ideas. They want to see the results of creative thinking in everything from the product and the design to the marketing and the structure of the company.
Amy Whitaker points to Warby Parker, the eyeglasses company, as one business that has got it right. “They design both beautiful glasses and a highly inventive business model,” she says. But the kind of thinking that allows Warby Parker to create original designs and a unique way of doing business extends far beyond a single eyewear company. What Whitaker calls “art thinking” allows businesses to apply creative thought to any industry.
“Filmmakers use art thinking when they figure out how to shoot a movie resourcefully under budget,” she argues. “Social entrepreneurs use art thinking when they refine manufacturing of clean-energy cookstoves to make them affordable in the developing world. Early stage investors use art thinking when they focus on the core question a business is trying to answer, take a risk on it, and retain ownership so that if it succeeds they can claim part of the upside.”
Whitaker defines “art thinking” as a framework for redefining art as a process in any part of life. “You are engaged in art thinking when you are not going from a known point A to a known point B but inventing point B,” she says. “You need mindsets of art, but also tools of business so that you can take risks skillfully, build support structures within your business model, and own the upside that you create.”
It’s not easy to implement. Time pressures restrict the space available for open-ended thinking, while the kind of brainstorming that Alex Osborn recommended leaves people open to ridicule when their ideas are less than perfect. When a good idea works, we rarely see the dozen bad ideas that came before it.
Nor is “art thinking” limited only to product design and company logos. While most businesses follow the same hierarchical structures and similar processes that carry products from concept to market, “art thinking” tries to govern the space between creativity and commerce. “There’s still a stereotype of art and artists as impractical and ‘out there,’” says Whitaker. “Yet you can be just as creative designing a business model as you can designing a product. Art Thinking gives language to this middle space, and describes ways of toggling between open-ended exploration and the equally creative task of commercialization, of making things work, financially and technologically.”
The most important way to bring creativity into a business then may be to simply leave the space for innovation to develop. Whitaker recommends focusing on the questions instead of looking for solutions. Even if it’s not clear at the time how an idea might work or what it might do, leaving staff time to think freely and away from deadline pressures can bring the kind of insights that change a business or create a new one.
Whitaker works points to Bitmark as one example of a company applying creativity in a traditionally technological field. The firm is attempting to harness the power of the blockchain to mark ownership of digital assets, whether pixelated art or location data.
“I think we will see a technological revolution in the next five years that completely level-jumps the gig economy, and improves the ways people are compensated for creative leaps of faith that end up generating significant financial value,” she predicts.
Whether that happens or not, it’s clear that the blockchain itself is one powerful example of the meeting of divergent and convergent thinking. A concept that relies on the kind of logic that suits a computer programmer has led to the creation of an entirely new currency, and in Ethereum, a new kind of contract. It might not be as easy to understand as Pokemon, but it’s a creative tech idea that even Tatsuo Nomura didn’t think of.
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