In early 1913, the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky was wrestling with a problem. He had returned from Moscow the previous December and he wanted to portray in a painting the “extremely powerful impressions” he had experienced in the city. Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract art so he played with form and lines and colors to re-create what he had felt in Russia’s capital and could recall of his time there.
He started well. His first design, he wrote in his essay “Picture with the White Edge,” was very “concise and restricted.” It soon gave way to a second design that included a representation of a sled in the bottom left corner. But then he ran intro trouble. He found his combination of forms “distasteful” and his use of green and blue unbalanced. “It tormented me,” he wrote. “After several weeks, I would bring out the sketches again, and still I felt unprepared. It is only over the years that I have learned to exercise patience in such moments and not smash the picture over my knee.”
It took five months for Kandinsky to work his way to the solution. The picture, he realized, needed a white edge that flowed “around the right-hand side of the picture in lazy coils.” Because the edge solved the problem, he named the picture after it.
You don’t have to be a painter to recognize Kandinsky’s dilemma. We’ve all been in a situation in which we’ve grappled with a problem and tried one solution after another only to come up short. We’ve all been tempted to break the problem over a metaphorical knee and move onto something new. But if we persevere, we usually find that we get there. One thing leads to another, and we stumble across the solution—whether it’s the right call to action in a marketing campaign, a new killer feature that defines a product, or the form that makes a design stand out. Somehow, our creativity kicks in and produces the answer we need.
But how does it happen? What drives our creativity to produce the solution that works, and what can we do to draw on that force whenever necessary?
One group of researchers think they’ve found the answer. They’ve identified curiosity as the key motivator. When faced with a problem, they believe, we want to know what the answer is and we won’t be satisfied until we find it. “The successful scientists often are not the most talented, but the ones who are just impelled by curiosity. They’ve got to know what the answer is,” the researchers write, quoting physicist Arthur Schawlow.
Curiosity, though, comes in two forms. Diversive curiosity is a general interest in exploring and learning. It’s what keeps us looking through bookstores, picking the next magazine out of the racks, and moving from one Netflix documentary to another. Specific curiosity is the desire to find the solution to the puzzle in front of us. It’s powered by a need to reduce uncertainty and create a sense of mastery. Our desire to find the solution is more powerful than the drive to seek information generated by diversive curiosity and it even pushes us to go beyond what we need to solve the puzzle.
Because this kind of curiosity is specific, it creates a deepening, rather than a broadening, of knowledge. Diversive curiosity produces a collection of unrelated ideas and disconnected information but specific curiosity builds on knowledge so that one realization leads to the next.
It’s the difference between brainstorming and “idea-linking.” The first randomly throws out a range of different options in the hope that one of them will be the solution you need. The second creates a chain that you hope will lead to the answer. Instead of making a long list of every solution you can think of, idea-linking makes each idea valuable, another step towards the answer. “Individuals may be inclined to retain aspects of earlier ideas that satisfy one piece of the puzzle and to incorporate new elements into subsequent ideas to solve a different piece of the puzzle,” the researchers write.
The reason that idea-linking, produced by specific curiosity, drives creativity is that puzzles rarely need just one solution. For the kind of complex problems encountered in business, there is usually more than one answer. A marketing campaign can work with a number of different tag lines. A product can have more than one feature that appeals to customers. Both may require a combination of different solutions that work together for best effect. Finding those solutions means constantly indulging that curiosity. As we look for answers in different places, the researchers argue, we find ideas that are loosely related to the puzzle and to each other. “We expect specific curiosity to benefit the idea generation stage of the creative process, because this stage involves exploring new mental pathways to develop original ideas,” they say.
To prove that the idea-linking generated by specific curiosity leads to more creative thinking than brainstorming, they made an elephant disappear.
How Do You Make An Elephant Disappear?
Or rather, they gave volunteers a passage that described a magic trick performed by Harry Houdini in 1918. In the account, Houdini walks across the stage, addresses the audience, then brings a full-grown Asian elephant onto the stage with him. The elephant greets the audience with a raise of her trunk and is led into a brightly-colored, wheeled box. The doors of the box close, there’s a dramatic drum roll, and when the doors are thrown open, the elephant has vanished.
The passage told some of the volunteers that the trick was one of the most mysterious Houdini had ever performed and that he had never revealed its secret. A control group read a version of the story that explained exactly how he did it. (The elephant was hidden behind a large, black curtain inside the box.) The researchers then asked both sets of volunteers how they thought Houdini had achieved the trick. After a few seconds, the volunteers who didn’t know the secret received a message telling them that they were wrong. The control group received a message telling them that were right.
Both groups completed a questionnaire that measured the levels of their curiosity and finally, the researchers asked the volunteers to imagine that they were Houdini and that they needed to design a better illusion than the elephant trick. “What might you do?” they asked.
Professional magicians graded the creativity of the tricks, and research assistants determined the degree to which the ideas incorporated elements of the original illusion.
The study found that when they designed their own trick the volunteers who didn’t know how Houdini had made an elephant disappear were, indeed, more curious than the control group. They also found that that specific curiosity—the volunteers wondering how Houdini had made an elephant disappear—did generate more creative ideas. In one of the experiments, the curious participants generated creative ideas 60 percent of the time, while the non-curious participants were creative only 36 percent of the time.
A further study, in which the volunteers also described the thought process they had followed when they designed their illusion, also revealed that the curious participants were more likely to use idea linking. They didn’t throw out a list of disconnected random ideas, like a brainstorming session. They followed a train of thought. One started by asking themselves what might be bigger than elephant, then thought of a building, followed by three elephants, followed by doing the trick without the box. Non-curious participants, by contrast, thought smaller—sometimes literally. One suggested using a smaller animal that would be easier to hide; another thought of adding smoke and mirrors to better disguise the elephant. Their ideas were less creative and less innovative.
“Participants who experienced specific curiosity engaged in significantly more idea linking, using aspects of early ideas as input for later ideas in a sequential manner,” the researchers wrote. “Idea linking mediated the relationship between specific curiosity and creativity, whether measured with expert evaluations or through the measure of nonfixation. These results indicate that specific curiosity drives individuals to use aspects of early ideas as a stepping stone to later ideas, rather than stopping at the first viable solution.”
How to Build Curiosity and Link Your Ideas
So when you’re grappling with a problem—whether that problem is the tone of a marketing campaign or the format of a picture—the place to begin isn’t in a room with colleagues, tossing ideas onto a white board. It’s with curiosity.
Look at what other people have done successfully in the same field and ask how they managed to do it. So if you’re making a video to promote a product, for example, collect other successful videos promoting similar products and find out how well they did. Then ask yourself what those videomakers did that was so effective. How did they attract the audience’s attention from the first frame and stop them clicking away? What emotions did the video generate and what techniques did the marketer use to trigger those emotions? What was the key factor in the video that generated the views, the shares, or the conversions?
Just asking questions puts you in the same position as the study participants who knew that Houdini had made an elephant disappear but didn’t know how. You don’t need to be sure of the answers any more than the curious participants knew that the elephant was hidden behind a curtain. You just have to be curious enough about the riddle to trigger the thought process that produces a creative response.
Once you have identified what you think might be the factors that generated the original video’s success, you can start thinking about what you can do with those elements to create not just your own version, but a better version. What could you change in those key factors that could make your video more effective? Curious participants thought of bigger animals but they also moved on to different processes. One started by trying to think of something “cooler” than making a disappearing elephant, and thought of Dumbo. That led him to think of making elephant fly which led to him thinking of making an elephant float, then an elephant doing flips, then defying gravity. The ideas might not have been very realistic but they were creative—and they become creative as the volunteer let his mind follow a train of thought.
In effect, what the researchers did was describe one way in which creativity always works. We start with consumption. We look at what other people have done before us and we understand how it works—and we do that because we’re curious about it. We want to know how it works. Then we iterate. We make our own versions that are often pretty close to what others have done. The creativity happens when we move forward and build on those first iterations, implement one idea after another to produce something entirely new.
It took Kandinsky five months to sketch and re-sketch his impression of his visit to Moscow. He didn’t produce multiple different pictures then sell the best one. He created and re-created one picture again and again, adding something new each time. That’s how we all solve problems and produce creative solutions.
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