Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this article: Where to begin…I found this to be interesting based on the core understanding that Design Thinking utilizes both left and right brain approaches to create and solve.  usually, we are talking about different people with each of these traits, not individuals that have the ability to “shift” between the two.  However, there are still times that I work with a group that could use a boost of creativity in their thoughts…so maybe I will give this a try!

Original Article HERE at NewsWeek.com

When Is a Brick Not a Brick?

What can a brick be used for? Well, there’s building a house, breaking a window, holding down a pile of papers on a windy day, squashing a bug, paving a driveway, building a wall, as the legs of a small table … Now take a break and shift your eyes from left to right and back again for 30 seconds.

If psychologist Elizabeth Shobe of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and her colleagues are right, that ocular exercise spurred creative thinking, enabling you to come up with yet more uses for a brick (perhaps putting in the toilet tank to reduce water usage? how about as a mock coffin at a Barbie funeral?). (Click here to follow Sharon Begley).

There is no shortage of self-appointed experts on creativity (a quick search for ways to increase it turns up “clear your workspace” and “act on your instincts“). The snake-oil approaches are unfortunate, because there is pretty decent neuroscientific research on the brain basis for creativity, as I wrote about a few years back. Above all, the studies show that creativity is not just a personality trait (and thus hard to change) but also a trainable skill.

Some of the most interesting work, for instance, has shown that an approach called psychological distancing can boost creativity. In psychological distancing, you construe a problem as not occurring to you in the here-and-now, as this Scientific Americanstory explains.

Also helpful to creativity is anything that increases cross talk between the brain’s left and right hemispheres.

That’s where shifty eyes come in.

In a paper to be published next month in Brain and Cognition, Shobe and her team note that earlier studies had suggested that cross talk between the brain’s hemispheres is important, and maybe even necessary, for creativity.

Patients who have undergone surgery to sever the bundle of neurons (called the corpus callosum) that connects the two hemispheres (sometimes done to stop epileptic seizures) come up short on standard tests of creativity, such as the brick puzzle.

It was also known that people with strong handedness—that is, they do absolutely everything with the left or right hand, and are all thumbs when they try to use the other hand—have less cross talk between their brain hemispheres than do people who are ambidextrous or “mixed handed,” in which they are able to use the nonfavored hand for some tasks.

But it wasn’t clear whether increasing hemispheric cross talk could increase creativity.

The scientists therefore had 62 volunteers take the “alternative uses test,” in which the goal is to think of unusual uses for common objects, such as bricks and newspapers. “Mixed-handers,” who have more hemispheric cross talk than strong left- or right-handers, came up with more unique uses for the objects than did strong left- or right-handers, supporting the idea that hemispheric cross talk boosts creativity.

Half of the volunteers then spent 30 seconds doing the shifty-eye exercise, moving their eyes back and forth horizontally, which is believed to increase communication between the brain’s hemispheres. The other half stared straight ahead for 30 seconds. Then everyone took the test again.

Obviously there should be some effect of experience. That is, on a second try, people should think of more unusual uses for bricks and the like, even when they are given different objects to think about. Most people did.

But the volunteers who had performed the eye-shifting exercise and who were strongly left- or right-handed showed a significant improvement in creativity as measured by how many uses they came up with, which no one else did; their performance now matched that of the mixed-handers. Staring straight ahead, in contrast, had no effect on creativity.

And performing the eye-shifting exercise did not boost the already-higher creativity of the mixed-handers, suggesting that they already had an optimal level of hemispheric cross talk.

“The results suggest that greater inter-hemispheric interaction can facilitate creativity of strong-handers,” the scientists conclude, “but that the characteristically higher inter-hemispheric interaction of mixed-handers was unaffected by the” eye exercise.

Dreaming up uses for bricks and newspapers is not exactly on a par with, say, inventing cubism or atonal music. But it’s the kind of exercise that life coaches and business-creativity consultants employ to get clients’ creative juices flowing.

Can shifting your eyes back and forth for 30 seconds boost creativity in a meaningful way—that is, not on a psych test, but in the real world?

I’m dubious that it can inspire someone to write the Great American Novel, but—who knows?—it might just get employees to come up with that killer brand extension.

To me, though, the more interesting implication of the research is less in providing a how-to-boost-creativity exercise than in shedding light on where creativity comes from in the first place. The shifting-eyes study is yet more evidence that people dream up unique and unusual ideas by fitting together disparate bits of information, some of it handled by the right brain and some of it handled by the left.

That suggests that when you are trying to solve a problem—and by “problem” I mean anything from a new ad campaign to an effective compromise in a political battle to a new product design—it might help to go offline, mentally. That is, rather than fixating on the question (typically, a left-brain activity), let your thoughts wander, which might engage the right brain.

Indeed, there is intriguing research that having a “leaky” mental filter, so that thoughts that are seemingly irrelevant to the problem at hand penetrate your consciousness, boosts creativity. But if all else fails, the shifty-eye thing might not be a bad start.

Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK’s science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.

Overview of Article:

Redefining a Profession

LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. “Oh, I don’t know,” drawled the designer. “Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package… I’ll call you then.”

Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike’s sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, “Change by Design.” “Few designers today would even touch this type of project,” he writes of Loewy’s assignment. “What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter.”

He’s kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I’d like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown.

Born in Britain, Mr. Brown is now the president and chief executive officer of IDEO, a design group based in Palo Alto, California. His book?’s objective is summed up by its subtitle: to demonstrate “How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation.” He marshals lots of examples of how this works in practice, although his underlying theme is as much about how design itself is changing, as how it effects change in other industries.

When Mr. Brown, 47, started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things, such as the widgets he developed in his first project for a machinery manufacturer, or visual ones, like the graphics on a Lucky Strike packet. Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school “design,” which he regards as “technology-centered,” to the “human-centered” discipline of “design thinking” — a term coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop tech products for clients in Silicon Valley.

Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is “about more than style.” In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.

For IDEO’s designers, this has meant working in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers, computer programmers, marketers and behavioral scientists. One design thinking project involved developing a new type of low-tech weekend bicycle — named “coasting” — for Shimano, the Japanese cycle components maker, to persuade the adult Americans who had loved riding their bikes as kids to take up cycling again, rather than developing a dazzling new bicycle as old-school designers would have done.

Another project encouraged the nurses employed by Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. health care group, to work out how to improve the care of patients by redesigning their own schedules. A third analyzed people’s spending habits to invent a new Bank of America service that helps them to save by rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar and depositing the difference in a “Keep the Change” account, just like throwing spare coins into a change jar. IDEO’s teams of design thinkers have also worked on projects for nonprofit organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S. government campaigns, as well as on conventional product design and branding programs.

Mr. Brown gives glimpses of what it’s like to work at IDEO. He recalls an executive from the furniture company, Steelcase, sinking into a snazzy-looking chair only for it to collapse. (It was a painstakingly detailed $40,000 foam prototype, not the real thing.) He also recounts the horror of the lead designer on the development of an Oral-B toothbrush, when he spotted one of his products washed up on a deserted Californian beach, six months after the launch. And what designer wouldn’t relate to his description of how: “I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, ‘Give me the next (Apple) iPod,’ but it’s probably pretty close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond (under their breath), ‘Give me the next (Apple ceo) Steve Jobs.”’

There is a danger of books like this deteriorating into sales pitches, as their designer-authors trot out examples of their companies’ prowess. But Mr. Brown writes with a winning combination of thoughtfulness, pragmatism and enthusiasm. IDEO looms large, but the references are relevant, and interspersed with descriptions of successful exercises by other companies, from the development of the Netflix online movie store, to that of United Airlines’s Premium Service between San Francisco and New York.

Mr. Brown also puts design thinking into a historical context by explaining how some of his design heroes practiced it, albeit unknowingly. Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great 19th-century British engineer, who designed the bridges, viaducts and tunnels of the Great Western Railway in southwest England and Wales, not only as spectacular structures, but to make passengers feel as if they were “floating across the countryside.” They still do.

Critically, he avoids the trap of presenting design thinking as a panacea. Mr. Brown charts its failures as well as successes, and sees confusingly designed Web sites and dysfunctional help lines, as the latterday equivalents of the Industrial Revolution’s “dark satanic mills.” Nor does he pretend that it is easy. Instead, he depicts it as a messy, uncertain, often inconclusive process, albeit one that is more fun, and much more productive than tweaking cigarette packets.

Thoughts on this Video: These guys are doing a very good job of documenting the process they are undertaking as they work to find a solution to the specific challenge they have taken on. I appreciate the desire to share HOW the process is working for them, and the quality of the information.

Thoughts on this video: This is a solid company that is using the ideas of Design Thinking to make better products and services.  This video gives several good looks at tools and techniques used by the team.

Overview of Article: Robert Sutton takes on the idea that group brainstorming is not an efficient way to generate ideas.  He references his time working with IDEO and makes very good points on what actually constitutes “efficient” brainstorming.

Thoughts on Article: I give this one to you as a classic on the ‘Brainstorming’ element of the Design Thing process.  Sutton makes very good points on the importance of having a team, but of making sure that you also have the right environment for that team to be productive.  This is a very good article.

Original Post HERE By Robert Sutton at BusinessWeek

Should your team brainstorm as a group or as individuals? At creative companies, switching between the two modes can be seamless—and highly productive

A recent Wall Street Journal story took on the hot topic of brainstorming. Titled “Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own,” the piece quoted research showing that people are “more creative” when they “brainstorm” alone rather than in meetings and offered supporting testimonials from managers.

This is a subject I am quite familiar with. Along with Andy Hargadon, I completed an 18-month ethnography in the 1990s on how the innovation consultants at IDEO do creative work, and we’ve both spent much of the past decade studying other innovative organizations. At the time, Andy was my PhD student, and now he is an associate professor at the University of California at Davis.

We agree that badly managed face-to-face brainstorms do stifle creativity and we agree that, even when brainstorming is done right, people probably can still generate ideas faster when they work alone. But it is total nonsense to conclude that if you want creativity, you ought to keep your people in solitary confinement where they can’t “waste time” listening to and building on the ideas of others.

Here’s the problem: Most studies of brainstorming are rigorous but irrelevant to the challenge of managing creative work. For starters, comparing whether creativity happens best in groups or alone is pretty silly when you look at how creative work is actually done. At creative companies, people switch between both modes so seamlessly that it is hard to notice where individual work ends and group work starts.

THEORY VS. PRACTICE. At group brainstorms, individuals often “tune out” for 5 or 10 minutes to sketch a product or organizational structure inspired by the conversation, and then jump back into the conversation to show the others their idea. In another typical scenario, I recall an IDEO brainstorm about a cool haircutting device, after which one participant, engineer Roby Stancel, ran off to build it. Drawing a hard line between “individual” and “group” creativity in these and dozens of other examples is pointless. What really matters is that the two modes mingle as the creative process unfolds.

This artificial group vs. individual structure isn’t the only problem with brainstorming experiments. These experiments are fake in that nearly all involve people who have no prior experience or training in group brainstorming. These brainstorming virgins (usually undergraduates in psychology classes) are briefly presented a list of rules and are then instructed to spend 10 or 15 minutes generating novel ideas about topics that they know and most likely care nothing about.

A common topic in these experiments is “What would happen if everyone had an extra thumb?” That might be fun to think about, but it isn’t a problem they will ever actually face.

In contrast, consider real brainstorms led by SAP’s Design Services Team in which participants care very much about, say, user-friendly software and will use any good ideas generated on the subject. These brainstorms have already led SAP to develop many clever prototypes and are starting to change the software that the company ships.

INNOVATION ENGINE. These experimental studies also fail to mirror authentic brainstorms because the standard and essential rule “Build on and extend others’ ideas” isn’t applied. To allow cleaner comparisons between group and individual brainstorming “performance,” individuals aren’t asked to consider the ideas of others. In any event, it is impossible to build on the thinking of fellow brainstormers when you work alone.

The main finding from these studies is that people “brainstorming” alone speak more ideas (per person) into a microphone during the 10- or 15-minute period than those in a group brainstorm. Researchers conclude that the “productivity loss” of group brainstorming happens mainly because people take turns talking and therefore can’t spew out ideas as fast. It’s also worth noting that these studies don’t count listening to other people’s ideas as a productive behavior.

I am not joking; most of this research is that trivial.

Group brainstorming isn’t a panacea even when it is done right, and is a waste of time—or worse—when done wrong. But a broad body of peer-reviewed research on teams and organizations, as well as my own observations, suggests that, when brainstorming sessions are managed right and skillfully linked to other work practices, such gatherings can promote innovation. Eight guidelines are especially important for running effective face-to-face brainstorms:

1. Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just to harvest ideas.
Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen shows that creativity occurs when people find ways to build on existing ideas. The power of group brainstorming comes from creating a safe place where people with different ideas can share, blend, and extend their diverse knowledge. If your goal is to just “collect the creative ideas that are out there,” group brainstorms are a waste of time. A Web-based system for collecting ideas or an old-fashioned employee suggestion box is good enough.

2. Don’t bother if people live in fear.
As Sigmund Freud observed, groups bring out the best and the worst in people. If people believe they will be teased, paid less, demoted, fired, or otherwise humiliated, group brainstorming is a bad idea. If your company fires 10% of its employees every year, for instance, people might be too afraid of saying something “dumb” to brainstorm effectively. It is better to have them just work alone.

3. Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions.
Alex Osborn’s 1950s classic Applied Imagination, which popularized brainstorming, gave advice that is still sound: Creativity comes from a blend of individual and collective “ideation.” Skilled organizers tell participants what the topic will be before a brainstorm. I once went to a session on how to give an “itch-less haircut,” and, at the suggestion of the organizer, took a preliminary trip to a salon where I asked the stylist for a cut as “itch-free as possible” to jumpstart my thinking. At the brainstorm, I reported how tightly the stylist wrapped the cape around my neck and how she put talcum powder all over me—effective, if uncomfortable and messy measures.

4. Brainstorming sessions are worthless unless they are woven with other work practices.
Brainstorming is just one of many practices that make a company creative, and it is of little value if it’s not combined with other practices—such as observing users, talking to experts, or building prototype products or experiences—that provide an outlet for the ideas generated. Some of the worst “creative” companies that I’ve worked with are great at coming up with new ideas, but never actually get around to implementing them. A student and I once studied a team that spent a year brainstorming and arguing about a simple product without producing even a single prototype, even though a good engineer could have built one in an hour or two. The project was finally killed when a competitor came out with the product.

5. Brainstorming requires skill and experience both to do and, especially, to facilitate.
In all of the places that I’ve seen brainstorming used effectively—Hewlett-Packard, SAP’s Design Services Team, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (or “The d.school”), the Institute for the Future, Frog Design, and IDEO—brainstorming is treated as a skill that takes months or years to master. Facilitating a session is a skill that takes even longer to develop. If you hold brainstorms every now and then, and they are led by people without skill and experience, don’t be surprised if participants “sit there looking embarrassed, like we’re all new to a nudist colony,” as one manager told The Wall Street Journal. That is how humans act when they do something new and have poor teachers.

6. A good brainstorming session is competitive—in the right way.
In the best brainstorms, people feel pressure to show off what they know and how skilled they are at building on others’ ideas. But people are also competitive in a paradoxical way. They “compete” to get everyone else to contribute, to make everyone feel like part of the group, and to treat everyone as collaborators toward a common goal. The worst thing a manager can do is set up the session as an “I win, you lose” game, in which ideas are explicitly rated, ranked, and rewarded.

A Stanford graduate student once told me about a team leader at his former company who started giving bonuses to people who generated “the best” ideas in brainstorms. The resulting fear and dysfunctional competition drastically reduced the number of ideas generated by what had been a creative and cooperative group just weeks earlier.

7. Use brainstorming sessions for more than just generating good ideas.
Brainstorms aren’t just a place to generate good ideas. At IDEO, these gatherings support the company’s culture and work practices in a host of other ways. Project teams use brainstorms to get inputs from people with diverse skills throughout the company. In the process, a lot of other good things happen. Knowledge is spread about new industries and technologies, newcomers and veterans learn—or are reminded—about who knows what, and jumping into a brainstorm for an hour or so to think about someone else’s problem provides a welcome respite from each designer’s own projects. The explicit goal of a group brainstorm is to generate ideas. But the other benefits of routinely gathering rotating groups of people from around a company to talk about new and old ideas might ultimately be more important for supporting creative work.

8. Follow the rules, or don’t call it a brainstorm.
This is true even if you only hold occasional brainstorms and even if your work doesn’t require constant creativity. The worst “”brainstorms”" happen when the term is used loosely, and the rules aren’t followed—or known—at all. Perhaps the biggest mistake that leaders make is failing to keep their mouths shut. I once went to a meeting that started with the boss saying, “Let’s brainstorm.” He followed this pronouncement with 30 minutes of his own rambling thoughts, without a single idea coming from the others in the room. Now that’s productivity loss!

The rules vary from place to place. But Alex Osborn’s original four still work: 1) Don’t allow criticism; 2) Encourage wild ideas; 3) Go for quantity; 4) Combine and/or improve on others’ ideas. To steal from IDEO, I’d add “One conversation at a time” and “Stay focused on the topic,” as both help save groups from dissolving into disorder.