Transcripts
1. 00 Practical Creativity Intro: Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello, everyone. Today
is a special day. We're going to talk
about creativity. We're going to talk about
practical creativity or creative problem solving. In other words, how to go beyond the obvious
and how to come up with noteworthy solutions whenever you face a challenge, technical challenge, a
functional challenge, any kind of problem
you're trying to solve. I'm TonkiPrevo. I'm an
industrial designer. I've done this for
quite a while. And I've decided to split this class in
actually two classes. One is about the mindset
that you need to have order to be more creative and achieve
more of your skills. And the second class
is literally a bunch of tools and methods
and techniques that you can apply to
help you come up with more quantity and more quality of good ideas. Let's do this.
2. 01 Creative Mindset Spaghetti challenge: All right. So part one, the part
about creative mindset, how do you need
to set your mind? How do you need to manage and master your feelings
and emotions about the fact that
you are trying to be creative and to
solve a problem. This is, of course, made of a lot of small
videos on specific topics. All of it is going to make
sense when it comes together. That's, of course, also up
to you to go back and forth and have a look at specific
videos one by one. Alright, let's start with how to deal with an example of a challenge and what
people achieve. So here is a challenge. It's actually a team building
event kind of exercise, and imagine you have
teams of four people. You give them spaghettis, tape, string, and a marshmallow, and you give them 18 minutes as teams to build the
biggest possible, the tallest possible tower or structure with the
marshmallow on top. And the winner is
the team that has the biggest distance between the table and the marshmallow. It may seem easy.
It's not that simple. So let's have a look at
who achieves what and why. You can see here that overall, the average team achieves
a tower of 20 ", so 50 centimeters tall, and we can see that there
are different categories of people and that they don't
all achieve the same thing. For example, business
school students are typically weaker, much worse than the average. Kindergarten kids, four
or 5-year-old kids in kindergarten are
usually above average. Professionals, experts
like architects and engineers are
way above average, and that's reassuring. They
know what they're doing. And then there's a
interesting element here that shows that a
team of three CEOs with an executive admin
actually achieve significantly better
results than if you have four CEOs in one team. Let's go a bit in the
details of what's going on. So what are the findings
from those experiments? The business school
students are trained at finding the one
best strategy. They are trained at thinking
first, deciding, Okay, what's going to be
the coolest, best, most magic way to tackle the problem
and achieve the best. They have a lot of ambition, a lot of drive, a
lot of confidence. But they actually
out of 18 minutes, only spend 10 minutes
building the thing. The rest is talking
and thinking. And if it works, great. If it doesn't, at the end, it's over, time is over, and the thing has failed. In many cases, they put the
marshmallow on their tower, and then the weight
of the marshmallow collapses the tower and
nothing has happened. I mean, they basically
have nothing. They have a broken tower and the marshmallow is on the
table, complete failure. Now, if we compare with the
other end of the spectrum, the kindergarten kids, they don't bother
introducing themselves. They don't talk that
much. They have fun. They are there to
play, not to compete, and they immediately
start building things. They are told that they
have limited time, so they just keep going. They go, they go, they build. I fails, of course.
They try quickly. They try, you know, they build some tower, they put marshmallow,
and it falls. So they just fix
it. And then again, and they try again, and
they adjust it and so on. At the end, the tower isn't
the result of a plan. It's probably not symmetrical. It has some weird hooks
and things that are leftovers of previous versions
in it, it doesn't matter. The fact is the
tower is standing. It has the marshmallow on top, and it usually is above
average in terms of height. The trick there is
action, practice. They go for it, no
hesitation, trial and error, the good old trial and error, and they get to something
really significant. Then of course, you
have the experts, the architects and engineers that the conclusion
is very simple. They have skills. I mean, they have specialized skills. The kids don't know how to
do, they figure it out. The experts they know how to do, they apply their knowledge, and of course, they achieve way above the results of those who
don't know, that's normal. Let's have a look now
at our team of CEOs. The trick there is really
the executive admin. The executive admin is
facilitating the communication, the consensus making
the decision making. She or he is facilitating basically it removing the
friction between those egos, between those
different skill sets and levels of knowledge, they get to agree on something
and deliver something. They are very driven
and ambitious people, so they are really
trying amazing things. And there is that one person
that is bringing a bit of common sense and
pragmatism into the game, and it really gives
good results as well.
3. 02 Creative Mindset Flying: So now here's another
example of a challenge. I gave a team of engineers
the challenge to create out of one piece of a four
paper kind of aircraft, and I told them that they
had 5 minutes to do that. I also told them that
I would be standing on the table and
dropping the craft, not throwing it, dropping it. And the success
criteria is that we measure the time it
takes from the moment I drop it to the moment
it hits the ground. So in other words, flying
the art of falling slowly. I asked them to
create something that falls slowly. All understood. They had no expertise
in aerospace design. So they all understood that trial and error
was the way to go. They immediately
made some prototypes of their paper and some
attempts to try it. They had fun. They were
discussing a lot of things, challenging each other.
This was really good. No, where they were not
so good is that they were rather careful and they came with radical solutions
much too late. The problem with that
is that once you create a radical solution and you try it and if it fails
and time is over, you have lost the
opportunity to fix it. Starting with radical solutions and failing is okay
because then you still have time to bring back
to dial back a bit on the pragmatism and realism, and you get to something
that is not boring, but maybe not as crazy as
your first radical solution. Um, another thing is
the way they tested it, you need to test
properly your solution. You need to test it
in a way that is revealing what's going
to happen in real life. So if I say that I'm
going to drop the device, the craft from 2.5 meters high and they test
it on 70 centimeters, that's not really giving them all the
information they need. And then the most important it was the
art of falling slowly. It was not the art of
falling in slow motion. They were allowed to do
things that move fast. The only dimension that matters is the
vertical dimension. If they had done something that moves really fast
but doesn't go down, then they would definitely win. So don't be too careful
at the beginning. If you want to be
creative, just go for it. Test your ideas, stress
test those ideas properly, and be careful that
you understood the brief and that you
frame the problem properly.
4. 03 Creative Mindset Wallas model: So what have we learned so
far about problem solving, we learned that
hands on iteration, trial and error definitely
outperforms overthinking. We also learned, of course, that knowing what you're
doing is very helpful. Specialized skills are useful, and they are even more useful if there is someone in
the room who is able to facilitate the conversations
and the negotiations between the different actors and get the right
decisions to be made. And then, of course, the problem statement, what are you actually
trying to solve? The problem that you
are trying to solve has to be described and
understood fully properly, otherwise you are putting
your resources and your energy and your time into
solving the wrong problem. Now, that's about
problem solving. Let's see how creativity operates or let's
dig a bit deeper. About 100 years ago, actually 100 years ago, Graham Wells
proposed this model. He was observing, let's say, scientists and big inventors
and the big names, I mean, the Darwins and
the Tesla and so on. The people who really helped
science move forward. And he observed how they
operate and how they think. And he said that they have basically four major
phases in their work. One is acquiring
domain knowledge. So really the preparation,
it's learning, learning, learning, that can be observing, traveling, experimenting,
and so on. The second is that they took
time to actually incubate. They took time to
think about what they had observed,
what they had learned, what they had seen,
try to connect the dots and see
how things work. So relaxing about it is
also part of the job. Then you have the aha
moment, the illumination, the spark in the eyes that
really is the point where, uh huh, now, it seems
like I'm onto something. And let's verify it. Verification is really
important because, of course, everybody believes that
we have good ideas, but a good idea is
only a good idea. If you can prove it, if you
can test it and implement it. Verification, which
is really about evaluating testing and crafting, you may have an intuition, but to write it properly, to describe it properly, to teach it properly is a
completely different game that needs incubation and
maturation and verification. So that's 100 years
ago for big inventors. Now, the good thing is
that we see connections, right with what we said before. Specialized skills are helping. So acquiring knowledge
makes sense. The kindergarten kids
don't have that, so they had to work
around that problem, and the architects
they had a lot of it. Verification is basically
building the tower, right? So it's doing it,
implementing it. Being creative, if it's not to create something,
that's not being creative. That's just daydreaming.
So those two things are clearly matching
what we've been saying. The thing is, we're
not in 1926, right? So let's have a look at
how things have evolved and if our world is better
or worse now for creativity. The difference on acquiring domain knowledge is that today
information is everywhere. You just have it in your
phone, in your computer, any kind of media, anything
that is connected, is going to get you access
to all sorts of information. You can have it even
nicely explained. You don't need to
summarize anything. You can just ask AI to
make summaries, et cetera. Now, let's not get
fooled either. This is information. Knowledge is information where you have understood it, right? One thing is get information, read an article, read a book. That's not the same as
understanding it fully. So knowledge is when you have had the time to understand it, and wisdom is when you've even figured out the links between those different
pieces of knowledge. You have connected
dots and you have made conclusions that were
not in that information, but that you have come up with because you fully
understood what it's about. So today we have speed of input, but you still need
to do the work in your own head to get
something valuable out of it. Let's have a look at incubation. That's probably where
we are the worst. Back in the days, if you
would send a question, let's say, or you have
found you have an idea. You have observed something
in your experiments and you write a letter to a fellow scientist and describe your findings and want to
have his or her opinion. Well, the letter takes
ten days to arrive, the person takes
ten days to answer, and that answer takes
ten days to come back. There is a month
during which you continue experimenting,
you continue thinking, meditating reflecting
on those findings and looking forward to the answer of that
fellow scientist. So you continue thinking. Today, everything is fast,
not necessarily curious. Everything is really about being fast and not
about enjoying, appreciating, meditating
about the findings. So that's probably something
where you might want to make some time for yourself to just enjoy what you're doing, enjoy what you're learning, and not try to go too fast. Illumination. Back in the days, you had those inputs, those observations, those
findings from your experiments, and then you were like, having a drink and thinking about it
and chatting with friends, and writing letters to
fellow scientists and so on. And then you had
that aha moment. Nowadays, so much
information comes to you. Immediately, so much
stuff is happening immediately that we are more often thinking,
Ah, yes, of course, that makes sense rather
than being the one who discovers or the one who
comes up with that theory. And it's kind of
getting blurred. It's kind of getting melted into that process of constant
flow and overflow. So Again, be careful,
find some rest, find the time to just
detach, disconnect, go for a walk, and allow yourself to have that
illumination moment. It can be in the
shower. It can be anytime you're walking in
the forest, doesn't matter. Allow yourself to just relax, daydream, and have
that moment for real. Verification. Now,
again, the same thing. If you do things, if
you are in crafts, if you are building things, writing things,
composing things, knitting, then you
are actually doing. If you are only asking asking an AI or
something like that, you are just in a
confirmation bias. You're just reading, maybe
proof reading, maybe not. You're clearly not the
one crafting the message, and you cannot come to the same conclusions related to verification of your theory. So what we see there is that the things that are most
challenged are your mindset. Do you take the
time to just digest your knowledge and come up with really creative fancy out
of the box solutions? Are you aware of
how things work, how the external world is
putting pressure on you, and are you controlling
that mindset? And then are you into doing business or are you
into getting done business?
5. 04 Creative Mindset Time pressure: Alright, so now we're
going to get into another part of the class where we are busting a few myth. We're going to take some misconceptions
around the theme of creativity and what drives creativity and what
blocks creativity. And we're going to
see that a lot of those beliefs are arguable,
to say the least. First one being that
last minute panic is a good way to be creative. Let's have a look at
what that really means. So the myth is that pressure
triggers creativity, like when I give 5
minutes to someone to create an aircraft or 18
minutes to build a tower. Is that really the case? Is pressure triggering
creativity? I don't think so. I think that pressure
unleashes creativity. Creativity is already there. It's within us. We
were born creative. It's not something
that you wait for, it's not something
that you learn or acquire, you have it. Actually, it's something
that you should foster. You have it. You need to
foster it to make it stronger. What last minute panic
does is remove the locks. Society, life, school, parents, neighbors, media, peer
pressure is blocking you. It's telling you what's right, what's wrong, not to do this,
don't behave like that. Don't say this, don't
make jokes about that. All that pressure
is formatting you into holding back
on your creativity. And to be a creative, you basically need
to fight that, control it, manage it, know exactly when to open the gate and let your
creativity express itself, and when to hold back
because, for example, you need to behave
in an environment where it is expected of you. So time pressure, absolutely, good idea, but not by accident. Give yourself 5 minutes to solve something to
come up with an idea. Give yourself a time
frame for your task, but do it when you have plenty of time so that
if it goes wrong, you can do it
again. No big deal.
6. 05 Creative Mindset RocknRoll: Alright, here's another myth, drugs and rock and
roll and, you know, being destructive and disturbing and do all sorts of
breaking things. Like this is a way
to be creative. Well, rock 'n roll or music
is fine, but not the drugs. What you will find out
in the other class about the creative tools and
methodologies that are proposed is that all of it is
really focused on your cognitive skills on how your brain works and on
having the right ideas. We've seen earlier today that it's about
specialized skills. It's about facilitation
and communication. It's about understanding
the problem properly. It's about being proactive and active and making decisions. So none of this involves drugs or alcohol or
sleep deprivation. Creativity actually
requires you to be healthy and strong and
energetic and powerful. So don't get fooled. Being a rock star is fine
as a lifestyle if you want, but that's not what
helps you be creative. If it happens that you
create something that is so disruptive that it actually
breaks something else. It replaces something else. You invent a technology that replaces another that's fine. I'm not saying that breaking
things is always wrong. I'm saying that
breaking things for the sake of breaking things
is not a creative strategy. It's just destructive. And in most cases,
creative strategies are actually productive, constructive, and sometimes they destroy and disrupt things.
7. 06 Creativity Mindset Artist: And of course, another myth or misconception is that creative
people are all artists. Now on Skillshare, I believe
many of you are artists, but that doesn't have a direct link with being
creative. Here's what I mean. Being creative is about bringing new ideas to solve a problem. The problem can be of any type. Being an artist is
often about solving your own problems and
is not always creative. Some people spend
their entire life trying to master an
ancient technique, and that's totally fine from an artistic point
of view, of course. But that doesn't claim to be highly creative or change
the face of the world. It is about craft, it's about quality of performance and let's say
technical performance. It's not necessarily creative. You can be a creative person
without being an artist, you can be an artist
without being creative. You can be both, of course. But these are distinct concepts.
8. 07 Creative Mindset Messy: And then of course, a very
common prejudice is that creative people are messy as if there was a link between
chaos and creativity. Of course, I have another view. Messy is creative,
but spelling matters. Being messy is often
misunderstood. What I think is that
creative people are keeping everything
top of mind. One of the main sources of creativity is when
you can connect dots. You experience
something on the left, something on the right,
something early, something late, and you keep it all top of
mind and then you put it together and you find the links. You find that wisdom
from those inputs, and that's what is the characteristics
of creative people, people who intentionally
keeping things top of mind. So of course, the stereotype
of the mad scientist with all those folders and
papers and documents all over the place on his
desk comes from that. It comes from the
idea that the pile on the left and the pile on the right have
something in common. That's just an intuition. The scientist doesn't
know yet what's the link between
those two researches, but he or she has the
intuition that there's something there and they
keep it top of mind. Personally, if I put a document in a sleeve,
the sleeve in a folder, the folder in a drawer, it's like I physically decide to forget that
piece of information. I want to keep everything awake, everything on my map
of opportunities, everything top of mind. Everything is part of
that same investigation, which is simply learning more. It's like if you would
be on Skillshare and deleting the classes that
you have already followed, that doesn't make any sense.
You keep them all there. You can go back to some of them because you've seen
some class and it reminded you
something that was said in one that you saw last
year, you go back and forth. That is being creative. That's not being messy.
9. 08 Creative Mindset Risk: And then of course,
another misconception is that creativity is
risk, like risk taking, because you try to do things differently, you're
not doing as usual, so you're taking a risk, and that to many
people is very scary. Now, the thing is
that here is a trick. Assess what can go wrong. There is this actually really
good book by Dale Carnegie, how to Stop wearing
and start living. And one of the
advices he gives is that always when you are in front of something
that scares you, ask yourself what can go wrong? What's the worst case scenario? And in most cases, the worst case scenario is okay. The worst case
scenario is you fail. You wasted an hour, 2 hours, half a day doing your exercise, crafting your art piece, and it's not satisfying
you. And then what? We'll just do it again. You just wasted 2 hours. Nobody dies from
that. So it's really, um, not so risky. Being creative, even trying radical solutions is
in itself not a risk. The risk is if you have the wrong tools and
you waste tons of your time and energy
and resources on solving the wrong problem
with the wrong approach, but that's not inherent
to creativity. So here is a really good advice. Don't execute on an idea if you haven't thoroughly
challenged it. So you have an intuition that something
interesting is there, that you need to try it, fine, but really try to test it first, intellectually,
mentally, then do some small tests that can give you quickly an idea whether you're
onto something or not. Once you have thoroughly
challenged your idea and you're still convinced it's a good one, then go for it. Once you start executing, once you create a company, once you go on Kickstarter, once you are putting
tons of money into an enormous art piece,
then stop hesitating. Don't question it, go
for it and finish it. Don't execute an idea that you haven't challenged and don't question an idea once you
have started executing. Here's an interesting
insight from Paul Arden. Start taking bad decisions
and it will take you to a place where others
only dream of being. It's again, this idea
of risk and safety, psychological safety, feeling good about
what you're doing. Just allow yourself
to be judged. Allow yourself to
make bad decisions, meaning to do things that others consider
as bad decisions, not things that you
consider as bad decisions. Just follow your gut, go with it and trial and error, like the kindergarten
kids, go for it, experiment, try,
adjust, come back, fix it, eventually apologize
if necessary and keep going.
10. 09 Creative Mindset Humour: And here is something
that is not a myth. It's naturally easy
to be creative. As we said earlier, you
were born creative, and we all have a
sense of humor. So to make it easy on yourself
and there doing things, take everything as a joke. You, as a kid, have
done jokes, pranks, you've used sarcasm,
you've made caricatures, and all these things are
actually creative tools. You've practiced it,
so just trust it. Sense of humor,
that's your grammar. Metaphors, that's
your vocabulary. We have all used
those words before. So being creative is natural. We were born that way,
and it's easy as a joke. Make jokes, make
fun of yourself, make fun of your work,
make fun of others, make fun of their work, kindly, generously, and everything
is going to be fine.
11. 10 Creative Mindset Task: Another misconception is
that creativity is a task, you're doing a serious
job on Monday, Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, you have to be creative and
then on Thursday and Friday, you do a serious job again. This is not how it works. Creativity is not a
task, it's a mindset. You can apply it to any task. Creativity is a language. You don't need to be
fluent to use a language. You just need to go for it. You just need to
decide using it. You can just practice anytime. You can practice creativity
on serious tasks. That's actually the case for most inventions and
innovations out there. You can use creativity
on anything. You can be creative
in a conversation. You can be creative
in the way you experience somebody else's work. It's a mindset. It's in your head. Just allow
yourself to be creative, allow yourself to be judged, and you will be creative
even in serious tasks.
12. 11 Creative Mindset Culture: Culture, this is not
a misconception. Culture is the contextual
definition of right and wrong. Everything you do is
driven by your culture, by your moral compass, by everything you've
learned throughout life, and all the decisions you've
made on how you perceive, right, wrong, appropriate,
adequate, et cetera. Everything you create is
flavored by your culture. Everything you create is
flavored by who you are. What that means is that it will be a problem
for somebody else. There will always be someone out there will think you
are doing wrong. There will always be someone up there who will say you've made the wrong decision or you've not achieved what you said you would and things like that, because these people have other definition of right
and wrong and wrong. Don't worry about that. Just
be yourself to be creative is to give so you are the
source of what you are giving, the source of what
you are able to give, and none of us is able
to give everything and perfection because there
is no such thing because it's very definition
depends on who you are. It depends on who
the audience is. So just go with your culture, embrace your culture,
change in yourself, whatever you think
needs to be changed. Keep dearly whatever you
think is worth keeping. Be proud of who you are,
proud of what you're doing, and keep creating, keep doing.
13. 12 Creative Mindset Doing: And here is a big misconception. The idea that doing something is the same
as getting it done. In my opinion, these are
completely different things. Why? Because getting something done is focused on the output. It's about the teacher
asked me to write an essay, 5,000 word essay on some topic, and I'm focused on having a document that contains
those 5,000 words. That's getting it done. Doing it is reading, searching, thinking,
hesitating, rewriting, correcting, asking for
advice, discussing it, rewriting, checking
again, proof reading, learning in the process. Having an aha moment
in the process, and that's the outcome. The outcome is who you have become after finishing the task. Whether you're an
artist, an inventor, a creative in
advertising industry, the output, the artifact
is only a step, a necessary step to the outcome, which is what you are
trying to achieve, who you are trying to become, what you are trying to make
other people feel like. So when you are in advertising, the actual piece of
video is not important. What's important is
that people see it and get convinced that they have to take
a certain action. So the outcome is the
action of the audience. The output is the
advertising video and your job is not
to create the video. Your job is to
trigger the behavior. In any creative tasks, in any action, in any craft, something that takes time to do, it's very tempting to use super cool tools that
make things easy and fast. The question is
always, is it yours? The question is always, is the outcome worth the
time I spend on it? Because if you are
just creating output, you're not achieving much. Outcome should
outweigh the output always the outcome is what
you learn in the process. The outcome is what others
learn in the process, what others experience from whatever it is that you
generate as an output. Along those lines,
help is a curse. If there is a special part of your craft that
you don't master, just go for it, put the effort, put the time, and keep
learning, practice. Getting help, like, for example, getting help from an AI. If you are a writer, I
can imagine it's very tempting to write a book in
a week rather than a year, but is it going to be your book? Are you even going to
fully own the content? And then there is
a big part of it, which is self satisfaction,
self confidence. It is proven that People
who avoid the effort are just not learning that
much and they are also not achieving that much and they are not
feeling great about it. If you want to build
self confidence, if you want to build
confidence in your craft, in your art in what it
is that you are doing, in the very reason why you
are on Skillshare right now trying to learn
something, you have to do it. Take the time and effort to go through the pain and
achieve something, that in itself is
worth more than whatever output you can generate with whatever
automated tool.
14. 13 Creative Mindset Summary: So earlier we learned that
problem solving is about hands on iteration and that just doing is better
than overthinking. We learned that we need
to know what we're doing. Some skills are necessary, that facilitation,
conversation, communication, consensus is a big
part of success, and that starting from properly framing and
defining the problem is, of course, the right way
to solve that problem. Then we talked about creativity. And what we saw there is that
creativity is not a matter of talent or special gift from
the stars. We all have it. We were all born creative.
It belongs to us. It's part of who
we are as humans, and we have to embrace it. We have to embrace the
process of creativity. We saw that it's not a tool
for mayhem and destruction. It may disturb some people sometimes that you
change things, that you create
stuff that is new, but it's just creating
another order. It's not about
destroying things. Creativity is intentional. It needs personal engagement. You do stuff, you do the effort, you decide to keep
things questionable. You decide to connect the dots, you decide to
investigate deeper. We also saw that
because there is this misconception of risk
associated with creativity, you need to build
confidence, self confidence, and confidence in
your tools in order to foster that creativity
that is in you. And we saw that having a good
sense of humor and relying on loving your own culture and your own personality
and who you are, are good ways to just be confident that what
you're doing is worth it. Finally, creativity is meant to foster greater
outcomes than outputs. When you are painting a piece or writing a book or
composing a song, the song itself
is not important. How people feel
when they listen to it is what you are
actually doing. The outcome of your
creativity goes way beyond the output or
the simple artifact. In practice, how do we do? Well, keep an eye on
your own approach. If you have been
until now struggling, being creative and
coming up with really new or groundbreaking
ideas on anything, just practice your craft and try to observe yourself
how you're doing things. Where do you get stuck? Where do you hesitate? Why are you scared
of trying something? Try to observe yourself
like you were flying on the ceiling and just
keep practicing. Keep practicing,
keep practicing, challenging yourself,
forcing yourself to do things differently. For that, I invite you also
to follow the Part two, where we will review
tools and practices and methods that help you overcome
your blocks, your fears, help you generate quantity
of ideas and solutions, tools that help you generate quality of ideas and solutions. See you there. A
Tanguy Prevot, Industrial Designer / Educator
