3 Tools to Become More Creative: Balder Onarheim (Transcript)

So there are a lot of different ways to understanding creativity.

Today, I’ll talk about the creative person, meaning your creative abilities. I do not talk about the creative person, then this is what normally people sees on their eyelids as Pablo Picasso.

But I have a very different take on creativity, a very different type of creativity that I find as important and as interesting. And that is the Vladimir Putin creativity.

Because Putin is, to me a brilliant example of a role leader who is extremely good at using different ways of thinking to achieve his goals. I won’t get political here, so I’ll leave it there.

But luckily, I’m not the only one seeing these types of creative skills as seemingly importantly as the more creative in the classical sense, the more artistic domains.

And one of my favorite studies was back in 2010, IBM did a big study where they asked 1600 CEOs in more than 60 countries around the world, whether these CEOs were prepared for the future. And actually less than half of the CEOs they asked felt that they themselves and their companies were actually ready for the future.

And then when asked what they could do better in their company to actually prepare for the future, creativity came out on top.

So in more than 60 countries, these 1600 CEOs agree that creativity was actually what they needed to make their company resilient for the future.

In another study that I really like, LinkedIn, they have this thing every year; they publish a list of the most common words people use to describe themselves.

And in 2012, creative was the most commonly used word in LinkedIn, when people describe themselves in their profiles. 2013 it drooped to I think third, but responsible minimum, but it’s still up there. So people still want to perceive themselves as creative.

And this view on creativity, to me changes the whole discourse about how we can actually train creativity. Because to me, we have to start seeing creativity as a fundamental human skill. It’s something that we’re born with, that we all need. And that is actually the key to success in any domain, any way of life, and any way of living.

I think, normally, I would say, that creativity is as important as an engineer for as an artist. And I love this because I see a lot of nodding here. So people seem to agree, you get the point, creativity is important.

And after one of these talks I gave, this old engineer came up to me, and he said, “Well, I really like to talk very interesting, especially the point about like, everyone should be creative. I think that’s such a brilliant point. But you know, you should also remember to mention that some of us still have to do the serious stuff. So the rest we can be creatives.”

And that was after listening to me for 45 minutes, only talking about why creativity is important to teach in engineering schools. So to make my point as clear as possible, in my point of view, when I talk about training creativity, it’s not about art, it’s about success in any aspect of life; that being work, private life, sex, cooking, wherever.

Being a scientist, I always have this need to define exactly what I’m talking about. So I’ll give you one of the many, many definitions of creativity with a very cliché example.

So when I grew up, this was a cell phone. And this was a computer. And young me these two things were radically separate. They were both technology. They both run on batteries, the batteries could last for weeks and weeks. This but the normal phone today…. and when Apple introduced the iPhone, I was conceptually shocked because the two things cell phone and computer had so little in common that seeing the two things put together as one thing was to me really new and it was really useful.

I loved having this new thing. I just never thought about it because it was two separate things. And what I wanted to pay attention to here is actually the conceptual difference between the original components.

Because in my line of research, we see creativity as being the ability to take two or more concepts, concepts or conceptual understandings and put them together in something new. That fulfills being novel as a new and also being useful for some kind of context.

But why is this something we have to relearn? Why don’t I talk about learning creativity, and I’ll give you a very, very simple example, it might be a bit characated, but some of you or most of you have probably seen this before. It’s called the Nine Dot Puzzle. The challenge is link all the nine dots using four straight lines or fewer without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once.

So I’ll give you 15 seconds, normally it’s 10 minutes. The embarrassing thing is kids have no problem with this. Kids do this right away. And I’ll start by showing you why it’s so hard for adults to solve this.

So if you look at the person trying to solve this on paper, this will be the solving strategy. Let’s see, oh, yeah. So you start in one corner, you go to another corner. And you’ll continue doing that until you realize I’m almost out of lines, and then you’ll cross 45 degrees and realizing you’re all out and it still hasn’t gone through all the nine dots.

And the creative solution to this… the adult solution is that you have to realize that you don’t have to stop in a dot. And by realizing this, you can actually solve it.

So the reason why this is a puzzle is because we put rules into it that are not there. The only person who told me that the line should connect two dots and stop there is some teacher in math… in a math class back in the days, but this still sticks.

So the adult solution, the adult creative solution is like this. And I normally use this to warm up when I work with kids. And I remember the first time I did it, one of the pupils in the class about six year old when seeing this, he said, Well, I can solve it with three straight lines. And you know, adult arrogantly will be like, Oh, you’re so cute. Yeah, come on the show me.

And he did this. And it’s a completely different solution. I’ve also seen kids folding the paper round. So you can sort of do one straight line just going around the paper in circles, which is also still fine.

But in the same class another people said, Well, I can actually solve in one straight line. And I had already been shot one, so I was okay, maybe you can. And he did it and it’s still a completely fine solution. It’s just embarrassing that we didn’t think about it because we have this idea of there being a relationship between the thickness of the line and the size of the point, right?

Making this really a challenging task for adults, very simple tasks for kids.

So something happened along the way. And it’s consensus, consensus, more or less, and a lot of different creativity trends that people get less creative when they grow up.

So basically, it looks something like this. You probably may have seen the famous Ken Robinson talk. If you haven’t, you should; this is a TED talk, he talked about this for 40 minutes, and it’s more or less, very well accepted.

Another thing that is to me as an expert, even more scary is they’ve also done a lot of studies on the relationship between expertise and creativity within that same domain.

So extremely simplified, you have some kind of learning curve within the domain, the dotted line here represents the 10,000 hour line, which is of course expertise line. And what these studies show is something like that. So you can be very creative and enter a new domain because you don’t have all the rules of the domain, then your creativity in the domain more or less progresses alongside your expertise.

But right before you have your 10,000 hours, then your creativity within the same domain starts going up. So it’s something about not knowing too much within your own expertise if you want to be able to perform credibly. This is quite challenging.

So there are a lot of explanations for exactly what happens as we grow up and various explanations for why we lose our creativity. I’ll mainly focus on one which I think is the one that is easiest to train and we are working with training with students, and that’s our associative limitations.

Bringing you back to the example about the iPhone, when I talked about the conceptual distance, as in our associations back in the days a cell phone computer were very far associations. Nowadays, they’re considered more or less the same thing.

But as we grow up, we get more and more boxes, more and more frames, making it really hard for us to connect things that aren’t put in the sandbox by someone else.

So what a lot of creativity training is about is actually improving the brain’s ability to find different pieces of information that seem to be irrelevant at the time. It’s that simple.

So I’ll give you three very quick tools for how you can train your associates in network. The first one is continuous practice; this is something you can do every day.

The second one is a way to use your sleep as a creative technique.

And the third one as a right now solution, if you’re stuck with a creative problem, what can you do to get to the next step?

So let’s start with the continuous practice thing. I’ll do this when I brush my teeth every night. And I want… to give an example of this, I want you all to look at the toothbrush and think of three random words quickly. Three random words.

And then try to analyze how random word those words really, maybe it was like dog, bicycle, shirt, water, traveling, something you’ve seen within the last couple of hours, at least, or maybe just related to what you’re looking at right now.

So what I do when I brush my teeth, as I challenge myself to think of random words that are actually random. So if the starting word would be toothbrush what would be a random word, someone? Camel? Yeah, that’s, that’s great.

Okay, yeah, I would think about the brush and yeah, but still, it’s pretty far. Car tire could be another one. But what I do is basically I try to come up with a new completely random word as quick as possible, a word that has nothing to do with the previous word I was thinking about. And then I keep doing that.

And I can feel like almost every week I get better at it. So this ability to for randomness, there was originally done a really cool numerous imaging study of hip hop artists who are good with improvising words. And those guys blew any creativity test away.

Because their ability to randomly pick some words and then connect them something else and then come up with something that no one else thought of, is actually a very important part of being creative.

So very simply, as often as you can, try to challenge yourself to come up with random words, is an important part of creativity training.

The second tool is a bit more technical to explain; it is very simple to do. So what you see up here is a very simplified version of how we sleep.

And what I am trying to say is from fall asleep, we go into deep sleep. And then about every 90 minutes we are in what it’s called rapid eye movement sleep or just dream sleep. So above the red line here, that’s where you have your dreams.

As you probably all remember, in your dreams, you don’t apply too many rules, right? So you can be in Italy over here, and then walk into Spain, and sort of no one else would notice that I’m still in the same room. So you don’t apply the same rules, which are the rules that destroy our creativity.

So if we can manage to use our dream sleep, to be creative, it’s actually a way to work around all these rules we use when we’re awake.

SO HOW DO YOU PRIME YOUR SLEEP?

How do you prime what you dream of? In one of my favorite studies they did this with Tetris. So they had people playing Tetris right before they fell asleep, and then they woke them up in dream sleep and asked them what they’ve dreamt about. And almost every participant had some element of Tetris in their sleep.

So family members fall into place or something that resembles Tetris. And the way you can use this to try to be more creative is very simple. Right before you fall asleep, try to think about the problem you want to solve, try to think about all the information we would need to solve it. But of course, you should not try to solve it because then you will not fall asleep. We all know that feeling.

And then the chance of you actually dreaming about this without all the normal constraints improves. And then try to make sure that you wake up after some kind of 90 minute cycle. So it could be six hours and half hours, nine hours of sleep. So the chance of waking up in our dream sleep is bigger.

And then in the morning, take notes, did our dream but anything related to my problem? And no matter how farfetched it seems, when you wake up, try to note it down because it will give you some new thoughts about whatever problem you’re working on.

We can’t always go to sleep when you want to solve problems. So the last technique of today as randomness. As I said, we are terrible at randomness. If I ask for random word, it will be really do something.

So what this technique is about as if you’re stuck with a problem, you can’t find a way to solve it, introduce some randomness. I use Wikipedia; they have a random article button. And then what you get is a completely unexpected piece of information.

And then what you do is you challenge yourself, I have a problem, I have this random piece of information, probably never heard about before. Can I in some way force that information into my problem?

One very concrete example of this, we were working on a project with… where we struggled with the production technology. And then I did this, and up came a list of Russian boxers in the 105 kilogram category. And one other name reminded me of an old teacher who told me about this very specific old production method that I hadn’t thought about in a long time that we could actually use to solve a problem.

So this sort of extremely weird link I would never have thought of, if I hadn’t looked at random Wikipedia. As I said, I can’t promise you guys to be more creative right now or 20 minutes ago.

What I want you to promise me is that every single person here will try one of the three following things. This is not hard. This is the 70%. Go home and try one of these for yourself. Either practice while you’re brushing teeth tonight, random words.

Or before you go to bed tonight, think about some kind of credit challenge and try to wake up after six, seven and a half and nine hours.

Or next time you’re stuck with a creative problem. Press the random button on Wikipedia, and you will get some new inspiration.

Thank you so much for listening. It was a joy. Thanks.

SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:

Balder Onarheim’s talk titled “3 Tools to Become More Creative” provides practical insights into nurturing creativity. Here are the key takeaway points from his talk:

1. Creativity as a Fundamental Skill: Onarheim challenges the misconception that creativity is limited to artistic pursuits. He argues that creativity is a fundamental human skill, vital for success in various aspects of life, including work, personal life, and problem-solving.

2. The Importance of Associative Thinking: Onarheim emphasizes the importance of associative thinking, which involves connecting seemingly unrelated concepts or ideas. This skill is crucial for generating novel and useful solutions to problems.

3. Creative Skill Decline in Adulthood: Onarheim discusses the well-accepted idea that creativity tends to decline as people grow older. This decline is attributed to the development of rigid mental frameworks and rules that limit creative thinking.

4. Tool 1: Continuous Practice for Randomness: Onarheim introduces the first tool for enhancing creativity: continuous practice in thinking of random words. By challenging yourself to come up with genuinely random words, you can improve your ability to think outside the box.

5. Tool 2: Using Sleep for Creativity: Onarheim explains how to leverage sleep as a creative tool. He suggests priming your mind with a problem or challenge before falling asleep. Your brain’s ability to bypass constraints during dream sleep can lead to creative insights.

6. Tool 3: Introducing Randomness in Problem-Solving: Onarheim offers a technique for overcoming creative blocks. When stuck on a problem, introduce randomness by clicking the “random article” button on platforms like Wikipedia. The unexpected information obtained can trigger novel ideas and solutions.

7. Encouragement to Experiment: Onarheim encourages the audience to experiment with at least one of the three tools he presented. He believes that by taking small steps to enhance creativity, individuals can unlock their creative potential and think more innovatively.

8. Creativity Beyond Art: Onarheim’s talk challenges the common perception that creativity is limited to artistic endeavors. He argues that creativity is equally crucial for professionals in non-artistic fields, highlighting its significance in business and problem-solving.

9. The Link Between Creativity and Success: Onarheim cites studies, such as IBM’s CEO survey, which reveal that creativity is considered essential for preparing businesses for the future. This underscores the link between creativity and success in various domains.

10. Embracing Associative Limitations: The talk emphasizes the need to overcome associative limitations imposed by age and expertise. To foster creativity, individuals must break free from rigid mental frameworks and allow themselves to make unconventional connections between ideas.

In conclusion, Balder Onarheim’s talk provides practical tools and insights to help individuals nurture their creativity, highlighting its significance in all aspects of life. By challenging conventional thinking and encouraging experimentation, he aims to inspire people to become more creative thinkers.

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