Can You Learn to Be Creative? (你可以更有創意嗎?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/05)
Can You Learn to Be Creative?
MOST of us want to be more creative, but the plethora of advice is enough to drive you crazy. There are literally thousands of books and self-help programs that promise to teach you all the special secrets of creativity. So let's begin with three commonly held myths, first among them that creativity is a rare form of genius. Not true--everyone can learn to be more imaginative. Second, that creativity matters only in the arts and sciences. Again, not true--fresh ideas can invigorate any area of human endeavor. Third, that creativity is a talent and thus effortless. False--intense energy and strong motivation are needed to generate original ideas. How do creative people create? And what can the most creative people--writers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs--teach us? Can we apply in our lives what they practice in theirs? Can creativity be learned? Are there any techniques for generating originality in projects and ideas? Our contributors, all of them prolific and creative people from diverse fields, share some of their secrets with us.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Irvine, has written more than thirty books of science fiction. Greg talks about how to break the creative logjam and make the writing process fun.
Dr. Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimum Experiences, is a leading authority on creativity. Mike emphasizes the openness and the curiosity of creative people, and how we can all share in the creative experience.
Dr. Rhoda Janzen, a poet and instructor of English literature at UCLA, has twice been the poet laureate of California. Rhoda describes her creative process, analyzes one of her poems, and talks about how she encourages creativity in her students.
Dr. John Kao, a noted teacher, entrepreneur, and the author of Jamming, is an expert on corporate creativity and management, John, who was trained as a psychiatrist, discusses the training necessary to develop personal creativity.
Dr. Todd Siler, an internationally known artist, author and entrepreneur, is the first visual artist to receive a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Todd believes that you don't have to be a genius to think like one.
ROBERT: John, you're a creative machine--entrepreneur, jazz pianist, author, movie producer [John was a production executive on Sex, Lies and Videotape, which won the Palme d'Or (First Prize) at the 1989 Cannes Film]. Is creativity a talent that only comes naturally, or can you teach it?
JOHN: The answer to both questions is yes. I think we all have tremendous creative abilities. And yes, creativity can be taught. Maybe not in the sense of finding one set of rules that works for everyone but by looking for patterns, for different aspects of creative skills.
ROBERT: Rhoda, you've published over a hundred and fifty poems. Describe the creative process when you write poetry. What's the root of your own personal creativity?
RHODA: Well, creativity for me, as it manifests itself in my poetry, is a process that's almost like a trance. I just sit down when I have that idea, and I begin to write. I've learned how to intellectualize it, to rationalize it, to speak about my poetry in an academic way. But the process itself--that first act--is just sitting down and letting myself go.
ROBERT: We're going to ask Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] to analyze you later. Greg, you're an astrophysicist and science fiction writer of such books as If the Stars Are Gods, in which beings are collected like songs--quite a creative concept. But what do you do when you're stuck, when the page is blank, when your creativity is cramped, when the ideas just aren't flowing?
GREG: Then I go for a walk, or I go for a swim. One thing I've learned is, don't make it hard. The surest way to block yourself is to make writing a disagreeable experience, so that your unconscious remembers next time that it doesn't want to go there.
ROBERT: Does that happen often?
GREG: No, because for me it's always fun. If it's not fun, I don't do it.
ROBERT: Todd, your science-based paintings are collected by major museums around the world. And you have a company that teaches creativity in schools and businesses, based on your book Think Like a Genius. Can anyone think like a genius?
TODD: You don't have to be one to think like one. Look at that enormous treasure chest you have--the three-pound complex we call a brain, which encompasses such a vast range of thought and feeling and experience. The first rule to tap your potential is just to be open. And to embark on that inner search for yourself.
ROBERT: You have to be willing to work at it?
TODD: Yes. Most people are more creative than they give themselves credit for. There's a beautiful thought by Goethe, who said that if children were allowed to develop naturally from the day of their birth, they'd all be pure geniuses. I absolutely believe that.
ROBERT: Mike, in your book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, you profile many of the world's most innovative people in the arts, sciences, and public leadership. What makes these folks tick? What's at their core that generates such creativity?
MIKE: Oh, they're quite different from one another in many ways, but one thing they have in common is their tremendous curiosity, which leads to a kind of unfettered openness in experiencing the world. There are people eighty, ninety years of age who are like children of six or seven; they're still open and curious about the world.
ROBERT: There's hope for us.
MIKE: I think so. The more childlike we become, the better.
ROBERT: I'm in good shape, then. Are these principles applicable to normal people who want to be more creative in their daily lives--as opposed to the superstars you deal with?
MIKE: The important thing is not to confound success--recognition--with the creative experience. We can all experience creativity, but unfortunately not all of us can be recognized as artists. Recognition comes only to a few people, although that would change if society paid attention to more disciplines and domains. But if we're talking about the experience itself--then, yes, we can all live much more creatively.
ROBERT: Greg, I want to put you in a hypothetical situation. Imagine you're lecturing on creativity to two diverse groups, both of which you're quite familiar with. During the day, you're teaching physics graduate students. At night, you're conducting a workshop for young science fiction writers. Your assignment is to engender creativity. Are you going to use a different approach with each group?
GREG: No, I think I'd start with the simplest thing, which is analogical thinking. I'd teach them to ask, "How is this thing like that thing, and how is it not?" To look for comparisons where you wouldn't think any basis for comparison existed, and go on from there--see if something comes out of the woodwork. Creativity is really just a process of trying to make a connection that you didn't see before. But you have to be open to it.
ROBERT: But physics students have been trained to do structured problem sets in, say, differential equations, while the science fiction writers may be free-form thinkers. Does that make a difference?
GREG: Well, with the physics students, you might ask, as Einstein did, "How is going up in an elevator like standing on the earth? Are they the same experience?" That's the equivalence principle, which was a giant step toward understanding gravity. Nobody had ever thought of it before, but these two experiences are the same. It's just that simple.
JOHN: Greg is in a good position to consider your hypothetical example of bringing two groups together and seeing what crosses boundaries. New ideas often come from the collision of different perspectives--from almost forcing the square peg into the round hole.
ROBERT: Greg is the personification of collision.
TODD: One of the best things you can do to spark the creative process--whether in scientists or writers or whomever--is to get people to approach problems from unique angles. Getting rid of the normal categories we all put things into also helps.
JOHN: And the categories can be demographic. In our company, our information-systems guy is sixteen years old, and so he's also our token teenager. We make sure to have a blend of different kinds of people--different ages as well as different disciplines.
ROBERT: Rhoda, you've won awards for innovation in teaching. What do you do to generate creativity in your students?
RHODA: I agree with what's being said about bringing different groups, different demographics, into dialogue. At UCLA we're fortunate to have one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. In my classrooms, I deliberately invite dialogue between different cultures, different ethnic groups, different racial groups, and we begin to challenge assumptions--the act of going into dialogue pushes us and expands our boundaries. But by the same token it's also important to ignore categories. For instance, if I'm trying to emphasize creativity in a classroom, I might say, "Let's look at this mid-nineteenth-century novel and find some commonalities with this late-twentieth-century film"--so not only are we crossing the boundaries of art, we're putting these oppositional forces into contact.
ROBERT: John, what are the primary mistakes that people make when they're trying to be creative? What forces inhibit creativity?
JOHN: Part of it is the voice of judgment. "I'm not doing work that's good enough" or "I'm not creative, it's not part of my job." Another big mistake is to assume that there's a right way to practice creativity--that there's an objective set of principles that you have to study. Obviously there are certain principles, in a general sense, but one writer I know in Hollywood works only between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. Others work ten hours a day--
ROBERT: With both hands--
JOHN: --and probably both feet as well. Creativity is variable, in terms of the specific style, and people need to understand that they are free to develop their own style.
ROBERT: Mike, what are some mistakes that you've seen among the hundreds of creative people you've interviewed?
MIKE: Most of those people were lucky enough to have survived all their mistakes, so they don't make as many as they used to. But I agree with John [Kao] that many people feel constrained--they feel they're not entitled to try something different. They think their lives have been set for them from the beginning, and that they shouldn't explore other interests. This can lead to a routinization of thinking as well as living, which then spoils their chances to be someone else.
ROBERT: Todd, tell us about your school programs and how they engender creativity in young children.
TODD: We have an art and science program that integrates the inventions and languages and ways of looking at the world that the arts and sciences employ. We use a range of tools that I find useful for people who don't describe ideas well in words but can model them.
ROBERT: Physical, tangible models?
TODD: Right. For instance, we ask groups of people from diverse backgrounds and of different ages and interest, "What's your ideal learning environment--but don't tell me, show me." And we supply them with a range of ordinary materials, with which they build these fabulous multidimensional symbolic models that represent their ideas, visions, and viewpoints.
ROBERT: So you have them use model-building to express abstract ideas. What other questions might you ask?
TODD: What does learning mean to them? How do they like to be taught? What are the kinds of things they want to learn? And how do they want to apply what they learn? Today what's happening in schools is that children are becoming brilliant test takers, if that, and then they dump the information, literally, at the door. Ask them three weeks later, "What is it that you studied? How are you applying it to your life?"--and many of them are clueless. Our program increases the meaning and the usefulness of the information they're learning, so that they can apply it to their lives, interests, and passions. This model-building allows them to do that. They can use their own intelligences and learning styles to build something that makes their thought processes tangible.
ROBERT: People actually build these abstract sculptures.
TODD: Yes. They're not making art or science or engineering per se. We ask them to literally give form to their thoughts: "Show me!" It's a sophisticated show-and-tell. Using various common materials, they draw, cut, paste, and build multiform objects inspired by mental connection-making techniques. These objects look three-dimensional, but they're more, because they have parts that move [and change over the fourth dimension of time]. There's also a fifth dimension, which is the symbolism expressed. The signs, stories, and symbols cross intellectual barriers.
JOHN: I'm reminded of the process that designers go through.
TODD: Prototyping.
JOHN: Designers have to move right away into something concrete, because if they stay stuck in the conceptual, their conversations will be pyrotechnic but useless in the final analysis. So how do you move quickly from concept to some kind of an embodiment? In business, people often think of creativity primarily as moving from generic concept to specific concept. Todd seems to have created some kind of language for concretizing thoughts, enabling people to communicate.
TODD: Yes. It's a form of prototyping, because you're actually bestowing form. But it's not as restrictive; it's much more free-form. And it's nonthreatening--there's no prerequisite of having to be an artist or a scientist, a poet or a thinker, or anything. You take the most common materials and give form to thought. It's the symbolic embodiment of thought.
JOHN: That's important, because people are often stuck in the notion that they have to find the right answer--say, when they're making a decision about their future--as opposed to figuring out something that's good enough for now, until you transcend that with a new understanding.
RHODA: And once you've got your embodiment, once you've built your model, you're going to change it. Constant change is one of the wonderful things about the creative process. It takes the sting and the pain out of thinking, "Oh, I've got to create something fabulous!"
TODD: Nothing's fixed. It's all changeable; it's all modifiable--the point is the growth. It's like part of the evolutionary process. Since you allow free interpretations, it's going to be morphing and doing all kinds of things.
MIKE: One of the problems of the creative process is that people think they'll get to the end of it and that's it. But in the creative process, you learn from each step of the way, and with each step something changes, and you don't know what the end will be.
ROBERT: Finality is often a fallacy in creativity. Mike [Csikszentmihalyi], you often refer to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychotherapist and concentration camp survivor, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning. Is there a relationship between creativity and a search for meaning?
MIKE: All creative people, whether they're scientists or artists, are really trying to understand how the universe is put together, why it's there, what it's doing.
ROBERT: If we had the answers, we wouldn't be doing this series.
MIKE: That's right. And that quest keeps going on. New questions arise all the time, and the search gets more and more interesting.
ROBERT: To make the universe even more interesting, we're going to ask Rhoda to read one of her poems for us.
RHODA: I'd be happy to read a poem. It's called "Seniors Witness Portent." It's set in urban Los Angeles, and it's based on something that happens virtually every day--an event I witnessed one day when I was out with a friend.
I was driving with my friend the optimist
who despite her optimism had that afternoon
noticed at Ralphs that on her shopping list
she had scribbled ground belief. The moon,
starlike, air-kissed the Hollywood jacaranda.
The unhappy geriatrics withheld applause,
sitting on what they wished was a verandah,
not the bald cement abutment that it was.
They were motionless after a matzo supper,
watching as on a stage a curse-hungry teen,
whose face was tossed like a crumpled wrapper
into our headlights and our panic of adrenaline:
he seized a bicycle and sheered it at our car.
It was one of L.A.'s casual cruelties, the faces
as from a hole punch, dispensable and sure,
the earth that roils with unnamed psychosis
just under the urban blanket we have tucked
around its bulk, the faultfinding and the path
seismic--oh, it's been coming, it's been sicced
on us, the six-toed night-blooming behemoth.
ROBERT: Rhoda, I'm going to put you into a difficult situation. I want you to be the teacher in your English class, and you're going to analyze this poem, written by some woman you've never met. How would you dissect it? What's the core of its creativity? Why did it win prizes?
RHODA: Well, before I would ask my students why it's a successful poem, I'd just look at it in terms of what's happening. What is this poem about? I'd probably ask my students to tell me what's going on at the literal level. You know, there are so many negative stereotypes attached to poetry. Students think it's about love and fancy emotions and anguish and so forth. And poems don't have to be about that. So I would ask my students, "Look, what do we know about the speaker? Who is this friend that the speaker is driving with? What do we know about their relationship? Literally, what's happening in the poem? Can you describe to me this incident of violence, and the intentionality behind it?" And then, once we've established what's actually going on, I might try to move the discussion into why these comparisons are being made. I think it all goes back to what we mentioned earlier--connections and discursiveness. How and why are we bringing together things that don't seem to have much in common? For instance, in this poem, why has the poet compared seismic activity to a gesture of adolescent rage? What do those two things have in common? I would take it from there and invite my students to participate in this sort of unfolding analysis.
ROBERT: Greg, in your science fiction, do you do similar things? Do you bring conflicting ideas together?
GREG: Oh, sure. The best way I know to generate a story is to smack people together, basically. The big problem I usually have is not starting a novel but stopping a novel. I just finished a novel and then realized there was something more I wanted to do with it. So I called up my editor, and she said, "Can't you leave those people alone?" And the answer is no. The problem is that my characters keep on doing things, because they engender their own lives. And it's really hard for me to put them down.
ROBERT: Give us an example.
GREG: Well, there's this character who dies and then reappears.
ROBERT: Not a problem for you.
GREG: Appears in a different form. And it was a big surprise to me to have this person coming back, as it would be in real life. But being a science fiction novelist, I could do it technically. But I didn't know what was going to happen until I initially turned the page and found out at about the same time the reader will. I really like that, although it's kind of tough. It's not sailing smoothly on the lake of serene consciousness--it's more like whitewater rapids all the time. And that's why I turn to writing very eagerly, and in a sense to find out what happens next. And this is the way I hope people read my books--wondering what's going to happen.
RHODA: Do you ever feel out of control in your artistic process?
GREG: There's always an element of being out of control. Skiing is like that. There's some sense of control--one thing I finally learned from my high school English teacher was to outline. I outline more and more, but it's just to put a frame around the story.
ROBERT: Todd has been out of control ever since I met him twenty years ago at MIT.
TODD: I love listening to this. When I finish reading a novel, I'm really involved with the characters and I tend to create continuing virtual stories with them. They go on living in our imaginations, and we do things with them even after they've stopped at the end of the book.
GREG: Now you understand the disease of unendingitis.
ROBERT: Rhoda, are students afraid to be creative because they don't want to look silly?
RHODA: Frequently they are afraid to be creative, and it's one of the things I fight against in the classroom. Students need to be comfortable. They need to feel confident in their own skills. I want a student to be able to make connections between things. I want to be able to ask them, "Look, what's the connection between a Faulkner novel and a Drew Barrymore film?" And if they feel comfortable coming up with that commonality, they'll be able to develop a fruitful analysis.
ROBERT: What is the connection?
RHODA: Well, that's up to the students. And I don't necessarily want them to end up with Drew Barrymore, but until they feel comfortable and have faith in their own connections--in their own ideas; the ideas that they originate--then they won't feel comfortable going on to further analysis.
MIKE: In general, when very creative people are engaged in a voyage of discovery, they don't know what the end product will be. It's a scary thing. And you have to learn to control that fear, and be like Ulysses.
JOHN: Creativity is intangible. You sit in a room and you think, until ideas become concrete in some way. You may have no navigational aids to tell you where you are. So an important part of the process is to develop trust in yourself. It's almost a way of having a dialogue with yourself, as if you were your own patron, or your own best friend, or your own nurturer, encouraging yourself to step forward, be brave, change the frame, alter your work habits, try new things with no guarantee of success.
ROBERT: Where have you done that in your own life?
JOHN: When I was involved in academic teaching, I wanted to empathize with my students. So for several months before classes started, I would study something that I knew nothing about--like learning to play a new musical instrument or reading about some obscure period in history--just because I wanted, in some respects, to give myself permission to start with a blank piece of paper and get back into a beginner's mind. These kinds of experiments, this internal theater of maneuvers, might seem a bit nutty--whether it's setting up your workspace, or pretending you're an investigative reporter in your hometown, or putting on someone else's head and trying to see the world through a different set of lenses. But they might get you the metaphoric pot of gold.
ROBERT: That's how I thought about this show--at least, the nutty part.
JOHN: There you go. Thank goodness.
TODD: You have to have the courage to experiment. You leave behind your fears. That's the hardest part--getting people to suspend that fear, that self-judgment. Getting them to say, "Gee, what would this connection be like? What's behind it? What could it mean?" And having the confidence to undertake the kind of independent thinking that we often don't cultivate. We all subscribe to more of a herd mentality. We all agree on ways of looking at the world, instead of allowing ourselves to experiment--not in the structured way that science experiments but in a very loose way, where you welcome serendipity and surprise.
ROBERT: How does the integration process work in all this--where you need a period of time just to sit and let it stew?
GREG: We've been talking about work. I want to talk about not working. I favor creative laziness. Every night, I fix in my mind the things I'm struggling with, and I go to sleep. In the morning, lying face down, before any signs of life, I just go to the mailbox and see if anything has arrived. I just let it happen for five or ten minutes. It may appear as though I'm being lazy--and in fact I am--but I'm trying to get the unconscious to do the work that I don't have the time to do. And it's like a gift every time it arrives. I think this works about a third of the time--that is, every three days or so, I get something in the mail. Sometimes it's just junk mail--you know, "YOU MAY HAVE WON A MILLION DOLLARS!"--but at least it's something.
MIKE: Most creative people have these routines that help them break away from linear, rational attempts to solve problems by the usual means. Your mind is able to make connections you would never have made no matter how hard you tried. But you have to have the skills. I talked to a musician, for instance, who says that he looks at his hand with awe and wonderment as it composes. Of course, he could look at his hand for twenty years, and if he didn't have that skill, it wouldn't do anything. So, you have to have the skill, and then this creative laziness will let you look at it from points of view you never had before.
TODD: There's a complement to creative laziness, which is the other extreme. Some people actually increase their creative vigor by working--creatively working and multitasking lots of different things. And while other people are dropping dead just looking at them, they're revitalizing themselves. You'd think that somebody who finishes a project that would kill most mortals would want to rest. But in fact it's the creative fever that--
ROBERT: --energizes them.
TODD: Energizes them. It's unbelievable. It's a fast burn all the time. Feels great.
ROBERT: Excellence in all fields can be produced by contradictory styles. Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov are great chess players, though each has a radically different approach--one is an aggressive attacker, the other's a plodding defender--yet both are world champions. It's the ability to do what you do extraordinarily well.
MIKE: And finding your own way of doing it.
ROBERT: John, what can we learn from these three creative people: a poet [Rhoda Janzen], a writer [Greg Benford], and an artist [Todd Siler]. What in the richness of their experiences can help normal people in everyday life?
JOHN: Let's put on the hat of an anthropologist and simply study them in their native habitat, to see what kind of work processes they employ. When do they work, where do they work? Greg [Benford] was talking about being willing to go for a swim if he felt he was getting a little stale. What's the work setting? What does it look like? What's on the desk? Is it solitary? It is interactive? We begin to build case studies of how the creative process works.
ROBERT: Mike, how would you study these creative people we're holding captive here?
MIKE: Just to follow on from what John [Kao] was saying, I think what we learn from them is that they've taken control of their own lives--maybe willy-nilly, maybe under pressure--and developed a way of personalizing their own activity and experience. They're not pushed around, they don't follow an externally imposed pattern; instead, they try to figure out how they can express what they know in the best possible way.
ROBERT: How about their methodology?
MIKE: Each one probably has a different way of working. You can look at when they get up in the morning, when they eat, when they sleep, and so on--and you'll come up with an average that doesn't mean anything. The only thing they have in common is that each has discovered how to manage the creative process for himself or herself in the best possible way.
ROBERT: Creativity is the combination of general principles and individual variability.
JOHN: But they all probably have a fascinating creative biography--how their interest began, how it evolved, whatever reversals they may have had. And what their learning process has been, throughout. If we could find some overall time dimension as well, that would be fascinating.
ROBERT: Let's contemplate a time dimension here and look forward a hundred years. Will creativity be a subject we learn in school, like English and history?
JOHN: It already is, in some countries and in some communities. What's going to be different a hundred years from now is that we'll all have access to a rich array of technology-based tools, and perhaps other kinds of methods, for amplifying our creativity.
MIKE: What probably will be different is that we'll be less and less obliged to follow certain patterns that are foisted on us, either by backward technology or backward social arrangements. And this freedom could make us a fantastically creative society.
RHODA: I hope so. I hope that the boundaries between disciplines will be down, or at least flexible, and that art will be enriched by responses and accomplishments from other fields.
GREG: I think we may be able to access creativity technologically. Literally get some sense--because we know how the brain works--of what it feels like to be creative. And that would be something new for human prospects.
TODD: I think our world culture will eventually be struck on the road to Damascus and realize that creativity is the growth engine of learning, the way to discovery, to invention, to civility. To humanity. And we'll get wise to that, and we'll study it and respect it, and this will allow us to flourish. Period.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
ALTHOUGH the fields in which creativity is applied are radically different, the processes whereby creativity is generated are remarkably similar. Learning to be creative really works--but it takes work. How do you solve a problem creatively? The first key to creative problem-solving is to generate numerous alternative solutions that are sufficiently different from one another. Don't fear conflict, even confusion, among these competing ideas. Be willing to be wrong. Allow insight and inspiration to wash over you. But don't evaluate possible solutions too quickly; analysis--even accurate analysis--stifles creativity. Develop your entire set of creative solutions first; then, and only then, appraise them. But then you had better be rigorous and merciless in your analysis. Woolly-brained, poorly structured, creative solutions can be worse than no solution at all. So test them all; eradicate the weak ones--Kill off your own babies! Never be satisfied; always monitor results; constantly re-assess everything. That's how you learn to be creative, as the right processes move us closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
How do you solve a problem creatively? The first key to creative problem solving is to generate numerous alternative solutions that are sufficiently different from one another. Don't fear conflict, even confusion, among these competing ideas. Be willing to be wrong. Allow insight and inspiration to wash over you. But don't evaluate possible solutions too quickly; analysis--even accurate analysis--stifles creativity. Develop your entire set of creative solutions first; then, and only then, appraise them. But then you had better be rigorous and merciless in your analysis. Woolly-brained, poorly structured, creative solutions can be worse than no solution at all. So test them all; eradicate the weak ones -- Kill off your own babies! Never be satisfied; always monitor results; constantly re-assess everything. That's how you learn to be creative, as the right processes move us closer to truth.
[因該怎麼樣利用創意解決問題? 第一關鍵就是產生很多不同的解決方案。 在這些互相競爭的方案中不要恐懼衝突, 甚而混亂。 不要害怕犯錯誤。讓靈感啟發您。 不要太性急評估解答; 分析-- 甚而準確分析—會抑止創意。 首先要發展出一整套創意性的方案; 然後才去評估他們。可是一但您開始了分析階段你必需嚴謹和殘忍。 測試他們; 根除微弱-- 殺掉您自己的嬰孩! 不能得意; 監測結果; 經常重新評估一切。只有這樣才能學習創意, 才能利用正確的過程更接近真理。]
--- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: Can You Learn to Be Creative?
Illustration(s): Gregory Benford, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Rhoda Janzen, John Kao, Todd Siler, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/211/211transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Monday, August 4, 2003
How Does Creativity Work at Work? (創意如何發酵?)
How Does Creativity Work at Work? (創意如何發酵?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/04)
How Does Creativity Work at Work?
TODAY's global marketplace is dynamic and hypercompetitive. Organizations must innovate constantly, producing unending lines of better goods and services. Business creativity is now a necessity, not a luxury. Can your company survive without creativity? What about you personally? Do you have original ideas that work? Your career could depend on it. But why are creativity and innovation important? And what's the difference between creativity and innovation? Creativity forms something from nothing, while innovation shapes that something into ever more practical products and services. Creativity by itself can be aimless, shooting off in all directions, some of them useless; while innovation by itself can be sterile, producing nothing fundamentally novel. So how can organizations be structured and managed to be both creative and innovative? And what can we do to bring imagination and productivity to our jobs? If the process can be focused and replicated, creativity helps build companies and promote careers. We assembled a group of creative professionals--three have been chief exeecutives of creative organizations--to answer these questions.
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen J. Cannell has written some four hundred episodes for network television, as well as five best-selling novels. As the founder, owner and chief executive of one of Hollywood's largest indepedent television studios, Steve takes us behind the scenes in a business filled with creative egos.
Dr. Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate School, is the author of leading books on creativity. Mike holds that a company's success depends not as much on coming up with a lot of original ideas as on selecting and realizing the best of them.
Dr. Robert Freeman is the former chief executive of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Eastman School of Music. Bob tells us what it's like to manage an organization overflowing with creative artists.
Dr. John Kao, a psychiatrist and entrepreneur, is the author of Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativty. John helps companies to foster creativity and sees the successful ones as "idea factories."
Ray Kurzweil, who has founded four high-technology companies based on his pioneering work in computer science, believes that technical diversity and group creativity are essential in this kind of company. Ray is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines.
ROBERT: Ray, you've started, built, and managed a series of companies based on revolutionary, computer-based systems for new processes, such as speech recognition, and new products, such as musical keyboards. How do you encourage and inspire your employees to be creative?
RAY: Take speech recognition, where the technology is interdisciplinary, requiring experts in signal processing, speech science, linguistics, and half a dozen other disciplines. These people really needed to think as a group, so the first thing we did was to get them all together to understand these different disciplines. An interesting technique--as I noted in the show, "What's Creativity and Who's Creative?--we gave problems from one field to people from another, and let them apply their own tools and traditions to a problem they'd never dealt with before. That way, they really did think out-of-the-box, and they came up with very creative ideas.
ROBERT: Does the boss have to be reasonably familiar with each of those disciplines?
RAY: You do need one person who knows what's feasible: technology has to be feasible, but ahead of the edge. It's important to catch the wave at the right time. You have to aim at something that's going to be an advance when the product comes out--which might be two years later. So you really have to think about where the technology will be.
ROBERT: John, in your book, Jamming, you use your experience as a jazz musician to point up the similarities between that kind of spontaneous creativity and creativity in the workplace. You're also the chief executive of a company called The Idea Factory. What's an idea factory?
JOHN: In a general sense, an idea factory is any organization whose central competitive strengths are creativity, originality, flexibility, and foresight--the ability to see into the future. All businesses want and need creativity, but going from platitudes and slogans to actual practice--which means dealing with people, budgets, opportunities, technology--is very difficult to do. So an idea factory is actually a place, a setting, where creativity can happen every day.
ROBERT: Is creativity more easily generated in a high-tech company than in, say, a distribution company?
JOHN: The only kinds of companies that don't need creativity these days are companies that don't need to change--don't need to keep an eye on rapidly shifting environments. I'd say that would be no companies.
ROBERT: Bob, what's it like running an organization of musical artists, all of whom think they're something special?
BOB: Each of those creative artists is going to have a fairly narrow area of professional disciplinary focus. The bassoon teacher is going to want to make bassoon reeds, the historical musicologist is going to want to deal with watermarks and manuscripts from J. S. Bach, and the piano teacher is going to want to play Chopin etudes. If you put out on the table $75,000 to $100,000 a year, out of an operating budget of $20 million, and say that you will allocate these discretionary funds to projects in which those colleagues work together, you'll get a rush toward the center and some pretty creative ideas.
ROBERT: What's an example of that?
BOB: Oh, a project concerned with the future relationship of supply and demand for classically trained musicians. As soon as you get musicians thinking about that, they'll come to the conclusion that the supply of pianists is already far ahead of the demand. But that's the case only if you plan on sending out the five best pianists from New York to give concerts all over the country. If you can put each of twenty thousand pianists in a different small town in America and get them to develop the musical life in those communities to a pretty high level, you get a wholly different variable.
ROBERT: Steve, you built your private company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, into the largest independent television studio in Hollywood. You produced a thousand hours of network television, shows, like Wise Guy and Silk Stalkings. As a writer yourself, what's it like managing other writers?
STEPHEN: It's an interesting dilemma, because as a writer I have tremendous pride of authorship--which you have to have. And yet as an executive running a company with fifteen hundred employees, many of whom are creative people, you have to do a whole other thing--you have to be a referee. You need to learn how to keep people working together. You have a lot of high-octane people who can get sideways with one another, and in order to keep everything moving forward, you have to subjugate yourself. I always say to people when I come in, "Just because my name's on the building doesn't mean I'm the smartest guy in the building. If I have a bad idea, I want you to tell me."
ROBERT: Do they?
STEPHEN: Oh, boy! If they don't, if I feel they're just slathering Vaseline on me, I pull people aside and say, "Hey, you know what? You're not doing me any good." I need to know when I'm not thinking straight, because I make creative mistakes just like anybody else in the business. In a creative environment, the best idea wins, not the idea that comes from the guy with the biggest title. Everyone should feel part of the process. If the assistant film editor's idea is used in the cutting room, she says to herself, "God, I told them to cut there. I made a contribution, and that's great!" In a creative company, all of a sudden you have this kind of collective heartbeat; people get really excited, and that excitement feeds on itself. Of course, you have to work hard to keep the politicians out of the mix. I have actually let people go who I thought were really talented, because they were playing politics--because they were interested in fomenting anxiety in order to promote themselves. In a creative environment, you have to eliminate politics.
ROBERT: Mike, you've interviewed and analyzed hundreds of creative people from all walks of life. This is the real world, raw data that forms the substrate of your books, like Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. From what you've heard about Ray [Kurzweil]'s technology companies, Bob [Freeman]'s music schools, and Stephen [Cannell]'s television studio, what do you think of these guys?
MIKE: When we think about creativity in organizations, we usually focus on how to generate more and more new ideas from as many people as possible. But that's not where the real issue is. There are lots of good ideas out there. The problem with implementing creativity is how to select, encourage, and realize the good ideas. That's where we don't do a very good job. I think everyone here knows how to do that, but in many organizations they don't. Some CEOs will even hire psychologists to get workers to think out-of-the-box, and although they may increase the number of new ideas, they still don't know how to select the good ones. We have to concentrate more on implementation than on origination.
RAY: The key issue in a group process is defining what you're trying to create. In my companies, we spend a lot of time defining very precisely what it is we're trying to accomplish, and then we take each aspect and break it down in more detail, and we keep doing that until that definition actually becomes the creative output itself.
ROBERT: John, when you work with companies, how do you deal with the selection process that Mike [Csikszentmihalyi]'s talking about?
JOHN: It's fundamental. People often associate creativity in organizations with the big lightbulb, but just in order to prime the pump, companies and all kinds of organizations need to take note of the little possibilities, the small ideas, the pieces of information that don't quite fit with the existing way of thinking. And once an idea gets onto the table, that's just the beginning of the journey. Most companies are a Darwinian jungle, where ideas get killed or stabbed in the back or somehow manage to survive despite the political environment--and that's what constitutes the selection process.
ROBERT: But is that bad?
JOHN: It depends. If you're talking about organizational creativity as a process that requires investment and involves important resources, like people's careers and intellectual property, you have to be more intentional--you can't just let 'er rip. This is not to say that you need to plan every aspect of how you proceed, but you do have to have a process for developing ideas, funding them, and stewarding them to the point where they have value.
STEPHEN: Well, that's one of the points that Ray [Kurzweil] made right at the beginning--that somebody needs to be the quarterback. It's one thing to foster the ideas and get everybody thinking in the same direction, but if the team starts to wander off, you have to get it back on track.
RAY: And the ideas are not the key thing. As Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] pointed out, there are lots of ideas out there. When we dissect a goal into its parts, we find that there are hundreds of ideas for each of these little subproblems. The question is, How do you select the ideas and put them all together? We try to solve the problem very quickly, which means that we might come up with a first step that doesn't work--but then we analyze that step and determine why it doesn't work. It's an iterative process of getting closer and closer to the goal.
BOB: There needs to be a forum for discussing the ideas.
ROBERT: Mike, if you were doing a book on organizational creativity and Ray [Kurzweil], Stephen [Cannell], Bob [Freeman], and John [Kao] were among your interviewees, what questions would you ask them?
MIKE: On what basis do you promote people in your company? And what are you looking for among your chief people?
ROBERT: How important is promotion in creative management? Bob, how does promotion work in the worlds of music and academe?
BOB: One of the fascinating things about American universities, including music schools, is the process whereby young men and women of age thirty or so, who have just finished doctoral degrees, are taken into the machinery of the selection process leading to tenure and by age forty have made valuable contributions. This has a lot to do with how that process is managed and what the incentives are. What one is always doing in the academic world is looking for teachers who, by age forty, have a good enough national reputation to attract good students and good enough teaching skills to make those students improve and prosper.
STEPHEN: The promotion process is critical to a creative company, and it differs from that in, say, brokerage houses or accounting firms. When you decide to put someone in charge of other people is that you may have to make a choice between creative talent and management skill. Some people who have tremendous creative ability may not have any management skills and never will--and vice versa. I've put writers in charge of television shows who I didn't think were necessarily my best writers, but they were best at getting the show going, making the whole thing run, and fostering a feeling of creativity.
ROBERT: How did you handle the writers you thought were the best but who weren't given the promotions?
STEPHEN: Well, what I try to do with those people is work with them--because you can teach management skills to people. For instance, one thing I sometimes find with creative people is that they behave badly because they're insecure. A writer may scream at his secretary, say, to show how important he is, but what he's really doing is waving a flag over his head that says, "I'm not secure, so I need to build up my own importance by humiliating someone who can't defend herself." So what I'll do is pull that person in and say, "Here's what you're doing, guy. You've just raised a flag, and I can read that flag."
RAY: Managerial promotion is not the only thing that's important. Being put in charge of a group of people is not the only way to get recognition. In our technology companies, creative individuals are really the most important contributors, not necessarily the manager of an R&D department.
ROBERT: How do you reward those people?
RAY: By creating a culture in which they understand that their ability to create knowledge, even if they're working all by themselves, is at least as important as being a manager.
JOHN: There are many ways to reward people which fundamentally reflect what you value. There are companies that will reward people with more free time or money from a slush fund to pursue personal interests.
ROBERT: It's more important than even a personal bonus?
JOHN: It might be a lot more important than cash. Let's look at what motivates creative people--and Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] can certainly help us with that. Often creative people are best motivated by being part of a community in which they can do their best work with people whom they regard as being their peers at the top of their game.
STEPHEN: My brother-in-law says that when people come in for employment interviews at his architectural firm, more and more frequently the first question they ask is "How much free time will I have?" This is a very strange question, because when I was starting out, that was the last thing I was worried about. I wanted to get employed; I wanted to make my mark; I wanted to climb the ladder; I didn't worry about my vacation time.
MIKE: Well, time is the ultimate resource, so now in some sense it's a symbol of power. But I think that what all you gentlemen are saying is very important, and not often implemented in organizations. You're not just throwing money or power at people below you, but you're paying attention to them, and to what they're trying to do. You're trying to find the best match between them and the needs of the organization. I don't think you can achieve creative results in organizations simply by rewarding people financially or with power; you have to pay attention to people and treat them with respect.
RAY: We try not to let rank and ego issues get in the way. We try to create a group enthusiasm--to create a flow, if you will. When this works well, ideas come out of a session and nobody knows who actually came up with them. The group is working as one mind, internalizing the problems and coming up with solutions.
ROBERT: As society becomes more knowledge-based, creative organizations, however diverse in content and customers, are becoming more similar to one another in process and structure. Bob produces knowledge in music schools, Ray in technology companies, Stephen in the entertainment business, John in facilitating new ventures. It's the creative output that makes such similarity of style so fascinating.
RAY: Increasingly, knowledge production is really where it's at. We've created a trillion dollars of new market capitalization in Silicon Valley alone over the last ten years and it's all new knowledge. That's how wealth is being created in the world today. And it's not just computers and software; it's art and music and writing and all kinds, all forms, of knowledge. One reason we're successful in this country is that we have the culture and the institutions to encourage that.
JOHN: The importance of creativity today reflects a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy. In the old days, wealth was created by standardization. In the industrial era, you manufactured something, you sought long production runs to get economies of scale, you were really efficient--you could get a Model-T any color you wanted as long as it was black. And there was a whole set of assumptions about how to manage. Organizations had a typical hierarchical structure to make sure things ran smoothly. That system worked well when the industrial environment was relatively stable, but now it's fundamentally unstable--and so we need fewer economies of scale and more economies of discovery. This means that the approach to organizational structure and management has to shift as well.
RAY: And these shifts are happening faster, because technological change is accelerating--and it's going to continue to get faster.
ROBERT: Let's look at the dark side. What are some of the things organizations do that inhibit creativity?
RAY: If you have a lot of hierarchy, it causes problems by cutting down communication. I've moved away from hierarchical organizations; I've flattened them. I try to recognize everybody's skills and find ways that the group can work together and give people satisfaction.
ROBERT: All of you, I'm sure, have made mistakes. Ray, in retrospect, what have you done that inhibited creativity?
RAY: Throwing too many people at a project.
ROBERT: Bob, I bet it's easy to aggravate musicians. Have you ever done that?
BOB: I'm sure I have, undoubtedly every day, though without intending to. I hope it won't be irrelevant here to draw a contrast between symphony orchestras and string quartets. A symphony orchestra is a very hierarchical organization that gets its artistic direction from a strong leader who's standing on a box with a stick in his hand and who brooks no discussion or enjoys no collaboration on anything. If he says, "It's now too loud," it is indeed now too loud. In a string quartet, the four players who are members of that organization have to interact with one another to achieve creative results. I'm not going to name this famous European string quartet, but it uses no music and has played together for thirty years. The one woman member, who plays second violin, has been married at one time or another to each of the three others. How you get creative results with that kind of collaboration Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] may know, but I don't.
ROBERT: Stephen, are you going to try that system?
STEPHEN: No, I wouldn't try that system. We have in filmmaking what is called the auteur theory, which means that the director has a vision and his vision is omnipotent. This is very similar to Bob [Freeman]'s orchestra model, where the conductor is the absolute boss. I've always fought against the auteur theory, because it doesn't bring the best creativity to the table. You have writers, you have actors, you have directors, and the idea that only one person on a set can have a vision is, I think, wrong. Everybody should have a vision of what he or she has to do, and it's the director's task to mold those visions and keep everything moving in the right direction. A really good director would be willing to see something unexpected that an actor is doing, adjust his own vision, and change the way he directs the scene. I don't think the auteur theory is healthy for filmmaking.
ROBERT: Sounds like you're a perfect boss. Tell me a mistake that you've made.
STEPHEN: Oh, I make 'em all the time.
ROBERT: Tell us one; I won't tell anyone.
STEPHEN: Well, OK. I once blew up at a network in a meeting--
ROBERT: But they deserved it.
STEPHEN: No, actually I just lost it. I allowed myself to vent in the wrong circumstances. It was my fault, and I left the meeting knowing I had made a horrible error--and when I make a mistake like that I'm affecting not only my own career but the careers of all the other people who are working with me on these projects. And I didn't work for that network again for about nine years.
ROBERT: You bring up an important distinction, because you're a creative person running a large creative organization--as are Ray [Kurzweil] and Bob [Freeman]. How can the same human being be personally creative and at the same time be managing the creativity of others?
STEPHEN: You have to become a little schizophrenic. You have to compartmentalize. There's some part of you that has to be a manager and has to say, "OK, I'm not fronting for this proejct; I'm not the writer here."
ROBERT: Ray, you're an inventor and you run companies. Isn't that a managerial conflict of interest?
RAY: I try to collaborate. My own creative process is to frame a problem at night, think about it, and then go to sleep--and in the morning there's often some creative ideas to work with. But then to get everybody involved in the creative process, we try to recognize everybody's contribution--which is really their reward, along with the thrill of having the technology affect people's lives.
ROBERT: Mike, do you see a conflict when a manager is both personally creative and trying to manage the creativity of others?
MIKE: It could happen, but there's a lot of creativity in management itself. If you can enjoy orchestrating talent and skill, being a manager of creativity can be very satisfying.
ROBERT: John, when you work with companies, what are some keys to engender creativity?
JOHN: That's about a ten-hour subject, but I'll comment on a couple of things. One is to look explicitly at the environment within which creative work might occur--I mean both the physical and emotional environments. On the physical side, it's no accident that in Hollywood and in the recording industry the workspace is generally free of the "Dilbert" kind of cubicles, and there are special conference rooms for brainstorming sessions. Big ideas need a big space. The emotional environment is about how the person managing the process makes people brave enough to step forward with their ideas. It also has to do with what the company believes in, because organizations need a north star in order to fix a purpose for creativity. Creativity in and of itself, as we've mentioned, is just new stuff, so a company needs to link creativity to a larger vision of the future. It needs to have what you might call strategic foresight, so that creative work is organized and focused.
ROBERT: Stephen, as a north star, how do you make decisions in your company?
STEPHEN: I'm very intuitive. I was actually asked this question in a magazine interview. I said that if I don't have an answer, I try to solicit the best opinions in my company, but then I make a gut shot at it. The reporter said that I was the first executive to acknowledge relying on intuition in decision making. The other people he'd interviewed all said that they made decisions empirically. They would collect information, they would make graphs, they would use efficiency scales and equations and whatever to figure out the bottom line, and then they would make a decision based on that.
ROBERT: Those other guys may be making decisions just as intuitively as you do, but they could have been embarrassed to say so, because it's socially unacceptable to make decisions based on intuition.
STEPHEN: Well, that's what this reporter said. He said that intuition is considered a feminine trait, and most of those guys wouldn't admit to it. Of course, I will.
ROBERT: Intuition and analysis each have their role; the best decision makers use both.
STEPHEN: You know me. I don't need to claim to use empirical studies to support my decisions just to justify getting paid a lot of money.
ROBERT: Ray, how do you see creativity in rapidly changing technologies?
RAY: Creative groups are dynamic and shifting and aren't necessarily long lasting. With the Web, we can create virtual companies very quickly and have work groups that aren't geographically in the same place. With increasing bandwidth, we can tap math talent in Russia, programming talent in India, and musical talent in China. Creative groups can be formed around the world.
ROBERT: The Web is amazing. Last night I was searching for John [Kao]'s resume on my paper-strewn desk when I realized that it would be easier to download it from his Web site five hundred miles away. Took about eight seconds.
RAY: There's a fantastic network of knowledge that's at our fingertips, and it's becoming more compelling. I feel very plugged in.
ROBERT: Does the integration of technology enhance creativity? Some say that technology enhances control and thus stifles creativity.
RAY: Many solutions to problems are out there; people just have to discover them. With all this knowledge at our fingertips, and with powerful tools to find it, we can attack more complex and demanding tasks.
JOHN: This notion of a group memory is very important. Companies often don't know what they know. Technology enables the representation and sharing of knowledge in ways that haven't been possible before. We're just at the beginning of an exciting era.
ROBERT: Let's fast forward into that era a hundred years. How will creativity impact business?
MIKE: I've been studying many traditional manufacturing firms, and it's incredible how creative they now have to become to survive. They have to change every few years. Previously, they could wait twenty years or so before they had to make their products obsolete, but now it has to be done almost immediately.
BOB: Education in the next century will embody something that the Scandinavians already understand: We're training people for careers that aren't going to end at age sixty-five or seventy but go on until eighty or ninety. Thus the importance of continuing education--the opportunity to bring men and women, perhaps in their mid-forties, back to school either to improve skills that aren't up to current standards or to help them begin new careers.
RAY: A hundred years from now, society will be profoundly different, and people will be profoundly different. We're not going to have unmet material needs. The whole point of society will be to focus on innovation, the creation of new knowledge. And as a species, we will have vastly expanded intellectual skills, because of a merger between our biological brains and the very powerful new technologies we're creating. We're already putting [very simple] implants in our brains, and that will be routine a hundred years from now. We'll be a lot smarter, and the goal will be creating new knowledge.
JOHN: Companies will be measured on ROI--return on innovation. There will be chief innovation officers, who will be responsible for these innovation processes, which will move ideas forward in very explicit ways. People will look at the management of ideas then as routinely as they look at the management of money now.
ROBERT: Stephen, you'll still be writing novels a hundred years from today?
STEPHEN: I'm counting on it; I'll be in a crypt somewhere typing away. I think we're looking at such a huge technological revolution that flexibility and creativity will be essential. There will be many new delivery systems, many more ways to get ideas to the consumer. You'll need to be much more flexible to take advantage of this increasingly innovative world we're in.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
CREATIVITY and innovation mark the economic frontier of contemporary commerce. Finding new and better products to sell, services to offer, and ways to work are all essential for survival in highly competitive environments. With increasingly rapid change, the need to anticipate change is critical. Creativity in business is surprise, breakthrough, leaps of logic, sudden shifts in modus operandi. But creativity has to be directed or it may well spin out of control. Modern organizations require both creative management and the management of the creativity--that is, executives who cook up novel ideas themselves and executives who can direct the creativity of others. Creativity is required in all sectors--business, the professions, not-for-profit, academic, government. Creativity works its magic across the organization, from overall strategy to specific R&D, from finance to production, distribution to customer service. Creativity, in short, propels the country's business and catapults its citizens' careers. What drives the best people in the best organizations? An almost obsessive need to change, even to shock. Creative individuals are rolling dynamos; they are intense, gutsy, spirited, strange. It's personalities like these that push us closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
“Creativity is required in all sectors--business, the professions, not-for-profit, academic, government. Creativity works its magic across the organization, from overall strategy to specific R&D, from finance to production, distribution to customer service. Creativity, in short, propels the country's business and catapults its citizens' careers. What drives the best people in the best organizations? An almost obsessive need to change, even to shock. Creative individuals are rolling dynamos; they are intense, gutsy, spirited, strange. It's personalities like these that push us closer to truth.”
[社會全面 – 企業, 專業, 非營利, 學術, 政府, 都需要創意。 從整體戰略到具體研發, 從財務到生產, 從發行到顧客服務, 創意的魔術橫跨組織。 簡而言之, 只有創意能推進國家的產業, 公民的事業。 最佳的組織裡最佳的人才有一種特質--他門需要改變甚致於震動現狀。創意人士是輾壓發電機; 他們個性強烈, 性質古怪。 這種人士才會把我們推向真理。]
-- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Does Creativity Work at Work?
Illustration(s): Stephen J. Cannel, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Robert Freeman, John Kao, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/203/203transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/04)
How Does Creativity Work at Work?
TODAY's global marketplace is dynamic and hypercompetitive. Organizations must innovate constantly, producing unending lines of better goods and services. Business creativity is now a necessity, not a luxury. Can your company survive without creativity? What about you personally? Do you have original ideas that work? Your career could depend on it. But why are creativity and innovation important? And what's the difference between creativity and innovation? Creativity forms something from nothing, while innovation shapes that something into ever more practical products and services. Creativity by itself can be aimless, shooting off in all directions, some of them useless; while innovation by itself can be sterile, producing nothing fundamentally novel. So how can organizations be structured and managed to be both creative and innovative? And what can we do to bring imagination and productivity to our jobs? If the process can be focused and replicated, creativity helps build companies and promote careers. We assembled a group of creative professionals--three have been chief exeecutives of creative organizations--to answer these questions.
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen J. Cannell has written some four hundred episodes for network television, as well as five best-selling novels. As the founder, owner and chief executive of one of Hollywood's largest indepedent television studios, Steve takes us behind the scenes in a business filled with creative egos.
Dr. Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate School, is the author of leading books on creativity. Mike holds that a company's success depends not as much on coming up with a lot of original ideas as on selecting and realizing the best of them.
Dr. Robert Freeman is the former chief executive of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Eastman School of Music. Bob tells us what it's like to manage an organization overflowing with creative artists.
Dr. John Kao, a psychiatrist and entrepreneur, is the author of Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativty. John helps companies to foster creativity and sees the successful ones as "idea factories."
Ray Kurzweil, who has founded four high-technology companies based on his pioneering work in computer science, believes that technical diversity and group creativity are essential in this kind of company. Ray is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines.
ROBERT: Ray, you've started, built, and managed a series of companies based on revolutionary, computer-based systems for new processes, such as speech recognition, and new products, such as musical keyboards. How do you encourage and inspire your employees to be creative?
RAY: Take speech recognition, where the technology is interdisciplinary, requiring experts in signal processing, speech science, linguistics, and half a dozen other disciplines. These people really needed to think as a group, so the first thing we did was to get them all together to understand these different disciplines. An interesting technique--as I noted in the show, "What's Creativity and Who's Creative?--we gave problems from one field to people from another, and let them apply their own tools and traditions to a problem they'd never dealt with before. That way, they really did think out-of-the-box, and they came up with very creative ideas.
ROBERT: Does the boss have to be reasonably familiar with each of those disciplines?
RAY: You do need one person who knows what's feasible: technology has to be feasible, but ahead of the edge. It's important to catch the wave at the right time. You have to aim at something that's going to be an advance when the product comes out--which might be two years later. So you really have to think about where the technology will be.
ROBERT: John, in your book, Jamming, you use your experience as a jazz musician to point up the similarities between that kind of spontaneous creativity and creativity in the workplace. You're also the chief executive of a company called The Idea Factory. What's an idea factory?
JOHN: In a general sense, an idea factory is any organization whose central competitive strengths are creativity, originality, flexibility, and foresight--the ability to see into the future. All businesses want and need creativity, but going from platitudes and slogans to actual practice--which means dealing with people, budgets, opportunities, technology--is very difficult to do. So an idea factory is actually a place, a setting, where creativity can happen every day.
ROBERT: Is creativity more easily generated in a high-tech company than in, say, a distribution company?
JOHN: The only kinds of companies that don't need creativity these days are companies that don't need to change--don't need to keep an eye on rapidly shifting environments. I'd say that would be no companies.
ROBERT: Bob, what's it like running an organization of musical artists, all of whom think they're something special?
BOB: Each of those creative artists is going to have a fairly narrow area of professional disciplinary focus. The bassoon teacher is going to want to make bassoon reeds, the historical musicologist is going to want to deal with watermarks and manuscripts from J. S. Bach, and the piano teacher is going to want to play Chopin etudes. If you put out on the table $75,000 to $100,000 a year, out of an operating budget of $20 million, and say that you will allocate these discretionary funds to projects in which those colleagues work together, you'll get a rush toward the center and some pretty creative ideas.
ROBERT: What's an example of that?
BOB: Oh, a project concerned with the future relationship of supply and demand for classically trained musicians. As soon as you get musicians thinking about that, they'll come to the conclusion that the supply of pianists is already far ahead of the demand. But that's the case only if you plan on sending out the five best pianists from New York to give concerts all over the country. If you can put each of twenty thousand pianists in a different small town in America and get them to develop the musical life in those communities to a pretty high level, you get a wholly different variable.
ROBERT: Steve, you built your private company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, into the largest independent television studio in Hollywood. You produced a thousand hours of network television, shows, like Wise Guy and Silk Stalkings. As a writer yourself, what's it like managing other writers?
STEPHEN: It's an interesting dilemma, because as a writer I have tremendous pride of authorship--which you have to have. And yet as an executive running a company with fifteen hundred employees, many of whom are creative people, you have to do a whole other thing--you have to be a referee. You need to learn how to keep people working together. You have a lot of high-octane people who can get sideways with one another, and in order to keep everything moving forward, you have to subjugate yourself. I always say to people when I come in, "Just because my name's on the building doesn't mean I'm the smartest guy in the building. If I have a bad idea, I want you to tell me."
ROBERT: Do they?
STEPHEN: Oh, boy! If they don't, if I feel they're just slathering Vaseline on me, I pull people aside and say, "Hey, you know what? You're not doing me any good." I need to know when I'm not thinking straight, because I make creative mistakes just like anybody else in the business. In a creative environment, the best idea wins, not the idea that comes from the guy with the biggest title. Everyone should feel part of the process. If the assistant film editor's idea is used in the cutting room, she says to herself, "God, I told them to cut there. I made a contribution, and that's great!" In a creative company, all of a sudden you have this kind of collective heartbeat; people get really excited, and that excitement feeds on itself. Of course, you have to work hard to keep the politicians out of the mix. I have actually let people go who I thought were really talented, because they were playing politics--because they were interested in fomenting anxiety in order to promote themselves. In a creative environment, you have to eliminate politics.
ROBERT: Mike, you've interviewed and analyzed hundreds of creative people from all walks of life. This is the real world, raw data that forms the substrate of your books, like Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. From what you've heard about Ray [Kurzweil]'s technology companies, Bob [Freeman]'s music schools, and Stephen [Cannell]'s television studio, what do you think of these guys?
MIKE: When we think about creativity in organizations, we usually focus on how to generate more and more new ideas from as many people as possible. But that's not where the real issue is. There are lots of good ideas out there. The problem with implementing creativity is how to select, encourage, and realize the good ideas. That's where we don't do a very good job. I think everyone here knows how to do that, but in many organizations they don't. Some CEOs will even hire psychologists to get workers to think out-of-the-box, and although they may increase the number of new ideas, they still don't know how to select the good ones. We have to concentrate more on implementation than on origination.
RAY: The key issue in a group process is defining what you're trying to create. In my companies, we spend a lot of time defining very precisely what it is we're trying to accomplish, and then we take each aspect and break it down in more detail, and we keep doing that until that definition actually becomes the creative output itself.
ROBERT: John, when you work with companies, how do you deal with the selection process that Mike [Csikszentmihalyi]'s talking about?
JOHN: It's fundamental. People often associate creativity in organizations with the big lightbulb, but just in order to prime the pump, companies and all kinds of organizations need to take note of the little possibilities, the small ideas, the pieces of information that don't quite fit with the existing way of thinking. And once an idea gets onto the table, that's just the beginning of the journey. Most companies are a Darwinian jungle, where ideas get killed or stabbed in the back or somehow manage to survive despite the political environment--and that's what constitutes the selection process.
ROBERT: But is that bad?
JOHN: It depends. If you're talking about organizational creativity as a process that requires investment and involves important resources, like people's careers and intellectual property, you have to be more intentional--you can't just let 'er rip. This is not to say that you need to plan every aspect of how you proceed, but you do have to have a process for developing ideas, funding them, and stewarding them to the point where they have value.
STEPHEN: Well, that's one of the points that Ray [Kurzweil] made right at the beginning--that somebody needs to be the quarterback. It's one thing to foster the ideas and get everybody thinking in the same direction, but if the team starts to wander off, you have to get it back on track.
RAY: And the ideas are not the key thing. As Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] pointed out, there are lots of ideas out there. When we dissect a goal into its parts, we find that there are hundreds of ideas for each of these little subproblems. The question is, How do you select the ideas and put them all together? We try to solve the problem very quickly, which means that we might come up with a first step that doesn't work--but then we analyze that step and determine why it doesn't work. It's an iterative process of getting closer and closer to the goal.
BOB: There needs to be a forum for discussing the ideas.
ROBERT: Mike, if you were doing a book on organizational creativity and Ray [Kurzweil], Stephen [Cannell], Bob [Freeman], and John [Kao] were among your interviewees, what questions would you ask them?
MIKE: On what basis do you promote people in your company? And what are you looking for among your chief people?
ROBERT: How important is promotion in creative management? Bob, how does promotion work in the worlds of music and academe?
BOB: One of the fascinating things about American universities, including music schools, is the process whereby young men and women of age thirty or so, who have just finished doctoral degrees, are taken into the machinery of the selection process leading to tenure and by age forty have made valuable contributions. This has a lot to do with how that process is managed and what the incentives are. What one is always doing in the academic world is looking for teachers who, by age forty, have a good enough national reputation to attract good students and good enough teaching skills to make those students improve and prosper.
STEPHEN: The promotion process is critical to a creative company, and it differs from that in, say, brokerage houses or accounting firms. When you decide to put someone in charge of other people is that you may have to make a choice between creative talent and management skill. Some people who have tremendous creative ability may not have any management skills and never will--and vice versa. I've put writers in charge of television shows who I didn't think were necessarily my best writers, but they were best at getting the show going, making the whole thing run, and fostering a feeling of creativity.
ROBERT: How did you handle the writers you thought were the best but who weren't given the promotions?
STEPHEN: Well, what I try to do with those people is work with them--because you can teach management skills to people. For instance, one thing I sometimes find with creative people is that they behave badly because they're insecure. A writer may scream at his secretary, say, to show how important he is, but what he's really doing is waving a flag over his head that says, "I'm not secure, so I need to build up my own importance by humiliating someone who can't defend herself." So what I'll do is pull that person in and say, "Here's what you're doing, guy. You've just raised a flag, and I can read that flag."
RAY: Managerial promotion is not the only thing that's important. Being put in charge of a group of people is not the only way to get recognition. In our technology companies, creative individuals are really the most important contributors, not necessarily the manager of an R&D department.
ROBERT: How do you reward those people?
RAY: By creating a culture in which they understand that their ability to create knowledge, even if they're working all by themselves, is at least as important as being a manager.
JOHN: There are many ways to reward people which fundamentally reflect what you value. There are companies that will reward people with more free time or money from a slush fund to pursue personal interests.
ROBERT: It's more important than even a personal bonus?
JOHN: It might be a lot more important than cash. Let's look at what motivates creative people--and Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] can certainly help us with that. Often creative people are best motivated by being part of a community in which they can do their best work with people whom they regard as being their peers at the top of their game.
STEPHEN: My brother-in-law says that when people come in for employment interviews at his architectural firm, more and more frequently the first question they ask is "How much free time will I have?" This is a very strange question, because when I was starting out, that was the last thing I was worried about. I wanted to get employed; I wanted to make my mark; I wanted to climb the ladder; I didn't worry about my vacation time.
MIKE: Well, time is the ultimate resource, so now in some sense it's a symbol of power. But I think that what all you gentlemen are saying is very important, and not often implemented in organizations. You're not just throwing money or power at people below you, but you're paying attention to them, and to what they're trying to do. You're trying to find the best match between them and the needs of the organization. I don't think you can achieve creative results in organizations simply by rewarding people financially or with power; you have to pay attention to people and treat them with respect.
RAY: We try not to let rank and ego issues get in the way. We try to create a group enthusiasm--to create a flow, if you will. When this works well, ideas come out of a session and nobody knows who actually came up with them. The group is working as one mind, internalizing the problems and coming up with solutions.
ROBERT: As society becomes more knowledge-based, creative organizations, however diverse in content and customers, are becoming more similar to one another in process and structure. Bob produces knowledge in music schools, Ray in technology companies, Stephen in the entertainment business, John in facilitating new ventures. It's the creative output that makes such similarity of style so fascinating.
RAY: Increasingly, knowledge production is really where it's at. We've created a trillion dollars of new market capitalization in Silicon Valley alone over the last ten years and it's all new knowledge. That's how wealth is being created in the world today. And it's not just computers and software; it's art and music and writing and all kinds, all forms, of knowledge. One reason we're successful in this country is that we have the culture and the institutions to encourage that.
JOHN: The importance of creativity today reflects a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy. In the old days, wealth was created by standardization. In the industrial era, you manufactured something, you sought long production runs to get economies of scale, you were really efficient--you could get a Model-T any color you wanted as long as it was black. And there was a whole set of assumptions about how to manage. Organizations had a typical hierarchical structure to make sure things ran smoothly. That system worked well when the industrial environment was relatively stable, but now it's fundamentally unstable--and so we need fewer economies of scale and more economies of discovery. This means that the approach to organizational structure and management has to shift as well.
RAY: And these shifts are happening faster, because technological change is accelerating--and it's going to continue to get faster.
ROBERT: Let's look at the dark side. What are some of the things organizations do that inhibit creativity?
RAY: If you have a lot of hierarchy, it causes problems by cutting down communication. I've moved away from hierarchical organizations; I've flattened them. I try to recognize everybody's skills and find ways that the group can work together and give people satisfaction.
ROBERT: All of you, I'm sure, have made mistakes. Ray, in retrospect, what have you done that inhibited creativity?
RAY: Throwing too many people at a project.
ROBERT: Bob, I bet it's easy to aggravate musicians. Have you ever done that?
BOB: I'm sure I have, undoubtedly every day, though without intending to. I hope it won't be irrelevant here to draw a contrast between symphony orchestras and string quartets. A symphony orchestra is a very hierarchical organization that gets its artistic direction from a strong leader who's standing on a box with a stick in his hand and who brooks no discussion or enjoys no collaboration on anything. If he says, "It's now too loud," it is indeed now too loud. In a string quartet, the four players who are members of that organization have to interact with one another to achieve creative results. I'm not going to name this famous European string quartet, but it uses no music and has played together for thirty years. The one woman member, who plays second violin, has been married at one time or another to each of the three others. How you get creative results with that kind of collaboration Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] may know, but I don't.
ROBERT: Stephen, are you going to try that system?
STEPHEN: No, I wouldn't try that system. We have in filmmaking what is called the auteur theory, which means that the director has a vision and his vision is omnipotent. This is very similar to Bob [Freeman]'s orchestra model, where the conductor is the absolute boss. I've always fought against the auteur theory, because it doesn't bring the best creativity to the table. You have writers, you have actors, you have directors, and the idea that only one person on a set can have a vision is, I think, wrong. Everybody should have a vision of what he or she has to do, and it's the director's task to mold those visions and keep everything moving in the right direction. A really good director would be willing to see something unexpected that an actor is doing, adjust his own vision, and change the way he directs the scene. I don't think the auteur theory is healthy for filmmaking.
ROBERT: Sounds like you're a perfect boss. Tell me a mistake that you've made.
STEPHEN: Oh, I make 'em all the time.
ROBERT: Tell us one; I won't tell anyone.
STEPHEN: Well, OK. I once blew up at a network in a meeting--
ROBERT: But they deserved it.
STEPHEN: No, actually I just lost it. I allowed myself to vent in the wrong circumstances. It was my fault, and I left the meeting knowing I had made a horrible error--and when I make a mistake like that I'm affecting not only my own career but the careers of all the other people who are working with me on these projects. And I didn't work for that network again for about nine years.
ROBERT: You bring up an important distinction, because you're a creative person running a large creative organization--as are Ray [Kurzweil] and Bob [Freeman]. How can the same human being be personally creative and at the same time be managing the creativity of others?
STEPHEN: You have to become a little schizophrenic. You have to compartmentalize. There's some part of you that has to be a manager and has to say, "OK, I'm not fronting for this proejct; I'm not the writer here."
ROBERT: Ray, you're an inventor and you run companies. Isn't that a managerial conflict of interest?
RAY: I try to collaborate. My own creative process is to frame a problem at night, think about it, and then go to sleep--and in the morning there's often some creative ideas to work with. But then to get everybody involved in the creative process, we try to recognize everybody's contribution--which is really their reward, along with the thrill of having the technology affect people's lives.
ROBERT: Mike, do you see a conflict when a manager is both personally creative and trying to manage the creativity of others?
MIKE: It could happen, but there's a lot of creativity in management itself. If you can enjoy orchestrating talent and skill, being a manager of creativity can be very satisfying.
ROBERT: John, when you work with companies, what are some keys to engender creativity?
JOHN: That's about a ten-hour subject, but I'll comment on a couple of things. One is to look explicitly at the environment within which creative work might occur--I mean both the physical and emotional environments. On the physical side, it's no accident that in Hollywood and in the recording industry the workspace is generally free of the "Dilbert" kind of cubicles, and there are special conference rooms for brainstorming sessions. Big ideas need a big space. The emotional environment is about how the person managing the process makes people brave enough to step forward with their ideas. It also has to do with what the company believes in, because organizations need a north star in order to fix a purpose for creativity. Creativity in and of itself, as we've mentioned, is just new stuff, so a company needs to link creativity to a larger vision of the future. It needs to have what you might call strategic foresight, so that creative work is organized and focused.
ROBERT: Stephen, as a north star, how do you make decisions in your company?
STEPHEN: I'm very intuitive. I was actually asked this question in a magazine interview. I said that if I don't have an answer, I try to solicit the best opinions in my company, but then I make a gut shot at it. The reporter said that I was the first executive to acknowledge relying on intuition in decision making. The other people he'd interviewed all said that they made decisions empirically. They would collect information, they would make graphs, they would use efficiency scales and equations and whatever to figure out the bottom line, and then they would make a decision based on that.
ROBERT: Those other guys may be making decisions just as intuitively as you do, but they could have been embarrassed to say so, because it's socially unacceptable to make decisions based on intuition.
STEPHEN: Well, that's what this reporter said. He said that intuition is considered a feminine trait, and most of those guys wouldn't admit to it. Of course, I will.
ROBERT: Intuition and analysis each have their role; the best decision makers use both.
STEPHEN: You know me. I don't need to claim to use empirical studies to support my decisions just to justify getting paid a lot of money.
ROBERT: Ray, how do you see creativity in rapidly changing technologies?
RAY: Creative groups are dynamic and shifting and aren't necessarily long lasting. With the Web, we can create virtual companies very quickly and have work groups that aren't geographically in the same place. With increasing bandwidth, we can tap math talent in Russia, programming talent in India, and musical talent in China. Creative groups can be formed around the world.
ROBERT: The Web is amazing. Last night I was searching for John [Kao]'s resume on my paper-strewn desk when I realized that it would be easier to download it from his Web site five hundred miles away. Took about eight seconds.
RAY: There's a fantastic network of knowledge that's at our fingertips, and it's becoming more compelling. I feel very plugged in.
ROBERT: Does the integration of technology enhance creativity? Some say that technology enhances control and thus stifles creativity.
RAY: Many solutions to problems are out there; people just have to discover them. With all this knowledge at our fingertips, and with powerful tools to find it, we can attack more complex and demanding tasks.
JOHN: This notion of a group memory is very important. Companies often don't know what they know. Technology enables the representation and sharing of knowledge in ways that haven't been possible before. We're just at the beginning of an exciting era.
ROBERT: Let's fast forward into that era a hundred years. How will creativity impact business?
MIKE: I've been studying many traditional manufacturing firms, and it's incredible how creative they now have to become to survive. They have to change every few years. Previously, they could wait twenty years or so before they had to make their products obsolete, but now it has to be done almost immediately.
BOB: Education in the next century will embody something that the Scandinavians already understand: We're training people for careers that aren't going to end at age sixty-five or seventy but go on until eighty or ninety. Thus the importance of continuing education--the opportunity to bring men and women, perhaps in their mid-forties, back to school either to improve skills that aren't up to current standards or to help them begin new careers.
RAY: A hundred years from now, society will be profoundly different, and people will be profoundly different. We're not going to have unmet material needs. The whole point of society will be to focus on innovation, the creation of new knowledge. And as a species, we will have vastly expanded intellectual skills, because of a merger between our biological brains and the very powerful new technologies we're creating. We're already putting [very simple] implants in our brains, and that will be routine a hundred years from now. We'll be a lot smarter, and the goal will be creating new knowledge.
JOHN: Companies will be measured on ROI--return on innovation. There will be chief innovation officers, who will be responsible for these innovation processes, which will move ideas forward in very explicit ways. People will look at the management of ideas then as routinely as they look at the management of money now.
ROBERT: Stephen, you'll still be writing novels a hundred years from today?
STEPHEN: I'm counting on it; I'll be in a crypt somewhere typing away. I think we're looking at such a huge technological revolution that flexibility and creativity will be essential. There will be many new delivery systems, many more ways to get ideas to the consumer. You'll need to be much more flexible to take advantage of this increasingly innovative world we're in.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
CREATIVITY and innovation mark the economic frontier of contemporary commerce. Finding new and better products to sell, services to offer, and ways to work are all essential for survival in highly competitive environments. With increasingly rapid change, the need to anticipate change is critical. Creativity in business is surprise, breakthrough, leaps of logic, sudden shifts in modus operandi. But creativity has to be directed or it may well spin out of control. Modern organizations require both creative management and the management of the creativity--that is, executives who cook up novel ideas themselves and executives who can direct the creativity of others. Creativity is required in all sectors--business, the professions, not-for-profit, academic, government. Creativity works its magic across the organization, from overall strategy to specific R&D, from finance to production, distribution to customer service. Creativity, in short, propels the country's business and catapults its citizens' careers. What drives the best people in the best organizations? An almost obsessive need to change, even to shock. Creative individuals are rolling dynamos; they are intense, gutsy, spirited, strange. It's personalities like these that push us closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
“Creativity is required in all sectors--business, the professions, not-for-profit, academic, government. Creativity works its magic across the organization, from overall strategy to specific R&D, from finance to production, distribution to customer service. Creativity, in short, propels the country's business and catapults its citizens' careers. What drives the best people in the best organizations? An almost obsessive need to change, even to shock. Creative individuals are rolling dynamos; they are intense, gutsy, spirited, strange. It's personalities like these that push us closer to truth.”
[社會全面 – 企業, 專業, 非營利, 學術, 政府, 都需要創意。 從整體戰略到具體研發, 從財務到生產, 從發行到顧客服務, 創意的魔術橫跨組織。 簡而言之, 只有創意能推進國家的產業, 公民的事業。 最佳的組織裡最佳的人才有一種特質--他門需要改變甚致於震動現狀。創意人士是輾壓發電機; 他們個性強烈, 性質古怪。 這種人士才會把我們推向真理。]
-- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Does Creativity Work at Work?
Illustration(s): Stephen J. Cannel, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Robert Freeman, John Kao, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/203/203transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Monday, July 28, 2003
What's Creativity and Who's Creative? (什麼是創意? 誰有創意?)
What's Creativity and Who's Creative? (什麼是創意? 誰有創意?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/07/28)
What's Creativity and Who's Creative?
ARE you creative? Would you like to be? Why? Don't creative people just get into trouble? Creativity is the expression of originality -- it's exciting but also demanding, consuming, frustrating, and addictive; it's inspiring but also fickle, erratic, tricky, and risky. Creativity can be found anywhere, at home or work as easily as in art or science. It can erupt suddenly or emerge slowly. Creativity means being both different and better. Being different without being better is often pointless or just odd; being better without being different is just evolution, not revolution. For an act to be deemed creative, there must be an accepted style or method against which it can be judged original. The accepted style or method is the benchmark, and creativity often begins by rejecting or at least questioning it. An activity may seem creative up front, according to intent, but not creative in hindsight, according to results. The burden of proof is with the creators to demonstrate that their innovation is an improvement over what's gone before. Creativity comes in many flavors, and it is well represented in the diverse group we gathered. Three of our guests have run large, creative organizations; two are foremost teachers of creativity. All are personally creative. No two are alike in what they do; all are remarkably alike in how they think about what they do.
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen J. Cannell is one of the most prolific producers and writers of network television series in Hollywood. He is also a best-selling novelist, author of such thrillers as The Devil's Workshop and Riding the Snake. But what kind of English grades did Stephen get in high school?
Dr. Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi was for many years a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago; he is now at the Claremont Graduate University, in California. The author of various books on creativity, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mike describes some common characteristics of creative people.
Dr. Robert Freeman, a pianist and music historian, has been chief executive of two leading music schools, the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. Was Mozart more creative than Beethoven? Bob explores different styles of creativity.
Dr. John Kao, trained as a psychiatrist and active as an entrepreneur, has taught business creativity at Harvard Business School and Stanford University Graduate School of Business. John gives us some practical insights into the creative process.
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, and executive who has founded and managed four high-technology companies. He is also the author of two important books on the future of computers: The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Age of Intelligent Machines. Ray talks about sleep, risk, and group creativity.
ROBERT: Stephen, you've created or co-created forty television series, including The Rockford Files and The A-Team--an American record. How does it feel in your gut when you create a new show?
STEPHEN: For me it's always, Will I like it? I start with one premise: I want to be able to go home, look at that show, and be proud of it. And I always ask myself, "Would I be willing, three years hence, to come in and write a script over the weekend?"
ROBERT: Are you proud of all your shows?
STEPHEN: No. Obviously I've made mistakes along the way. I made shows that only my parents watched. But they all started off trying to be the best thing I ever did.
ROBERT: How did you feel when a show you really liked was canceled?
STEPHEN: I'm pretty good about cancellations. I do my best. I try not to worry about things I can't control--and I certainly can't control network thinking--
ROBERT: You can't control this show, either.
STEPHEN: That's right--I've known you long enough to know that. If a show gets canceled, I try to learn from the cancellation. I look at it and ask myself, "Did I do anything wrong? Was I stubborn, was I pigheaded? Could I have made the show better? Could I have affected its longevity in some important way?" And once I've gone through that--usually in two or three days--I can move on.
ROBERT: Mike, your book Flow is considered a classic in the study of creativity. What is flow, and what is its relationship to creativity?
MIKE: By flow, I mean a state that people feel when they're totally involved in whatever they're doing--when they're completely focused on the activity at hand. I started by studying artists, musicians, chess players, and athletes, and I found that despite the great variety of things they're doing, when they're really involved their inner states are the same. They describe their feelings in the same way. And the relationship to creativity is that this thorough involvement is always present when they're working in a creative medium. Flow may not result in creativity, but it has to be there.
ROBERT: Are there cross-cultural differences, or is creativity a universally consistent human trait?
MIKE: It seems universal. The creative output may differ from culture to culture, but the creative state is described very similarly in Korea, India, China, Japan.
ROBERT: Bob, tell us about some of the great composers. Their styles are very different, but is there a root similarity in their creativity?
BOB: Beethoven left us large numbers of individual sketch books, single pages, notebooks, continuity drafts--obviously, he worked on a fair number of pieces at the same time. And he worked with great pain. Mozart, on the other hand, was well known for hardly leaving any marks behind. He could go for a walk, come back, and write a whole string quartet.
ROBERT: Was creativity harder for Beethoven than it was for Mozart?
BOB: Looks as though it was harder. Brahms composed more like Beethoven, except that he went to the trouble of destroying all his tracks afterward, so it's very hard to get at the sketches.
ROBERT: John, as an author and jazz pianist as well as a psychiatrist, what can you tell us about the process of creativity?
JOHN: Well, I think it's important to recognize that the popular image of Archimedes jumping out of the bathtub, or of someone with a lightbulb popping up over his head, is just a part of an overall grammar, you might say, or of a series of events that constitutes the creative process. If you look at creativity as moving from the existing to the preferred, there's a whole lot of preparation prior to that lightbulb and a whole lot of work that needs to follow on after that. And the lightbulb doesn't appear over the head of only one person, necessarily, although the process clearly can occur between the ears of a creative person--which in some respects, we all are. Creativity also pops up in the space between people, and also within organizations--within society, if you will.
ROBERT: If ever there were lightbulbs popping up over someone's head, he's sitting right next to you. Ray, you're a successful entrpreneur, a remarkably prolific inventor--speech recognition devices, computer music keyboards, reading machines for the blind. It's an incredible list. Compare for us the process of creativity when you create new companies with the process that goes in writing your books.
RAY: I'll mention one similarity and one difference. The similarity is that creativity involves a sort of fantasy or daydreaming. When I start a technology, I try to imagine I'm at a conference four years from now, demonstrating how this thing works, and I just go with that fantasy. I find that I'm describing how it must have been--the problems we must have solved--and I work backward from there. The creative process of writing a book is similar: I have something I'm trying to accomplish, and I fantasize about how I will accomplish it. So I start daydreaming--and, really, a lot of creativity is done while you're sleeping. I like to think about a problem before I go to sleep--just frame what I know about it. Then, in the morning, somehow, some of the answer is there.
ROBERT: I went to bed last night thinking about the questions I was going to ask you.
RAY: The difference is that with technology you have to catch the wave. You can't be a little bit too early or a little bit too late--neither one works. You've got to be right on the wave of what's currently feasible. In writing, you can be more imaginative and have a much broader canvas to work with. For example, my latest book is about the twenty-first century, so you don't need to be concerned just with what's feasible today.
ROBERT: Mike, I need some help. Analyze me. I've been in a creative mode, working on this show, but I have to tell you I'm continuously grumpy. But paradoxically, even though I'm so grumpy, I've never been quite so happy. Am I just nuts?
MIKE: I don't think jolliness is necessarily a sign of how you feel inside. When Beethoven was struggling with his compositions, he probably felt like you did; he was grumpy, too. But inside he may have felt so consumed by what he was working on that those were the greatest days of his life.
ROBERT: Stephen, are you grumpy when you're writing a novel?
STEPHEN: No, no; I have so much fun doing it. For me, writing is a release of something I really enjoy doing. I look forward to it. I love what Ray [Kurzweil] was just saying, about our sleeping hours producing results. Sometimes I'll end a chapter and I'll think, Boy, I've written myself into a hole here. And the next morning I'll get up and I'll go "Whew!!"
RAY: But it's a struggle. It's not an easy process. It's the hardest work you can do, and you're constantly faced with problems to solve. As John [Kao] mentioned, the lightbulb is a very small part of it. There's the whole process of continuous improvement. I try to sketch out the first draft of a book very quickly, in one month--at least an outline of it. Then I progressively improve it. You're constantly framing problems that you need to solve and trying to find solutions.
STEPHEN: My outline is the framework, the architecture, of the novel. I know what the first act is, I know what my complication is at the top of act two, I know what my second-act curtain is. Some people say books shouldn't be written in three acts. I think any good story has to be told in three acts--just as a piece of music has to have its structure. And so I work that structure out; the process is very cerebral. Then I write a sixty- or seventy-page narrative, which breaks it into chapters. And once I've got that done, then I can enjoy the writing process, because I won't deviate too much from this framework. Sometimes I find mistakes that I've made in the structure, but basically the books write pretty easily from there.
JOHN: As a follow-on to what Stephen [Cannell] is saying, you can write books in several different ways. Some involve structure and having a plan, and some are about the play and the joy and the discovery. And I think that says something about the creative process, too: it's not just one way of thinking, it's multiple. In a sense, intelligence is made up of diverse ways of thinking that come together. There's the tension in setting up a goal, which may be a part of this process--a picture of the future, with all the uncertainty attached to trying something, failing, experimenting and failing. To be certain of your goal and at the same time uncertain how to achieve it can be very difficult.
BOB: I have a question for Stephen [Cannell]. When you sit down to write a book, you're trying to write something which is good, which is moving, and which satisfies your standards of excellence. In that way, I could compare you to Mozart--to the way he thought about what he was doing.
STEPHEN: Mozart and I are frequently compared.
BOB: To what degree would it complicate things for you--this is what Beethoven's principal preoccupation was--to write something that would be a masterwork for the ages? Do you have any sort of historical self-consciousness?
STEPHEN: I would reject that as a concept. When you put that kind of pressure on yourself--to write something so monumental that it will live thousands of years after you--by nature you just dry up your creative process.
BOB: It's not a necessary part of creativity?
STEPHEN: I'll give you an example. Shakespeare--who we'll all agree was one of the greatest English playwrights ever--was writing those plays to pay his rent. In his own mind, his sonnets were his truly great literature. He'd go down to the Globe and write those plays for the masses, and yet they'll live forever. I try and come up with an idea that I think is going to be exciting and interesting and pleases me intellectually. And there may some humor in it that I'll enjoy. But I try not to burden myself with the notion that it has to be brilliant, because that will dry me up.
ROBERT: Mike, you started out studying happiness and got into creativity as a result. What's the relationship between happiness and creativity? Are happy people creative? Are creative people happy?
MIKE: It depends. Creative people are often creative in order to escape unhappiness. Many people, especially in the arts and literature, are trying to produce a world in which they feel comfortable--someplace more harmonious, more ordered, more livable than the actual world in which they live. And when they're immersed in their own world, they feel happy.
RAY: There's another aspect of creativity. We've been talking about great individual contributors, but when you're creating technology it's necessarily a group process, because technology today is so complex that it has to be interdisciplinary. In my companies, for example, experts in speech, speech recognition, signal processing, computers, and linguistics all need to work together. And they're all essentially speaking their own languages, even about the same concepts. So we will spend months establishing our common language--which is actually a useful thing to do, because if anybody ever overhears our conversations they'll have no idea what we're talking about. I have a technique to get people to think outside the box: I'll give a signal-processing problem to the linguists, and vice versa, and let them apply the disciplines in which they've grown up to a completely different problem. The result is often an approach that the experts in the original field would never have thought of. Group process gives creativity a new dimension.
ROBERT: John, have you worked with high-technology companies?
JOHN: Several times. What Ray [Kurzweil] says is very true--that in order to move people out of a literal definition of what's interesting to pursue, it's important to be like the curator of the set of group experiences. You bring together people with very different points of view, you blend together disciplines, to produce new perspectives.
ROBERT: You're saying that the organizational creative process is different in some respects from the individual creative process. Let's compare, say, Stephen Cannell and Mozart, as one class, with technology companies like Ray [Kurzweil]'s.
JOHN: I would argue that everyone at this table is probably a good example of this kind of arbitrage between different kinds of work, or between different ways of seeing things. Even as one person in one career, we've all practiced both individual and group creativity. Our lives, in a sense, are a creative improvisation around themes, adding novelty when what we're doing gets boring, augmenting our portfolios. And in a high-tech company, it's often similar. You start off with some significant initial moves, assemble the founding team. But in order to inject the kind of energy and the additional perspective you need, you have to be a great manager--like a great chef mixing the right ingredients. You have to manage the tensions, find the sweet spot all the time.
RAY: I think there's a relationship between group process and Mike [Csikszentmihalyi]'s concept of flow. Flow is hard enough to achieve for an individual, because our daily needs and problems distract us from connecting in that profound way with the creative task at hand. But it's even harder to achieve flow in a group, because political issues often arise within the group, and people aren't all communicating. To really achieve that kind of flow in a group, everybody has to be firmly connected to the project--to the point that when ideas arise from the group, you don't necessarily know exactly whose idea it was. Groups form because they can accomplish things that individuals never can. There's a blending of perspectives.
BOB: Absolutely. We all start out as fairly narrow disciplinary specialists. And nothing worthwhile can be achieved except through the intelligence that emerges from a bunch of different specialists working together. And that's not an easy process.
ROBERT: But isn't there a danger, in today's world, of ceding too much creative responsibility to the group at the expense of the individual? Isn't there something to be said for loners--people sitting three or four standard deviations off the chart, messing around and shaking up the world?
STEPHEN: I think we can spark each other. In television we work with staffs of writers, and it's fascinating to watch what happens. It's what you guys were just saying: you have to give up your sense of self to the group. You have to say, OK, we're all here to make a story for Bob to write. I always characterize ideas as little pink things running around on the floor--we can either stomp 'em to death or we can nurture them. Somebody might throw out a stupid idea, but instead of saying, "Oh, that's dumb!" you can say, "Well,..." and play with it for a little while. Then something develops: other people add their ideas to it; someone says, "That's kind of cool," and the process builds like that. The next thing you know, you've built something, among all of you, that no one of you alone would ever have thought of. Bob will then take the ideas and write the script, because, as a staff of writers, we're creating the ideas for him to write. And he'll give it his stamp, adding his own creative flavor.
JOHN: It's "Yes, and" versus "Yes, but"--which is what you get in great jazz, where talented people work together. When you're playing in a jazz group, if somebody offers you an idea you've got to go with it, and add to it. You don't exercise judgment on the front end or you'll never get to something truly sweet.
BOB: The alternative is Richard Wagner, who's going to write the words and the music, conduct the work, and be the dramatic director--all by himself.
ROBERT: So occasionally individuals still have the freedom to go against the whole world--though less so today, where high technology is concerned.
MIKE: Oh, yes. Creative people often work both ways, bringing this kind of division inside their own practice. For the first four hours of the day, let's say, they're alone with the doors closed, working by themselves. Then they open the doors and start interacting and getting as much information and as many different points of view as possible.
BOB: You still need a prime mover. There's a group process, but generally you need one person who has the vision, who can provide the leadership and move the thing forward. This person has to have the intelligence and the understanding to make use of contributions from a broad array of other kinds of people.
ROBERT: Stephen, I want to get inside your head, since I--
STEPHEN: You'll be the first.
ROBERT: --since I didn't get the chance with Mozart. You love being a writer. Ever since we've known each other, I always see a sparkle in your eye whenever we talk about writing. It's never about success, it's never about money, it's always about writing. You've written five novels since you started, at age fifty. Five best-sellers. You've written four hundred episodes of network television. Remarkably, you're dyslexic. I want you to tell us what that means.
STEPHEN: I have fairly classic dyslexia. I mirror-read. I'm a very slow reader; I read about two hundred words a minute. I have sequencing difficulties, which makes computer work very hard for me. Every time I turn my computer on, I have to reread the instructions--I can't remember the sequence of events. I have recall difficulties.
ROBERT: In high school and college, what kind of grades did you get in English?
STEPHEN: Terrible. Terrible. As a matter of fact, I flunked three grades before I got out of high school. I went back to the twentieth reunion of my high school class in Pasadena. By that time, I'd won a few Emmys and had a fairly high-profile career--
ROBERT: I love this story.
STEPHEN: There was this guy sort of circling me. It was my old teacher, who'd given me F's throughout high school. At the end of the evening, he finally came up to me and said, "So, you, ah, really make your living writing?" But what he'd been looking at back then was my spelling--and spelling isn't writing. I can compose a sentence and say it to you, or I can compose it and put it down on paper.
ROBERT: But to look at it on paper--
STEPHEN: The words are totally misspelled, just phonetically spelled. I've ruined the spelling of my twenty-year associate, who inputs all my stuff for me. She can't spell anything anymore; she was great when she started.
ROBERT: This is so fascinating! Doesn't Stephen demonstrate an enormous disconnect between creativity and what we normally think of as standardized-test, SAT intelligence?
MIKE: How many in this group have similar backgrounds? I was very bad in high school.
ROBERT: Unfortunately, I wasn't. Sorry. I feel out of place, embarrassed--as if I'm not creative because I got decent grades.
BOB: I was pretty good in high school, because I knew that if I didn't work hard I'd lose my scholarship. What it would have been like otherwise, I don't know.
ROBERT: Einstein received poor grades in mathematics.
STEPHEN: Dyslexia often comes with a capacity for abstract thought. People who are very good with abstract thought have been dyslexic--Einstein and Edison, two of our greatest inventors, were dyslexic.
MIKE: Practically all of the hundred people I interviewed in my study of very creative individuals--ninety out of a hundred--had pretty bad things to say about their formal education. They usually had one or two teachers who made a big difference in their lives and whom they remembered fondly. But the structured, mass-produced instruction that their schools generally provided was something they just couldn't take.
JOHN: What we're circling around is the issue of who gets to decide what's valuable. You said it in your introduction, Robert: there has to be something of value created; it's not enough just to come up with something new. Otherwise, throwing paint against the wall would be creative, and that's surely not very valuable. But the question is, Who decides? This is especially hard when it comes to social situations or organizations. There are plenty of people who look at a new idea, or at somebody who's a creative troublemaker, and say, "That's not particularly good." When does the perspective change, so that that new idea has its day in the sun?
RAY: The world is changing. We're entering an era in which the creation of new knowledge really constitutes the wealth and power of a nation's organizations and individuals. It's no longer just about being disciplined in manufacturing, or intelligent in some rote way. Economics is really about creating new knowledge. That's why the United States is as successful as it is, and why there are economic problems elsewhere. We have a culture of risk-taking; people seek new frontiers, and we reward that. We have entrepreneurial institutions, such as venture capital and incentive stock options--all designed to create new knowledge and value. The Internet is giving tremendous empowerment to the arts; those millions of web pages need pictures and music, and that's where wealth is being created today.
ROBERT: How important is risk in creativity? The willingness to accept failure?
RAY: An important part of creativity is failure and one's attitude toward it. My view of failure is that it's just success deferred. But not everybody feels that way. If you're afraid of failing, if that's a devastating experience, then you can't be creative. You have to see disappointment as part of the inner process of getting to where you need to go.
STEPHEN: I really like that--failure as success deferred. That's a great line.
JOHN: It's inherent in learning. We never did anything perfectly the first time through. We didn't ride a bike the first time we got on it; we had to fail in order to learn. Look at designers: they take an idea and make a model, which by definition is going to be destroyed--preferably as quickly as possible. So you go from version 1.0 to version 2.0.
STEPHEN: I think it's important to have target fixation when you're creating, and not think about failure, not think about criticism, not think about rewards, not think about anything but what you're trying to do. Just focus on your target and screen the rest of that stuff out.
RAY: That's another difference between a book and a technology. With a book, you finally do launch it and it's out there. Whereas with technology, if version 1.0 doesn't work--well, fine, you can upgrade to version 1.1 and version 2.0.
ROBERT: Mike, do many of the people you've studied fear failure?
MIKE: You can't ever achieve much if you fear failure--because, as everybody here says, that's how you learn. You have to have the confidence that you can do it yourself. As people say, you have to obsolete yourself before others obsolete you--which means that you're always trying to get better and better in order to beat the competition.
ROBERT: When I consider the creative process, ego is a two-edged blade. One edge is an outsized anxiety about your public image: "How am I going to look in front of my colleagues and friends? I've been successful before, and if I fail now, my image suffers, my standing goes down." The other is a manic, sometimes offensive, outsized confidence. Both these attitudes are primitive, but the latter is more productive than the former.
STEPHEN: I think ego is a motor. It's really an important motor, especially for creative people. Your ego is what pushes you out on stage after failure. It's that little voice in the back of your head that says, "Yeah, I screwed that one up, but what about the next one?" When I joined the Writers Guild, all the new members were convened in a theater, and they asked us, "What do you think the biggest motivation for writers is?" And some people thought it was money, and others mentioned the creative satisfaction, and this guy said, "No, it's ego. That's what gets people to sit down in front of that keyboard."
MIKE: But I think it's important to realize that the creative ego is different from the normal ego.
STEPHEN: Well, it's not a boastful ego.
MIKE: You're so identified with what you're doing that you cannot let it fail, because it reflects on you. It's the activity itself--the writing or the painting or the music--that has become so much a part of you that you have to make it succeed, and through it make yourself succeed.
BOB: There are different kinds of egos. Going back to Mozart for a moment--he succeeded musically and artistically every time he put pen to paper. But in a larger sense, he didn't succeed at all--with respect to Salieri. The whole point of Amadeus was that the outcome was Salieri's fault, but Mozart just couldn't handle Salieri. If he'd been able to handle Salieri, he'd have lived twenty years longer, and who knows what works he would have composed.
STEPHEN: What I'm saying is that since failure does hover over every creative project, there's some part of you that wants not to enter into it, because you're liable to fail. What gets you over that hump is your ego, which says, "Yeah, but what if it turns out to be the best thing I ever did?
RAY: I'd express the goal of creativity a little differently. The real satisfaction in creating either music or a book or a technology is the impact that it has on other people. Seeing a technology change people's lives, or a book change people's ideas, is deeply satisfying. Now, maybe that's an ego drive, but it's more than just saying, "OK, I accomplished this." It's experiencing other people's input.
ROBERT: You can almost say the reverse: that is, creative people do get lots of input--but ultimately you have to do what you yourself feel good about. If you compromise, you're often not going to be as effective. I can't tell you how many contradictory opinions I've had on producing this Closer to Truth series--from topics and guests to set and structure--and when I violate the principle of listening to one's own gut, I usually make the wrong decision.
RAY: But Stephen [Cannell, doesn't your definition of "the best thing you ever did" reflect how your work affects other people?
STEPHEN: Well...probably a difference between the two of us in the way we approach the creative process is that I never look beyond the goal, the finishing of it. I don't say, "This is going to have a tremendous effect on humankind."
RAY: But you've internalized your audience. If no one ever reacted to your books or your TV shows, it wouldn't be as satisfying.
STEPHEN: But where television series are concerned--aside from the ratings, which are sometimes devastating to read--you don't have the response you'd get in a theater, where people are laughing or crying at the lines. You're sitting there with your wife, asking, "Well, what did you think?"
RAY: Then you internalize what people will say when they come to you afterward and tell you how it's affected them?
STEPHEN: To some degree, but not as much as you might think, or as I might like.
ROBERT: We need a prediction from everyone. Fast-forward a hundred years. Where is creativity making its greatest contribution to society?
STEPHEN: Because I'm a writer, I would hope it's in literature. Literature is about thought, and society should be about thought.
RAY: We'll have expanded our intelligence and creativity by merging with nonbiological intelligence, and we'll be creating new types of entities that we can't imagine today, such as virtual-reality environments. But we'll still have elements that are based on our foundation of music and art, and various forms of culture will be the primary expressions of knowledge.
JOHN: In a hundred years, we'll have better tools to take our innate creativity and collaborate with one another in more effective ways, and we'll realize our ideas much more immediately.
BOB: I'd like to refer to something Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] brought up. The creative teacher--whether it was someone alive in 1800, 1900, this year, or a hundred years from now--is going to be someone who sees in each of his or her students what makes them different, and can enable them to see their own futures.
MIKE: Technological creativity is certainly going to continue and flourish, but I'm not sure that will be formal creativity's most important contribution in the future. Humanity needs a creativity that can help us find our place in this evolving cosmos, so that we can respect one another, live together peacefully, and not destroy one another in order to feel good about ourselves.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
WHAT is creativity? It's certainly not standardized-test intelligence. Stephen Cannell, all by himself, is proof of that. How do you solve a problem creatively? It's often a mistake to get too smart too quickly. Expert opinion fouls up the creative engine; conventional wisdom is creative death. So develop your own ideas yourself, alone, without external information and before seeking the opinion of others. Your naivete will be more ally than enemy on the creativity battlefield. Brood. Cogitate. Meditate. Agonize. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt are all friends of the creative process. Experience tension, frustration, stress. Stimulating creativity means multiplying your options, generating alternative, contrasting, conflicting solutions. Lose yourself. Feel the flow. But remember what psychologist Abraham Maslow said: Creativity might be as much found in a first-rate chicken soup as in a third-rate painting. Suffer with humor to get closer to truth.
c2000 CLOSER TO TRUTH
Editor's Translations:
"Creativity means being both different and better. Being different without being better is often pointless or just odd; being better without being different is just evolution, not revolution. For an act to be deemed creative, there must be an accepted style or method against which it can be judged original. The accepted style or method is the benchmark, and creativity often begins by rejecting or at least questioning it."
[創億不只要求不同, 也要求更好。 單是不同而不是更好豪無意義˙單是更好而沒有不同只是演變, 不是革命。 一個行動, 如果要被視為創億性的, 就必須先跟被接受的樣式或方法相對。 被接受的樣式或方法是基準˙ 創億的開始經常由丟棄或質疑它。]
--- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
"Creativity might be as much found in a first-rate chicken soup as in a third-rate painting."
[一張下等繪畫的創億不如一鍋頭等雞湯的創億。]
-- Abraham Maslow 世界聞名心理學家
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: What's Creativity and Who's Creative?
Illustration(s): Stephen J. Cannel, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Robert Freeman, John Kao, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/103/103transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[創意組織 ]
(2003/07/28)
What's Creativity and Who's Creative?
ARE you creative? Would you like to be? Why? Don't creative people just get into trouble? Creativity is the expression of originality -- it's exciting but also demanding, consuming, frustrating, and addictive; it's inspiring but also fickle, erratic, tricky, and risky. Creativity can be found anywhere, at home or work as easily as in art or science. It can erupt suddenly or emerge slowly. Creativity means being both different and better. Being different without being better is often pointless or just odd; being better without being different is just evolution, not revolution. For an act to be deemed creative, there must be an accepted style or method against which it can be judged original. The accepted style or method is the benchmark, and creativity often begins by rejecting or at least questioning it. An activity may seem creative up front, according to intent, but not creative in hindsight, according to results. The burden of proof is with the creators to demonstrate that their innovation is an improvement over what's gone before. Creativity comes in many flavors, and it is well represented in the diverse group we gathered. Three of our guests have run large, creative organizations; two are foremost teachers of creativity. All are personally creative. No two are alike in what they do; all are remarkably alike in how they think about what they do.
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen J. Cannell is one of the most prolific producers and writers of network television series in Hollywood. He is also a best-selling novelist, author of such thrillers as The Devil's Workshop and Riding the Snake. But what kind of English grades did Stephen get in high school?
Dr. Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi was for many years a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago; he is now at the Claremont Graduate University, in California. The author of various books on creativity, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mike describes some common characteristics of creative people.
Dr. Robert Freeman, a pianist and music historian, has been chief executive of two leading music schools, the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. Was Mozart more creative than Beethoven? Bob explores different styles of creativity.
Dr. John Kao, trained as a psychiatrist and active as an entrepreneur, has taught business creativity at Harvard Business School and Stanford University Graduate School of Business. John gives us some practical insights into the creative process.
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, and executive who has founded and managed four high-technology companies. He is also the author of two important books on the future of computers: The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Age of Intelligent Machines. Ray talks about sleep, risk, and group creativity.
ROBERT: Stephen, you've created or co-created forty television series, including The Rockford Files and The A-Team--an American record. How does it feel in your gut when you create a new show?
STEPHEN: For me it's always, Will I like it? I start with one premise: I want to be able to go home, look at that show, and be proud of it. And I always ask myself, "Would I be willing, three years hence, to come in and write a script over the weekend?"
ROBERT: Are you proud of all your shows?
STEPHEN: No. Obviously I've made mistakes along the way. I made shows that only my parents watched. But they all started off trying to be the best thing I ever did.
ROBERT: How did you feel when a show you really liked was canceled?
STEPHEN: I'm pretty good about cancellations. I do my best. I try not to worry about things I can't control--and I certainly can't control network thinking--
ROBERT: You can't control this show, either.
STEPHEN: That's right--I've known you long enough to know that. If a show gets canceled, I try to learn from the cancellation. I look at it and ask myself, "Did I do anything wrong? Was I stubborn, was I pigheaded? Could I have made the show better? Could I have affected its longevity in some important way?" And once I've gone through that--usually in two or three days--I can move on.
ROBERT: Mike, your book Flow is considered a classic in the study of creativity. What is flow, and what is its relationship to creativity?
MIKE: By flow, I mean a state that people feel when they're totally involved in whatever they're doing--when they're completely focused on the activity at hand. I started by studying artists, musicians, chess players, and athletes, and I found that despite the great variety of things they're doing, when they're really involved their inner states are the same. They describe their feelings in the same way. And the relationship to creativity is that this thorough involvement is always present when they're working in a creative medium. Flow may not result in creativity, but it has to be there.
ROBERT: Are there cross-cultural differences, or is creativity a universally consistent human trait?
MIKE: It seems universal. The creative output may differ from culture to culture, but the creative state is described very similarly in Korea, India, China, Japan.
ROBERT: Bob, tell us about some of the great composers. Their styles are very different, but is there a root similarity in their creativity?
BOB: Beethoven left us large numbers of individual sketch books, single pages, notebooks, continuity drafts--obviously, he worked on a fair number of pieces at the same time. And he worked with great pain. Mozart, on the other hand, was well known for hardly leaving any marks behind. He could go for a walk, come back, and write a whole string quartet.
ROBERT: Was creativity harder for Beethoven than it was for Mozart?
BOB: Looks as though it was harder. Brahms composed more like Beethoven, except that he went to the trouble of destroying all his tracks afterward, so it's very hard to get at the sketches.
ROBERT: John, as an author and jazz pianist as well as a psychiatrist, what can you tell us about the process of creativity?
JOHN: Well, I think it's important to recognize that the popular image of Archimedes jumping out of the bathtub, or of someone with a lightbulb popping up over his head, is just a part of an overall grammar, you might say, or of a series of events that constitutes the creative process. If you look at creativity as moving from the existing to the preferred, there's a whole lot of preparation prior to that lightbulb and a whole lot of work that needs to follow on after that. And the lightbulb doesn't appear over the head of only one person, necessarily, although the process clearly can occur between the ears of a creative person--which in some respects, we all are. Creativity also pops up in the space between people, and also within organizations--within society, if you will.
ROBERT: If ever there were lightbulbs popping up over someone's head, he's sitting right next to you. Ray, you're a successful entrpreneur, a remarkably prolific inventor--speech recognition devices, computer music keyboards, reading machines for the blind. It's an incredible list. Compare for us the process of creativity when you create new companies with the process that goes in writing your books.
RAY: I'll mention one similarity and one difference. The similarity is that creativity involves a sort of fantasy or daydreaming. When I start a technology, I try to imagine I'm at a conference four years from now, demonstrating how this thing works, and I just go with that fantasy. I find that I'm describing how it must have been--the problems we must have solved--and I work backward from there. The creative process of writing a book is similar: I have something I'm trying to accomplish, and I fantasize about how I will accomplish it. So I start daydreaming--and, really, a lot of creativity is done while you're sleeping. I like to think about a problem before I go to sleep--just frame what I know about it. Then, in the morning, somehow, some of the answer is there.
ROBERT: I went to bed last night thinking about the questions I was going to ask you.
RAY: The difference is that with technology you have to catch the wave. You can't be a little bit too early or a little bit too late--neither one works. You've got to be right on the wave of what's currently feasible. In writing, you can be more imaginative and have a much broader canvas to work with. For example, my latest book is about the twenty-first century, so you don't need to be concerned just with what's feasible today.
ROBERT: Mike, I need some help. Analyze me. I've been in a creative mode, working on this show, but I have to tell you I'm continuously grumpy. But paradoxically, even though I'm so grumpy, I've never been quite so happy. Am I just nuts?
MIKE: I don't think jolliness is necessarily a sign of how you feel inside. When Beethoven was struggling with his compositions, he probably felt like you did; he was grumpy, too. But inside he may have felt so consumed by what he was working on that those were the greatest days of his life.
ROBERT: Stephen, are you grumpy when you're writing a novel?
STEPHEN: No, no; I have so much fun doing it. For me, writing is a release of something I really enjoy doing. I look forward to it. I love what Ray [Kurzweil] was just saying, about our sleeping hours producing results. Sometimes I'll end a chapter and I'll think, Boy, I've written myself into a hole here. And the next morning I'll get up and I'll go "Whew!!"
RAY: But it's a struggle. It's not an easy process. It's the hardest work you can do, and you're constantly faced with problems to solve. As John [Kao] mentioned, the lightbulb is a very small part of it. There's the whole process of continuous improvement. I try to sketch out the first draft of a book very quickly, in one month--at least an outline of it. Then I progressively improve it. You're constantly framing problems that you need to solve and trying to find solutions.
STEPHEN: My outline is the framework, the architecture, of the novel. I know what the first act is, I know what my complication is at the top of act two, I know what my second-act curtain is. Some people say books shouldn't be written in three acts. I think any good story has to be told in three acts--just as a piece of music has to have its structure. And so I work that structure out; the process is very cerebral. Then I write a sixty- or seventy-page narrative, which breaks it into chapters. And once I've got that done, then I can enjoy the writing process, because I won't deviate too much from this framework. Sometimes I find mistakes that I've made in the structure, but basically the books write pretty easily from there.
JOHN: As a follow-on to what Stephen [Cannell] is saying, you can write books in several different ways. Some involve structure and having a plan, and some are about the play and the joy and the discovery. And I think that says something about the creative process, too: it's not just one way of thinking, it's multiple. In a sense, intelligence is made up of diverse ways of thinking that come together. There's the tension in setting up a goal, which may be a part of this process--a picture of the future, with all the uncertainty attached to trying something, failing, experimenting and failing. To be certain of your goal and at the same time uncertain how to achieve it can be very difficult.
BOB: I have a question for Stephen [Cannell]. When you sit down to write a book, you're trying to write something which is good, which is moving, and which satisfies your standards of excellence. In that way, I could compare you to Mozart--to the way he thought about what he was doing.
STEPHEN: Mozart and I are frequently compared.
BOB: To what degree would it complicate things for you--this is what Beethoven's principal preoccupation was--to write something that would be a masterwork for the ages? Do you have any sort of historical self-consciousness?
STEPHEN: I would reject that as a concept. When you put that kind of pressure on yourself--to write something so monumental that it will live thousands of years after you--by nature you just dry up your creative process.
BOB: It's not a necessary part of creativity?
STEPHEN: I'll give you an example. Shakespeare--who we'll all agree was one of the greatest English playwrights ever--was writing those plays to pay his rent. In his own mind, his sonnets were his truly great literature. He'd go down to the Globe and write those plays for the masses, and yet they'll live forever. I try and come up with an idea that I think is going to be exciting and interesting and pleases me intellectually. And there may some humor in it that I'll enjoy. But I try not to burden myself with the notion that it has to be brilliant, because that will dry me up.
ROBERT: Mike, you started out studying happiness and got into creativity as a result. What's the relationship between happiness and creativity? Are happy people creative? Are creative people happy?
MIKE: It depends. Creative people are often creative in order to escape unhappiness. Many people, especially in the arts and literature, are trying to produce a world in which they feel comfortable--someplace more harmonious, more ordered, more livable than the actual world in which they live. And when they're immersed in their own world, they feel happy.
RAY: There's another aspect of creativity. We've been talking about great individual contributors, but when you're creating technology it's necessarily a group process, because technology today is so complex that it has to be interdisciplinary. In my companies, for example, experts in speech, speech recognition, signal processing, computers, and linguistics all need to work together. And they're all essentially speaking their own languages, even about the same concepts. So we will spend months establishing our common language--which is actually a useful thing to do, because if anybody ever overhears our conversations they'll have no idea what we're talking about. I have a technique to get people to think outside the box: I'll give a signal-processing problem to the linguists, and vice versa, and let them apply the disciplines in which they've grown up to a completely different problem. The result is often an approach that the experts in the original field would never have thought of. Group process gives creativity a new dimension.
ROBERT: John, have you worked with high-technology companies?
JOHN: Several times. What Ray [Kurzweil] says is very true--that in order to move people out of a literal definition of what's interesting to pursue, it's important to be like the curator of the set of group experiences. You bring together people with very different points of view, you blend together disciplines, to produce new perspectives.
ROBERT: You're saying that the organizational creative process is different in some respects from the individual creative process. Let's compare, say, Stephen Cannell and Mozart, as one class, with technology companies like Ray [Kurzweil]'s.
JOHN: I would argue that everyone at this table is probably a good example of this kind of arbitrage between different kinds of work, or between different ways of seeing things. Even as one person in one career, we've all practiced both individual and group creativity. Our lives, in a sense, are a creative improvisation around themes, adding novelty when what we're doing gets boring, augmenting our portfolios. And in a high-tech company, it's often similar. You start off with some significant initial moves, assemble the founding team. But in order to inject the kind of energy and the additional perspective you need, you have to be a great manager--like a great chef mixing the right ingredients. You have to manage the tensions, find the sweet spot all the time.
RAY: I think there's a relationship between group process and Mike [Csikszentmihalyi]'s concept of flow. Flow is hard enough to achieve for an individual, because our daily needs and problems distract us from connecting in that profound way with the creative task at hand. But it's even harder to achieve flow in a group, because political issues often arise within the group, and people aren't all communicating. To really achieve that kind of flow in a group, everybody has to be firmly connected to the project--to the point that when ideas arise from the group, you don't necessarily know exactly whose idea it was. Groups form because they can accomplish things that individuals never can. There's a blending of perspectives.
BOB: Absolutely. We all start out as fairly narrow disciplinary specialists. And nothing worthwhile can be achieved except through the intelligence that emerges from a bunch of different specialists working together. And that's not an easy process.
ROBERT: But isn't there a danger, in today's world, of ceding too much creative responsibility to the group at the expense of the individual? Isn't there something to be said for loners--people sitting three or four standard deviations off the chart, messing around and shaking up the world?
STEPHEN: I think we can spark each other. In television we work with staffs of writers, and it's fascinating to watch what happens. It's what you guys were just saying: you have to give up your sense of self to the group. You have to say, OK, we're all here to make a story for Bob to write. I always characterize ideas as little pink things running around on the floor--we can either stomp 'em to death or we can nurture them. Somebody might throw out a stupid idea, but instead of saying, "Oh, that's dumb!" you can say, "Well,..." and play with it for a little while. Then something develops: other people add their ideas to it; someone says, "That's kind of cool," and the process builds like that. The next thing you know, you've built something, among all of you, that no one of you alone would ever have thought of. Bob will then take the ideas and write the script, because, as a staff of writers, we're creating the ideas for him to write. And he'll give it his stamp, adding his own creative flavor.
JOHN: It's "Yes, and" versus "Yes, but"--which is what you get in great jazz, where talented people work together. When you're playing in a jazz group, if somebody offers you an idea you've got to go with it, and add to it. You don't exercise judgment on the front end or you'll never get to something truly sweet.
BOB: The alternative is Richard Wagner, who's going to write the words and the music, conduct the work, and be the dramatic director--all by himself.
ROBERT: So occasionally individuals still have the freedom to go against the whole world--though less so today, where high technology is concerned.
MIKE: Oh, yes. Creative people often work both ways, bringing this kind of division inside their own practice. For the first four hours of the day, let's say, they're alone with the doors closed, working by themselves. Then they open the doors and start interacting and getting as much information and as many different points of view as possible.
BOB: You still need a prime mover. There's a group process, but generally you need one person who has the vision, who can provide the leadership and move the thing forward. This person has to have the intelligence and the understanding to make use of contributions from a broad array of other kinds of people.
ROBERT: Stephen, I want to get inside your head, since I--
STEPHEN: You'll be the first.
ROBERT: --since I didn't get the chance with Mozart. You love being a writer. Ever since we've known each other, I always see a sparkle in your eye whenever we talk about writing. It's never about success, it's never about money, it's always about writing. You've written five novels since you started, at age fifty. Five best-sellers. You've written four hundred episodes of network television. Remarkably, you're dyslexic. I want you to tell us what that means.
STEPHEN: I have fairly classic dyslexia. I mirror-read. I'm a very slow reader; I read about two hundred words a minute. I have sequencing difficulties, which makes computer work very hard for me. Every time I turn my computer on, I have to reread the instructions--I can't remember the sequence of events. I have recall difficulties.
ROBERT: In high school and college, what kind of grades did you get in English?
STEPHEN: Terrible. Terrible. As a matter of fact, I flunked three grades before I got out of high school. I went back to the twentieth reunion of my high school class in Pasadena. By that time, I'd won a few Emmys and had a fairly high-profile career--
ROBERT: I love this story.
STEPHEN: There was this guy sort of circling me. It was my old teacher, who'd given me F's throughout high school. At the end of the evening, he finally came up to me and said, "So, you, ah, really make your living writing?" But what he'd been looking at back then was my spelling--and spelling isn't writing. I can compose a sentence and say it to you, or I can compose it and put it down on paper.
ROBERT: But to look at it on paper--
STEPHEN: The words are totally misspelled, just phonetically spelled. I've ruined the spelling of my twenty-year associate, who inputs all my stuff for me. She can't spell anything anymore; she was great when she started.
ROBERT: This is so fascinating! Doesn't Stephen demonstrate an enormous disconnect between creativity and what we normally think of as standardized-test, SAT intelligence?
MIKE: How many in this group have similar backgrounds? I was very bad in high school.
ROBERT: Unfortunately, I wasn't. Sorry. I feel out of place, embarrassed--as if I'm not creative because I got decent grades.
BOB: I was pretty good in high school, because I knew that if I didn't work hard I'd lose my scholarship. What it would have been like otherwise, I don't know.
ROBERT: Einstein received poor grades in mathematics.
STEPHEN: Dyslexia often comes with a capacity for abstract thought. People who are very good with abstract thought have been dyslexic--Einstein and Edison, two of our greatest inventors, were dyslexic.
MIKE: Practically all of the hundred people I interviewed in my study of very creative individuals--ninety out of a hundred--had pretty bad things to say about their formal education. They usually had one or two teachers who made a big difference in their lives and whom they remembered fondly. But the structured, mass-produced instruction that their schools generally provided was something they just couldn't take.
JOHN: What we're circling around is the issue of who gets to decide what's valuable. You said it in your introduction, Robert: there has to be something of value created; it's not enough just to come up with something new. Otherwise, throwing paint against the wall would be creative, and that's surely not very valuable. But the question is, Who decides? This is especially hard when it comes to social situations or organizations. There are plenty of people who look at a new idea, or at somebody who's a creative troublemaker, and say, "That's not particularly good." When does the perspective change, so that that new idea has its day in the sun?
RAY: The world is changing. We're entering an era in which the creation of new knowledge really constitutes the wealth and power of a nation's organizations and individuals. It's no longer just about being disciplined in manufacturing, or intelligent in some rote way. Economics is really about creating new knowledge. That's why the United States is as successful as it is, and why there are economic problems elsewhere. We have a culture of risk-taking; people seek new frontiers, and we reward that. We have entrepreneurial institutions, such as venture capital and incentive stock options--all designed to create new knowledge and value. The Internet is giving tremendous empowerment to the arts; those millions of web pages need pictures and music, and that's where wealth is being created today.
ROBERT: How important is risk in creativity? The willingness to accept failure?
RAY: An important part of creativity is failure and one's attitude toward it. My view of failure is that it's just success deferred. But not everybody feels that way. If you're afraid of failing, if that's a devastating experience, then you can't be creative. You have to see disappointment as part of the inner process of getting to where you need to go.
STEPHEN: I really like that--failure as success deferred. That's a great line.
JOHN: It's inherent in learning. We never did anything perfectly the first time through. We didn't ride a bike the first time we got on it; we had to fail in order to learn. Look at designers: they take an idea and make a model, which by definition is going to be destroyed--preferably as quickly as possible. So you go from version 1.0 to version 2.0.
STEPHEN: I think it's important to have target fixation when you're creating, and not think about failure, not think about criticism, not think about rewards, not think about anything but what you're trying to do. Just focus on your target and screen the rest of that stuff out.
RAY: That's another difference between a book and a technology. With a book, you finally do launch it and it's out there. Whereas with technology, if version 1.0 doesn't work--well, fine, you can upgrade to version 1.1 and version 2.0.
ROBERT: Mike, do many of the people you've studied fear failure?
MIKE: You can't ever achieve much if you fear failure--because, as everybody here says, that's how you learn. You have to have the confidence that you can do it yourself. As people say, you have to obsolete yourself before others obsolete you--which means that you're always trying to get better and better in order to beat the competition.
ROBERT: When I consider the creative process, ego is a two-edged blade. One edge is an outsized anxiety about your public image: "How am I going to look in front of my colleagues and friends? I've been successful before, and if I fail now, my image suffers, my standing goes down." The other is a manic, sometimes offensive, outsized confidence. Both these attitudes are primitive, but the latter is more productive than the former.
STEPHEN: I think ego is a motor. It's really an important motor, especially for creative people. Your ego is what pushes you out on stage after failure. It's that little voice in the back of your head that says, "Yeah, I screwed that one up, but what about the next one?" When I joined the Writers Guild, all the new members were convened in a theater, and they asked us, "What do you think the biggest motivation for writers is?" And some people thought it was money, and others mentioned the creative satisfaction, and this guy said, "No, it's ego. That's what gets people to sit down in front of that keyboard."
MIKE: But I think it's important to realize that the creative ego is different from the normal ego.
STEPHEN: Well, it's not a boastful ego.
MIKE: You're so identified with what you're doing that you cannot let it fail, because it reflects on you. It's the activity itself--the writing or the painting or the music--that has become so much a part of you that you have to make it succeed, and through it make yourself succeed.
BOB: There are different kinds of egos. Going back to Mozart for a moment--he succeeded musically and artistically every time he put pen to paper. But in a larger sense, he didn't succeed at all--with respect to Salieri. The whole point of Amadeus was that the outcome was Salieri's fault, but Mozart just couldn't handle Salieri. If he'd been able to handle Salieri, he'd have lived twenty years longer, and who knows what works he would have composed.
STEPHEN: What I'm saying is that since failure does hover over every creative project, there's some part of you that wants not to enter into it, because you're liable to fail. What gets you over that hump is your ego, which says, "Yeah, but what if it turns out to be the best thing I ever did?
RAY: I'd express the goal of creativity a little differently. The real satisfaction in creating either music or a book or a technology is the impact that it has on other people. Seeing a technology change people's lives, or a book change people's ideas, is deeply satisfying. Now, maybe that's an ego drive, but it's more than just saying, "OK, I accomplished this." It's experiencing other people's input.
ROBERT: You can almost say the reverse: that is, creative people do get lots of input--but ultimately you have to do what you yourself feel good about. If you compromise, you're often not going to be as effective. I can't tell you how many contradictory opinions I've had on producing this Closer to Truth series--from topics and guests to set and structure--and when I violate the principle of listening to one's own gut, I usually make the wrong decision.
RAY: But Stephen [Cannell, doesn't your definition of "the best thing you ever did" reflect how your work affects other people?
STEPHEN: Well...probably a difference between the two of us in the way we approach the creative process is that I never look beyond the goal, the finishing of it. I don't say, "This is going to have a tremendous effect on humankind."
RAY: But you've internalized your audience. If no one ever reacted to your books or your TV shows, it wouldn't be as satisfying.
STEPHEN: But where television series are concerned--aside from the ratings, which are sometimes devastating to read--you don't have the response you'd get in a theater, where people are laughing or crying at the lines. You're sitting there with your wife, asking, "Well, what did you think?"
RAY: Then you internalize what people will say when they come to you afterward and tell you how it's affected them?
STEPHEN: To some degree, but not as much as you might think, or as I might like.
ROBERT: We need a prediction from everyone. Fast-forward a hundred years. Where is creativity making its greatest contribution to society?
STEPHEN: Because I'm a writer, I would hope it's in literature. Literature is about thought, and society should be about thought.
RAY: We'll have expanded our intelligence and creativity by merging with nonbiological intelligence, and we'll be creating new types of entities that we can't imagine today, such as virtual-reality environments. But we'll still have elements that are based on our foundation of music and art, and various forms of culture will be the primary expressions of knowledge.
JOHN: In a hundred years, we'll have better tools to take our innate creativity and collaborate with one another in more effective ways, and we'll realize our ideas much more immediately.
BOB: I'd like to refer to something Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] brought up. The creative teacher--whether it was someone alive in 1800, 1900, this year, or a hundred years from now--is going to be someone who sees in each of his or her students what makes them different, and can enable them to see their own futures.
MIKE: Technological creativity is certainly going to continue and flourish, but I'm not sure that will be formal creativity's most important contribution in the future. Humanity needs a creativity that can help us find our place in this evolving cosmos, so that we can respect one another, live together peacefully, and not destroy one another in order to feel good about ourselves.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
WHAT is creativity? It's certainly not standardized-test intelligence. Stephen Cannell, all by himself, is proof of that. How do you solve a problem creatively? It's often a mistake to get too smart too quickly. Expert opinion fouls up the creative engine; conventional wisdom is creative death. So develop your own ideas yourself, alone, without external information and before seeking the opinion of others. Your naivete will be more ally than enemy on the creativity battlefield. Brood. Cogitate. Meditate. Agonize. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt are all friends of the creative process. Experience tension, frustration, stress. Stimulating creativity means multiplying your options, generating alternative, contrasting, conflicting solutions. Lose yourself. Feel the flow. But remember what psychologist Abraham Maslow said: Creativity might be as much found in a first-rate chicken soup as in a third-rate painting. Suffer with humor to get closer to truth.
c2000 CLOSER TO TRUTH
Editor's Translations:
"Creativity means being both different and better. Being different without being better is often pointless or just odd; being better without being different is just evolution, not revolution. For an act to be deemed creative, there must be an accepted style or method against which it can be judged original. The accepted style or method is the benchmark, and creativity often begins by rejecting or at least questioning it."
[創億不只要求不同, 也要求更好。 單是不同而不是更好豪無意義˙單是更好而沒有不同只是演變, 不是革命。 一個行動, 如果要被視為創億性的, 就必須先跟被接受的樣式或方法相對。 被接受的樣式或方法是基準˙ 創億的開始經常由丟棄或質疑它。]
--- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
"Creativity might be as much found in a first-rate chicken soup as in a third-rate painting."
[一張下等繪畫的創億不如一鍋頭等雞湯的創億。]
-- Abraham Maslow 世界聞名心理學家
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: What's Creativity and Who's Creative?
Illustration(s): Stephen J. Cannel, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Robert Freeman, John Kao, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/103/103transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Thursday, July 3, 2003
Film: The Bodacious Babes Out-Muscled The Big Green Guy
Film: The Bodacious Babes Out-Muscled The Big Green Guy
[文化創意產業]
(2003/07/03)
The Bodacious Babes Out-Muscled The Big Green Guy
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle flew in to first place this weekend with $37.6 million.
While that was a bit less heavenly than the original Charlie's Angels movie, which grossed $40.1 million its opening weekend in November 2000, the troika of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu still had more than enough to wallop The Hulk down to second place, where it earned an $18.8 million, according to final studio figures Monday.
But with Sony's reteaming of the Angels' triumvirate (alongside Bernie Mac as a new Bosley and against Demi Moore as a fallen angel) failing to outstrip the intake of the original and the extremely sharp 70 percent plummet of Universal's The Hulk, it was the third down weekend in a row for the overall national box office compared to this time last year. A year ago, the top 12 movies earned $131.3 million; this weekend the tally was $112.4 million, a 15 percent dropoff and 21 percent lower than last weekend.
Despite its huge dip, The Hulk (which debuted lower than expected last weekend with $62.1 million) just managed to cross the $100 million mark, the 10th film this year to do so. Its take now stands at $100.6 million. The PG-13 Angels, meanwhile, was tops among wide releases, averaging $10,880 per screen at 3,459 sites
Universal's president of distribution, Nikko Rocco, admitted being upset with the savage decline of the The Hulk, telling Reuters, "Obviously we're very disappointed. You never want to see this kind of drop." Several Wall Street types have predicted that if The Hulk continues its precipitous decline, it could mean the end of what was supposed to be a new superhero film franchise.
Editor's Comments:
That box office receipts for Hulk went from bad to worse is deeply discouraging, but based on the early reaction of some critics and the subsequent reaction of movie audiences, not a complete surprise. As one disappointed critic complained, "It's too long for kids, it's too slow for teens, it's too light for adults. It's too deep for those who don't like to think about their movies, it's too on-the-nose for those who do, and it's completely lacking in memorable action moments for those who are just coming for the special effects."
Hulk Director Ang Lee told interviewers at the film's premier that with a $150 million budget and full studio support, "If this movie sucks, the blame falls on me." The fact is Lee attempted to pull off an enormously difficult feat. Many would say that from the very start he had taken on "Mission Impossible." If in the collective judgement of movie critics and moviegoers he failed, he at least failed heroically.
Full Disclosure: I have yet to see Hulk in the theater, so as yet do not have enough information to give Hulk either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: "Angels" Throttles "Hulk"
Illustration(s): Chinese-American Actress Lucy Liu, Chinese-American Director Ang Lee's Hulk
Author(s): Bridget Byrne
Affiliation: E! Entertainment Television
Source: http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,12068,00.html
Publication Date: July 03, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[文化創意產業]
(2003/07/03)
The Bodacious Babes Out-Muscled The Big Green Guy
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle flew in to first place this weekend with $37.6 million.
While that was a bit less heavenly than the original Charlie's Angels movie, which grossed $40.1 million its opening weekend in November 2000, the troika of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu still had more than enough to wallop The Hulk down to second place, where it earned an $18.8 million, according to final studio figures Monday.
But with Sony's reteaming of the Angels' triumvirate (alongside Bernie Mac as a new Bosley and against Demi Moore as a fallen angel) failing to outstrip the intake of the original and the extremely sharp 70 percent plummet of Universal's The Hulk, it was the third down weekend in a row for the overall national box office compared to this time last year. A year ago, the top 12 movies earned $131.3 million; this weekend the tally was $112.4 million, a 15 percent dropoff and 21 percent lower than last weekend.
Despite its huge dip, The Hulk (which debuted lower than expected last weekend with $62.1 million) just managed to cross the $100 million mark, the 10th film this year to do so. Its take now stands at $100.6 million. The PG-13 Angels, meanwhile, was tops among wide releases, averaging $10,880 per screen at 3,459 sites
Universal's president of distribution, Nikko Rocco, admitted being upset with the savage decline of the The Hulk, telling Reuters, "Obviously we're very disappointed. You never want to see this kind of drop." Several Wall Street types have predicted that if The Hulk continues its precipitous decline, it could mean the end of what was supposed to be a new superhero film franchise.
Editor's Comments:
That box office receipts for Hulk went from bad to worse is deeply discouraging, but based on the early reaction of some critics and the subsequent reaction of movie audiences, not a complete surprise. As one disappointed critic complained, "It's too long for kids, it's too slow for teens, it's too light for adults. It's too deep for those who don't like to think about their movies, it's too on-the-nose for those who do, and it's completely lacking in memorable action moments for those who are just coming for the special effects."
Hulk Director Ang Lee told interviewers at the film's premier that with a $150 million budget and full studio support, "If this movie sucks, the blame falls on me." The fact is Lee attempted to pull off an enormously difficult feat. Many would say that from the very start he had taken on "Mission Impossible." If in the collective judgement of movie critics and moviegoers he failed, he at least failed heroically.
Full Disclosure: I have yet to see Hulk in the theater, so as yet do not have enough information to give Hulk either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: "Angels" Throttles "Hulk"
Illustration(s): Chinese-American Actress Lucy Liu, Chinese-American Director Ang Lee's Hulk
Author(s): Bridget Byrne
Affiliation: E! Entertainment Television
Source: http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,12068,00.html
Publication Date: July 03, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Tuesday, July 1, 2003
Film: Department of Redundancy Department
Film: Department of Redundancy Department
[文化創意產業]
(2003/07/01)
Department of Redundancy Department
It has been an unhappy autumn here behind studio gates. The gloom commenced when "Stuart Little 2," pre-sold as the summer's hit kid flick, nose-dived into the toilet. Next came "The Scorpion King," the latest installment in the "Mummy" series. It grossed less than half of what its predecessor did.
Conventional wisdom held that Sony Pictures' just-released Eddie Murphy-Owen Wilson action comedy "I Spy" was a surefire hit -- given its star power and the cult popularity of its namesake TV series. By last weekend, the $70 million-budgeted film had grossed only $25 million, with audiences shrinking.
The message from these and other recently unsuccessful remakes may be that a long-held industry maxim -- that remakes have built-in audience brand loyalty -- is going the way of Prince Val haircuts. Hollywood is currently infatuated with the concept of branding, deaf to Madison Avenue's warning that consumers, particularly young ones, care less than ever about brands. What they care most about -- terrifying news -- is quality.
Writers blame Hollywood's increasing reliance on recycled material on risk-averse out-of-date studio suits cocooned behind a fawning cadre of junior development executives -- mostly non-writers who typically talk or otherwise negotiate their way into their jobs and are notorious for their inability to recognize a good screenplay after they pretend to read it. Thus the famously craven writer's pitch to executives: "It's just like [hit movie], but completely different." Gus Van Sant tried delivering on that promise with his recent shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Psycho." Audiences failed to see the point. Producer Edward R. Pressman, whose films "Das Boot," "Plenty," "Wall Street" and "Reversal of Fortune" won Oscar notices, says, "There's no reason to remake something that's been done so well that anything that comes after it would pale by comparison."
In Hollywood, however, reason routinely takes a back seat to ego. Case in point: British director Guy Ritchie and spouse Madonna, whose recent remake of director Lina Wertmuller's wonderfully original 1975 hit "Swept Away," "Love, Sex, Drugs & Money," chalked up less than $600,000 before distributors pulled it.
Director Jonathan Demme's admiration for Stanley Donen's 1963 romantic thriller "Charade," which starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant at their best, didn't translate into an audience-pleasing remake. Demme's recent "The Truth About Charlie," starring Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton, appears to have flopped.
Writing last Sunday about the lackluster performance of recent remakes, Los Angeles Times movie industry columnist Patrick Goldstein put it bluntly. "Maybe getting audiences to spend $9.50 for a half-baked update of a (fill in the blank: TV spy show/'30s adventure movie/'60s thriller/'70s art-house classic) isn't such a slam-dunk after all."
Part of the problem, no secret here, is that many of the people running movie studios know far less about the cinema arts than they should. With some notable exceptions, they're typically people without writing or filmmaking experience, relying instead on business, law or financial backgrounds. Many are former studio publicity, promotion or sales functionaries who rose, often for reasons having little or nothing to do with the processes by which films are developed. Given the limitations of their experience they tend to be uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts that have not been tested in the marketplace. Safer to bankroll "Santa Clause 4" or "Home Alone 5" than to risk money on something weird like "Driving Miss Daisy." Leave that to the Zanucks.
So get ready for a remake of the 1961 Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid," possibly starring Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly. But why? "The generation that goes to the movies," speculates "El Cid" producer Arthur Sarkissian, "I don't know if they want to rent the old movie and watch it. "There's [also] a vast amount of material" in studio vaults, he says.
Indeed.
"Alfie, " the 1966 movie that made Michael Caine a star, is being remade. Joel and Ethan Coen ("Barton Fink," "Fargo," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") are prepping "an American spin" on the 1955 Peter Sellers comedy "The Ladykillers." Reported possibilities are "Flight of the Phoenix," "Fahrenheit 451," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Barbarella," with Drew Barrymore reprising Jane Fonda's 1968 role.
Sounds more like a video weekend to me.
"No matter how hard Hollywood tries to brainwash moviegoers into embracing familiarity," Goldstein concludes, "when we gather in the dark we crave something fresh and new."
Editor's Comments:
In my previous article "The Hulk: The Hulk has Heft" I wrote,
"The increasing technical virtuosity on the part of movie makers is matched by a corresponding technical sophistication on the part of movie goers. I am old enough to have seen The Guns of Navarone first run in 1961... Yet when I caught the movie recently on cable, I was shocked at how crude the once thrilling 1961 action sequences seemed in 2003. Recent action/adventure films... have raised the technical bar... to new heights. Modern audiences are thoroughly jaded. The naive action sequences of a more innocent era no longer pass muster... "
That was a true statement. That was of course not the whole story. This newfound technical virtuosity, useful as it is when applied intelligently, appropriately, is often accompanied by an appalling cluelessness about how to tell a story and touch the viewer's heart. The result has been an endless procession of inferior films boasting longer gun battles, faster car chases, louder explosions, riskier stunts, trickier special effects, all in the mistaken belief that "sensory overload equals emotional catharsis."
A perfect example is The Jackal (1997, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, screen adaptation by Chuck Pfarrer, starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier), an inept beyond belief remake of the tense and masterful The Day of the Jackal (1973, directed by Fred Zinnemann, screen adaptation by Kenneth Ross, starring Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale, Delphine Seyrig). Actually, one hesistates to refer to The Jackal as a remake. These two film adapations of the best-selling spy thriller by Fredrick Forsyth could not be more different. The Jackal was light on story and heavy on effects; The Day of the Jackal the exact opposite. No credit for guessing which version was the critical and box office success.
"I want them [the audience] to have been put through the wringer emotionally."
-- Michael Caton-Jones, director of The Jackal
"[The] Jackal remake left out one thing -- the suspense."
-- Margaret A. Mcgurk, movie critic for Cincinnati Enquirer
It's all very ironic. The makers of The Jackal probably set out to outshine the original. They undoubtedly assumed with the vast resources available in 1997 that were not available in 1973, they would leave the original in the dust. One can almost hear some glib development exec gushing "It'll be just like the original, only more so." Readers who saw both versions know that's not how it worked out. Moviegoers who thrilled to the understated menace of Edward Fox testing his custom made, one of a kind, single-shot sniper rifle on a watermelon in the 1973 original, then fidgeted through Bruce Willis' grotesquely overblown yet emotionally hollow 20mm cannon testing scene in the 1997 remake, know that less is more, and more is less.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: Department of Redundancy Department
Illustration(s): The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal, Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal
Author(s): Mark Miller
Affiliation: San Francisco Examiner
Source: http://www.examiner.com/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X1115MILLERw
Publication Date: November 15, 2002
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[文化創意產業]
(2003/07/01)
Department of Redundancy Department
It has been an unhappy autumn here behind studio gates. The gloom commenced when "Stuart Little 2," pre-sold as the summer's hit kid flick, nose-dived into the toilet. Next came "The Scorpion King," the latest installment in the "Mummy" series. It grossed less than half of what its predecessor did.
Conventional wisdom held that Sony Pictures' just-released Eddie Murphy-Owen Wilson action comedy "I Spy" was a surefire hit -- given its star power and the cult popularity of its namesake TV series. By last weekend, the $70 million-budgeted film had grossed only $25 million, with audiences shrinking.
The message from these and other recently unsuccessful remakes may be that a long-held industry maxim -- that remakes have built-in audience brand loyalty -- is going the way of Prince Val haircuts. Hollywood is currently infatuated with the concept of branding, deaf to Madison Avenue's warning that consumers, particularly young ones, care less than ever about brands. What they care most about -- terrifying news -- is quality.
Writers blame Hollywood's increasing reliance on recycled material on risk-averse out-of-date studio suits cocooned behind a fawning cadre of junior development executives -- mostly non-writers who typically talk or otherwise negotiate their way into their jobs and are notorious for their inability to recognize a good screenplay after they pretend to read it. Thus the famously craven writer's pitch to executives: "It's just like [hit movie], but completely different." Gus Van Sant tried delivering on that promise with his recent shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Psycho." Audiences failed to see the point. Producer Edward R. Pressman, whose films "Das Boot," "Plenty," "Wall Street" and "Reversal of Fortune" won Oscar notices, says, "There's no reason to remake something that's been done so well that anything that comes after it would pale by comparison."
In Hollywood, however, reason routinely takes a back seat to ego. Case in point: British director Guy Ritchie and spouse Madonna, whose recent remake of director Lina Wertmuller's wonderfully original 1975 hit "Swept Away," "Love, Sex, Drugs & Money," chalked up less than $600,000 before distributors pulled it.
Director Jonathan Demme's admiration for Stanley Donen's 1963 romantic thriller "Charade," which starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant at their best, didn't translate into an audience-pleasing remake. Demme's recent "The Truth About Charlie," starring Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton, appears to have flopped.
Writing last Sunday about the lackluster performance of recent remakes, Los Angeles Times movie industry columnist Patrick Goldstein put it bluntly. "Maybe getting audiences to spend $9.50 for a half-baked update of a (fill in the blank: TV spy show/'30s adventure movie/'60s thriller/'70s art-house classic) isn't such a slam-dunk after all."
Part of the problem, no secret here, is that many of the people running movie studios know far less about the cinema arts than they should. With some notable exceptions, they're typically people without writing or filmmaking experience, relying instead on business, law or financial backgrounds. Many are former studio publicity, promotion or sales functionaries who rose, often for reasons having little or nothing to do with the processes by which films are developed. Given the limitations of their experience they tend to be uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts that have not been tested in the marketplace. Safer to bankroll "Santa Clause 4" or "Home Alone 5" than to risk money on something weird like "Driving Miss Daisy." Leave that to the Zanucks.
So get ready for a remake of the 1961 Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid," possibly starring Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly. But why? "The generation that goes to the movies," speculates "El Cid" producer Arthur Sarkissian, "I don't know if they want to rent the old movie and watch it. "There's [also] a vast amount of material" in studio vaults, he says.
Indeed.
"Alfie, " the 1966 movie that made Michael Caine a star, is being remade. Joel and Ethan Coen ("Barton Fink," "Fargo," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") are prepping "an American spin" on the 1955 Peter Sellers comedy "The Ladykillers." Reported possibilities are "Flight of the Phoenix," "Fahrenheit 451," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Barbarella," with Drew Barrymore reprising Jane Fonda's 1968 role.
Sounds more like a video weekend to me.
"No matter how hard Hollywood tries to brainwash moviegoers into embracing familiarity," Goldstein concludes, "when we gather in the dark we crave something fresh and new."
Editor's Comments:
In my previous article "The Hulk: The Hulk has Heft" I wrote,
"The increasing technical virtuosity on the part of movie makers is matched by a corresponding technical sophistication on the part of movie goers. I am old enough to have seen The Guns of Navarone first run in 1961... Yet when I caught the movie recently on cable, I was shocked at how crude the once thrilling 1961 action sequences seemed in 2003. Recent action/adventure films... have raised the technical bar... to new heights. Modern audiences are thoroughly jaded. The naive action sequences of a more innocent era no longer pass muster... "
That was a true statement. That was of course not the whole story. This newfound technical virtuosity, useful as it is when applied intelligently, appropriately, is often accompanied by an appalling cluelessness about how to tell a story and touch the viewer's heart. The result has been an endless procession of inferior films boasting longer gun battles, faster car chases, louder explosions, riskier stunts, trickier special effects, all in the mistaken belief that "sensory overload equals emotional catharsis."
A perfect example is The Jackal (1997, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, screen adaptation by Chuck Pfarrer, starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier), an inept beyond belief remake of the tense and masterful The Day of the Jackal (1973, directed by Fred Zinnemann, screen adaptation by Kenneth Ross, starring Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale, Delphine Seyrig). Actually, one hesistates to refer to The Jackal as a remake. These two film adapations of the best-selling spy thriller by Fredrick Forsyth could not be more different. The Jackal was light on story and heavy on effects; The Day of the Jackal the exact opposite. No credit for guessing which version was the critical and box office success.
"I want them [the audience] to have been put through the wringer emotionally."
-- Michael Caton-Jones, director of The Jackal
"[The] Jackal remake left out one thing -- the suspense."
-- Margaret A. Mcgurk, movie critic for Cincinnati Enquirer
It's all very ironic. The makers of The Jackal probably set out to outshine the original. They undoubtedly assumed with the vast resources available in 1997 that were not available in 1973, they would leave the original in the dust. One can almost hear some glib development exec gushing "It'll be just like the original, only more so." Readers who saw both versions know that's not how it worked out. Moviegoers who thrilled to the understated menace of Edward Fox testing his custom made, one of a kind, single-shot sniper rifle on a watermelon in the 1973 original, then fidgeted through Bruce Willis' grotesquely overblown yet emotionally hollow 20mm cannon testing scene in the 1997 remake, know that less is more, and more is less.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: Department of Redundancy Department
Illustration(s): The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal, Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal
Author(s): Mark Miller
Affiliation: San Francisco Examiner
Source: http://www.examiner.com/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X1115MILLERw
Publication Date: November 15, 2002
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
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