Why Do We Make Music & Art? (我門為什麼創造音樂和藝術?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/06)
Why Do We Make Music & Art?
THINK of your favorite painting, your favorite poem, your favorite piece of music. How do these works of art make you feel? What do they reveal about you? In museums and music halls across the country, appreciation of the arts is enjoying a renaissance. The opening of a Picasso or Van Gogh exhibit, for instance, produces crowds customarily seen at rock concerts or sporting events. What is it about music and art that causes this excitement? We seem suspended, transported, connected, expanded--as if subsumed by something larger. A piece of music or a painting or a poem may lift our hearts, or fill us with ecstasy, or bring us to the brink of despair, or do absolutely nothing to us. What relationship is there between these human emotions and our analytical, rational selves? And what about the social import of art? Does art reflect our culture, or does art help to create our culture? From earliest times, in virtually every society on earth, an advanced aesthetic has marked the high point of civilization. Are these circumstances necessarily linked? We invited five very different artists to speculate about how music, poetry, painting, and other art forms release the human spirit and advance the human condition.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Todd Boyd, author of Am I Black Enough For You?: Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond, teaches critical studies in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. Todd talks about how rap music, hip-hop culture, jazz, and American movies have helped to create a global community.
Dr. Robert Freeman is a leading music educator, historian, pianist, and public spokesman for music education. Bob discusses the importance of musical education and the powerful impact of music on all levels of society.
Dr. Rhoda Janzen has won numerous poetry prizes and received UCLA's teaching award for innovation. Rhoda describes art as a visceral experience, much needed in a cerebral world.
Dr. Ray Kurzweil, scientist, author and entrepreneur, is the inventor of the first computer music keyboard. Ray believes that nonbiological entities will eventually contribute significantly to all forms of art and even create new ones.
Dr. Todd Siler is an artist whose science-based multimedia works are in major museums and numerous collections worldwide. Todd talks about art as immersion without boundaries, and about the observer as an integral part of the work.
ROBERT: Bob, you became director of the Eastman School of Music at the young age of thirty-seven, as a tenured professor from MIT; you've been chief executive of the New England Conservatory. You've traveled throughout the world of music. How can music so powerfully affect human emotion?
BOB: There is, of course, concert music, to which I've dedicated my life, but I'm going to tell you a story that doesn't have to do with music you hear in a concert hall. Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester told this story, at the dedication of an organ in a Catholic church in his diocese. He spoke about the recent death of his mother. The bishop has three brothers--two of them priests--and four sisters. They were all gathered around the bedside of their eighty-nine-year-old mother, who was in great pain and dying of cancer. They'd given her the last rites, and they all prayed that she wouldn't linger. And their mother would not die. She remained in great pain. The more they prayed, the more nothing seemed to happen. And finally the oldest sister said, "Let's sing some of the songs she taught us when we were children." Holding hands around her bed, they began with "You Are My Sunshine." By the end of the first verse, her breathing had become more regular and relaxed, and by the end of the second verse she had died. These seven people, looking to the heavens, had just found out how powerful a force music can be. And the Bishop said, don't misuse music.
ROBERT: Todd Boyd--we're honored to have two Todds with us today--you've been called one of the new public intellectuals on matters of race, class, and gender. How do music and art contribute to a common culture in America?
TODD BOYD: If you look closely back over the twentieth century, you'll find commonalties in music and other forms of culture that you may not find in social or political areas of life. A recent example would be rap music and hip-hop culture, which, interestingly enough, together constitute one of the few movements in our society that includes a broad cross-section of the people who make up the fabric of America. And if you go beyond America's shores, you'll find that this phenomenon has saturated the globe. That you can start from something as small as a song, or an album, and connect people throughout the world is strong testimony to what music and culture can do to create community at a higher level.
ROBERT: Ray, you've written two pathbreaking books--The Age of Intelligent Machines some years ago, and more recently, The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Do you see computers moving in an artistic direction?
RAY: Computers today are better than people expect in terms of music and art. There's [UC Santa Cruz professor of music] David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer program [a program that generates new compositions in the styles of various composers, among them Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, and Scott Joplin]. The British abstract artist Harold Cohen has developed a robotic painter named Aaron, which actually does pretty interesting work. Harold signs his own name to Aaron's drawings, but Aaron has not been programmed to complain. And I think there's a message there--that Aaron is really an expression of Harold Cohen's human intelligence, which he expresses through this program that in turn creates art. That's where we are today.
ROBERT: Will computers ever be able to create original works of music and art that will move human beings? Will they be proficient to the same degree as, say, Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world chess champion a few years ago?
RAY: Computers today are amplifying our human intelligence, providing new canvases, new tools. But computers--or, as I'd prefer to say, nonbiological forms of intelligence--are going to become more and more powerful. We're going to be able to replicate human intelligence by scanning it, understanding it, and reinstantiating it in new media. So we will meet entities in the twenty-first century that are very human and can express and respond appropriately to human emotion--which is really the ultimate expression of our intelligence. And music, art, and culture are perhaps the ultimate expression of our emotion. And I'd say that within thirty years or so nonbiological entities will have their own artistic reputations and will be creating paintings and music and other forms of art, too, such as virtual-reality environments.
ROBERT: I hope they don't replace Rhoda too quickly. Rhoda, you're a well-known poet who specializes in the nature of aesthetics. What is it about music and art that moves us so deeply, that gets inside us and ties our stomach in knots?
RHODA: Well, for every respondent it's different. I'm going to answer personally. I like listening to music, looking at art, and reading poetry so much because it gives me something that I don't get in the course of my regular life. My regular life is all about responding to analytical forms, using my mind, consciously engaging on an intellectual level. But when I'm listening to music or reading poetry, I'm being invited to respond at a visceral level, with my whole body. And it creates a space for me that's completely unlike anything I experience elsewhere. It gives me an opportunity to step away from the didactic messages that we're surrounded with. I mean, we're bombarded with messages about morality, civility, culture, race, and so forth, and we're asked to think about those things. And they're important. But poetry and music and art give us more; they invite us to respond sensually and viscerally.
ROBERT: Todd Siler, you're an important artist whose starkly original works project strong emotions. You were the first visual artist to receive a PhD from MIT, where, I should disclose, we met twenty years ago, when I was a teaching assistant in brain science and you were in my class. [I was at the same time attending the Sloan School of Management.] What do you feel when you create? Do your emotions depend upon the medium?
TODD SILER: When I get involved in the installations and things I build that involve painting, drawing, video, and other kinds of media, I don't draw any boundaries between them. It's a complete immersion.
ROBERT: What's the relationship between the objects you create and the observers who see them?
TODD SILER: I like to break down that distinction; I want the observer to literally become part of my art. In fact, I may finish the work, but it remains unfinished. It's completed by the constant interpretations and revisits that people have when they come to it, from all different disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences. My work tries to represent the nature of the thought process, as I studied it, experienced it. I'm not trying to paint thought, but I'm trying to paint the process of thought. So I love it when people begin to map their world onto my artwork. That's what completes it.
ROBERT: Does interaction with observers ever change your work?
TODD SILER: Very much so. All the time, I discover more things about a piece--when children approach it with openness, when colleagues approach it from a scholarly perspective. I welcome every kind of approach. Interaction is a way of journeying into the greatest mystery that we have--human thought--and not worrying whether it's going to be interpreted as you see it but rather inviting all kinds of interpretations.
ROBERT: Bob, you're a first-class pianist as well as a top administrator. What does performing feel like?
BOB: A successful performance depends upon a variety of elements. First is preparation. Are you fully in charge of what's going on? Do you know the material really well, so that you don't have to worry about it? Are you well rested? Your body can't do what your mind tells it to if you're not. Most important, many musicians suffer from terrible stage fright. The way to keep that from happening is to make sure that you're not playing for stakes that are too high: that if I don't play this piece really beautifully--
ROBERT: --I won't eat.
BOB: Well, "I won't eat" is the least of it. If you can get rid of all extraneous matters and play directly to the audience--as though you're playing for a particular person in the third row, say--it can be very successful. And enormously exhilarating.
RAY: There's an aspect of computer technology that gets to the heart of what computers can do today for the arts--which is to amplify our abilities and bring the tools to make art and music to more people. My father was a composer. He died in 1970, and in the 1960s, when he wanted to hear his multi-instrumental compositions, he had to raise money, bring a whole orchestra together, hand-write and mimeograph the scores. Finally, he'd hear his composition. And God forbid he didn't like it--then he'd have to start all over again, raise more money, and so forth. Now music students in any conservatory, or in their own apartments, can hear a multi-instrumental composition and change it as easily as you rewrite a letter on your word processor. And while they will still want to hear it performed by a real orchestra, they can create music as never before. Computers provide a whole new canvas for the arts. Also, synthesizers provide new sounds, which were impossible before.
BOB: Computers provide a whole new basis for musical literacy. You can [compose] without worrying about how many sharps there are in E major.
ROBERT: Ray's music keyboards have been one of the major forces expanding the range of music. Many people are very grateful for these new worlds that have opened to them.
RAY: That's the thrill of being an inventor--moving from equations on a blackboard to actually affecting people's lives. We get lots of feedback from musicians who, with this new technology, create forms of music that weren't feasible before.
ROBERT: Todd Boyd, you specialize in the critical analysis of motion pictures and popular culture. How significant is film as an art form?
TODD BOYD: Motion pictures certainly play a powerful role in all our lives--particularly with the advent of the VCR, which transformed movies by bringing them into the American home. And just as with any other art form, there are a few classics--I often refer to [Francis Ford] Coppola's The Godfather and Godfather II as a kind of quintessential text of the latter half of the twentieth century. Those films, at some level, can speak to all of us. The particular story may not be exactly like everyone's, but you can find something there about family, about the struggle to integrate into mainstream America. You can study these films and take them apart; not only are they fascinating, they're fulfilling. I often set up a screening for myself on Sunday afternoons, when I have the time to watch all six hours of The Godfather and Godfather II, with a bottle of Bordeaux and a nice cigar, and take it all in at the sensory level.
ROBERT: Godfather III didn't have the same quality?
TODD BOYD: Godfather III came out seventeen years later and had a whole different scenario--but Coppola needed the money.
RHODA: Do you feel that the accessibility of film is putting other genres, like poetry and music, into the background?
TODD BOYD: I think so, because film is now so prevalent. When I was teaching in Stockholm, I was amazed how much knowledge the Swedish people had of America, even those who hadn't traveled very much. The reason was that they had watched so many American films. So imagine the impact here in America. We have a common language now. Even if you aren't a moviegoer, it's in the popular dialogue. Film definitely does overshadow other areas of culture--music, poetry, what have you--because, at some level, film contains them all.
RAY: Film and TV have certainly empowered the arts, but what has really empowered the arts is the World Wide Web. I have artist friends who used to make four or five thousand dollars a year, and now they're doing extremely well. There's a tremendous explosion of demand for graphic arts on the Web. The same is true of music, film, video, writing, even poetry. We need content that's exciting and creates this sense of transcendence. There's a tremendous demand for content now.
ROBERT: Todd Siler, give us a sense of your art--I'm a great fan. What do you do? What do you see? What do you want to accomplish?
TODD SILER: My world is about the synthesis of different disciplines, and the only way I know how to express it is by using lots of different media. Sometimes I wish I were a filmmaker, because they get to use all those good things--animation and so on. My journey began when I became fascinated with how the brain puts ideas and information together, and I approach my work from both the arts and the sciences, from both sets of inquiry. And my search, really, has been about helping people understand their own creative process--not in a didactic way, but experientially. You literally have to go in and feel the rapture, feel the pain, feel a range of emotions--and allow yourself to understand the process from your own perspective, not from mine. I consider my works just as creative catalysts to get people going. And often I have to invent new technologies to create these works--like one installation I did, for example, which was twelve feet high and a hundred feet long and involved many different kinds of printing processes.
ROBERT: In some of your installations, you have people moving through, as if the people become part of the installation.
TODD SILER: Yes, absolutely. They're very much part of that mental and physical space. I try to break the distinction down, literally, by setting up conditions for a kind of magic, for people to catch themselves in their own reverie. Even a month later, they begin to understand that all the different elements of the creative process were at work there--from confusion to clarity, a full range of things. Everything, in a way, is meant to prompt viewers to examine their own experience. That's where my art comes back full circle.
ROBERT: Is confusion a legitimate emotion you want to trigger in us mortals?
TODD SILER: Ah, no--but I think ambiguity is. There's enormous power in ambiguity. People try to edit it out of the creative process. I welcome it. I think there are moments when you need enormous chaos, and sometimes, in preparing for presentations, I absorb an overload of information, and allow myself to literally fail--and then I find the order in the chaos, which enables the installation to live. This is part of the creative process and how it unfolds.
BOB: Doesn't a lot of that have to do with pattern recognition? Certainly it does in music, which unfolds in patterns. Isn't it important for kids to learn pattern recognition at an early age?
RAY: Pattern recognition is based on mastering chaos. Our earlier computers were based on structured rules, and that's why they were so formulaic and predictable and brittle. We're learning that we need to build machines in a different way to master self-organizing, complex, chaotic processing, which is really how the human brain works.
BOB: With respect to music, you can see what a poor job we're doing nationally with pattern recognition. Anytime you go to a restaurant where the staff sings "Happy Birthday" to the honoree of the day, almost none of the waiters and waitresses can hit the right notes--just going up an octave is practically impossible.
ROBERT: Certainly for me it is.
TODD SILER: I recently did a collaboration where, for the first time in my life, a musician completed my art by composing and performing a dedicated piece. The music and the textures and the layers were so integrated that I saw the seamlessness of all those different connections and relationships--I was so moved I was crying. That's the magic of emotion and ambiguity...all that.
ROBERT: What contributions do you think the arts make to human development?
TODD SILER: Billions of contributions, and that's not hyperbole. James Baldwin summed it up eloquently: the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers. And when you think of all the answers we give one another question; this is the arts' greatest contribution--to enable us to deepen the inquiry, to enrich the questions, to extend the inner journey we make in attempting to understand our own inner world and how it connects to other worlds.
BOB: Several years ago I had the privilege of chairing an international commission on the future of the principal music school in Finland, the Sibelius Academy. I learned at that time that in a country of five million people, with high rates of alcoholism and suicide and seventeen-percent unemployment, there were a hundred and fifty music schools. None of the musicians were unemployed, and why? Because the country cares deeply about music. This is the kind of society we're looking for; music and the arts bring Finland together.
TODD BOYD: I want to follow up on what Todd [Siler] said about art laying bare the questions, but take it someplace a little different. I remember hearing Miles Davis talk about how he structured a trumpet solo after watching a Sugar Ray Robinson boxing match. Sugar Ray was known as a master of style--you know, he would walk into the ring wearing two robes, and he'd take off the outer robe and underneath would be this white silk robe. It was all about presentation and performance. But Miles focused specifically on how Sugar Ray, in the first round of a fight, would set traps for his opponent without springing them. And then he'd come back in the second round and spring one of those traps, and the fight, of course, would be over. And Miles took that idea and applied it to his solo, so at the beginning of the solo there are all these traps set, and in the second half of the solo, he's springing the trap. So you can flow between those two disparate forms and find that sort of inspiration. Art really does lay bare the questions, and the questions can become much more interesting than the answers sometimes.
RAY: What's so interesting is that Miles was doing a form of boxing and Sugar Ray a form of music. A fascinating exchange and synthesis.
ROBERT: It's the resonance of great talent. Rhoda, you've unified art forms with a wonderful poem about a piece of art.
RHODA: It fits very well into this discussion, in the sense that it's a piece of art that responds to another piece of art. To give you some background: I was in the J. Paul Getty museum looking at an exhibit of twelveth-century sacramentaries. These are liturgical books, and they were displayed under glass, open. And in these books the first letter on each page was enlarged and beautifully decorated, with flowers, vines, animals; and sometimes the inital was inhabited by human figures. These initials were illustrative of the semantic; that is, they were in some way connected to the message on the page. And they were pictorializing and literalizing the language. And what promoted my poem was an inhabited "D"--a large capital D inhabited by a tiny male figure. It was a little man with one foot inside the D and one foot outside the D, just sort of taking a tentative step onto the page. And when I saw it, I knew this was poem material, this was going to be a poem for me. I was immediately struck by the possibilities implicit in the idea of language as symbolic shelter. I mean, the little man looked as if he were leaving a little D house. In this poem, the speaker is speaking to the little man who is leaving the D.
Like a decorous swimmer you test
the world outside your D. Is language
then so easy to bear? Your D shells
your narrow shoulders, poised for retreat
in case the sentence into which you
have maneuvered is tiresome or dangerous.
How do you design your view, with its illuminare
so deucedly gold? That tendril of filigree
tickling your hat? A sacramentary denizen,
devotee of diffidence, must commence some praise
of Christ, your neighbor in the word. Or is
your interior too fretted with script,
damask drapes, damson drawing room?
You men of letters remind me it's time
to pay my calls, to entertain, to correspond
devoutly with those whose residence you recall.
Careful, piccolino, the nobleman with heavy
plume and shadowed chin would love to invite
you out, himself in. Then where would you be--
homeless? Damnified, or keeping house
with Lord of Arguments, who seeks, I hear,
a D for personal definition? What is
your mission, if you must depart? At least
look up. Your domestic D is half a world
of comfort and could attract difficulty.
Perhaps you venture out simply to return
to depth as some in recent centuries
shore pages in foam, the waves' declension
dreams, dreaming, dreamt, where no traveler
speaks our salt. Desiccate, unlettered land.
TODD SILER: That's beautiful.
ROBERT: Ray, from your pioneering vision applying computer technology to generate music, what can we learn about the nature of human intelligence and its relationship to art?
RAY: The history of trying to emulate human intelligence through computers has been surprising. Even early computers were able to do mathematics problems that leading mathematicians had done, diagnose disease, and the like, but what has been very difficult, and what we still can't do, is master human emotion [replicate it in a computer], just to [give a computer the capacity to] understand a poem or respond to a piece of music [meaningfully]. We're really finding that the arts, which is a sort of transcendent expression of human emotion, represent the cutting edge of human intelligence. It will be the most difficult aspect of our intelligence to re-create [nonbiologically]. But in the process of trying to do that [i.e., develop profound artificial intelligence], we're learning some of the underlying elements and structure of art that are behind the inspiration.
ROBERT: And what does that process tell you about the human emotional response to art?
RAY: Well, it's clear that human emotion is the most subtle, most sublime, most complex, deepest aspect of human intelligence, and the hardest aspect to model fully in nonbiological systems.
ROBERT: Bob, let's get to education, because it enables appreciation of music and art. You've been a great proponent of bringing music education to everyone in America, not just to the elite. Why is this important?
BOB: It's important to musicians, for obvious reasons, but music education is important to humanity--not just America--because of the message music brings, which is a liberating one. All kinds of music can be for all kinds of people. There's a wonderful young string quartet from the Eastman School called the Ying Quartet, which spent two years in residence in a little town named Jessup, Iowa, and turned this town of corn and hog farmers into music lovers and string players. At their last concert in a gymnasium, a thousand people came--the population of Jessup is only two thousand. When the quartet members were invited to testify on Capitol Hill at the reauthorization hearing for the National Endowment for the Arts, twelve farmers came along, each at his own expense, to tell Congress what an important force this was for their town.
ROBERT: Todd Boyd, can music play a role in promoting racial harmony and bringing America together?
TODD BOYD: It certainly does that, though historically it has been quite divisive as well. Music has probably erected as many barriers as it has broken down. But in my mind the most significant American music is jazz, and this is a music that clearly emanates from an African-American cultural perspective. Jazz is high art at this point, and it's truly fascinating how for so many years it has been able to cut across boundaries in America and throughout the world. We're now seeing the same sort of thing with hip-hop, which is attracting very broad audiences. I was in Japan and happened upon a hip-hop club in which all the people were Japanese, none spoke any English, but they knew every word of Biggie Smalls' "Big Papa." And they could rap it just as if they'd lived in America all their lives. There's something about art--music, film, and other forms--that transcends social and national barriers, and when people encounter these things they tend to put aside some of the baggage they'd otherwise be carrying.
BOB: A big question with respect to the future of jazz is whether it should now be essentially a classical form, as invented in the 1920s and 1930s, or whether it should continue to grow.
TODD BOYD: I don't think jazz could ever be classical in the traditional sense, because the root of jazz, of course, is improvisation. And therefore it's constantly growing, constantly changing--and the minute you try to, say, put it under glass, then problems come about. That's what happened in the 1970s, and then in the 1980s there was a resurgence, when people realized that you couldn't treat jazz like a precious art object--you had to engage it for it to grow.
BOB: Like the rest of art, jazz must be growing, changing and evolving.
TODD BOYD: Exactly.
BOB: At the New England Conservatory of Music, for the past twenty-five years, there's been an annual event called the Gospel Jubilee--lots of gospel music. The hall is packed with an audience largely, but not exclusively, African-American. At the last concert, on my left were an African-American from the conservatory and her boyfriend, and on my right were two Russian immigrants--ladies in their mid-eighties. And the Russian ladies asked me, "What is this music?" And I said, "Well, this expresses something of the way in which African-Americans learned to live with pain during the days of slavery. This music represents a way of moving forward despite lots of sadness, and it involves a kind of responsive procedure with the audience. If you want to get into it, why don't you start singing right off, `Amen' and `Hallelujah,' with everybody else?" They did, and at the end of the evening they said, "You know, this concert made us feel like real Americans for the first time."
TODD BOYD: The idea that gospel music would be the quintessential American experience for them speaks a lot about its power.
ROBERT: And the ability of music to unify a culture. Let's look forward a hundred years. Will music and art be more or less important in society?
BOB: It depends on how we proceed with the education of young musicians. If they believe that music is for everybody, and that everybody needs to be involved in it, whether or not they become Paganinis or Heifitzes in the long run, then we'll have a vibrant culture and music will serve as a force to unify us all. If not, it'll be just the way it is now.
ROBERT: We wouldn't want too many Paganinis.
TODD BOYD: Music and art, for me, are always organic. As long as there's the need and desire to create, there will always be art forms, and art will continue to be significant, because this is how people throughout history have expressed themselves. And that's the beauty of it--there's no way we can restrain this organic process as it takes place.
TODD SILER: The arts are going to be central to tapping and developing human potential. People are going to realize the enormous power of art to liberate and innovate the human spirit.
RHODA: We usually talk about the future in terms of our achievements in science, but I think we're going to have a resurgence in the fine arts in the coming decades. And I hope that will continue, including the development of new art forms, such as the screenplay.
RAY: As the technologist on the panel, I think society is going to be very different a hundred years from now. We'll have overcome our material needs and we'll have literally expanded our minds by merging with very intelligent nonbiological entities. And what we're going to do is create art. Music will take on different forms. We'll have new art forms, like virtual-reality environments, and we're going to experience new forms of knowledge with our expanded mental faculties.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
GREAT music and art, as we feel the emotion and sense the insight, penetrates our psyches and marks us as human beings. But what is "great art?" The fact is that "greatness" has little to do with it: what counts is the enjoyment, the vision, the soaring of emotion. "Great" is not relevant, because it's almost impossible to decide what is great. Some say that great music or art must improve with age--that the marketplace of ideas, given sufficient time, will sift the diamonds from the dirt. But fads are common, and rediscovered works can speak with surprising freshness. So it's up to each generation, and history, to say what endures. Education in music and art should focus on appreciation as well as performance, and not on an academic analysis. Above all, that kind of education must be open to everyone; art and music are not to be limited to society's elite. An aesthetic education, widespread and well-structured, can become a powerful social equalizer. There's no better way to civilize and unify our society. But if you feel the emotion and sense the insight, if the piece lifts and ennobles the spirit, that's enough to make the case for now. Such exhilaration is already closer to truth.
Editor's Comments:
Todd Boyd observes that
"... I was in Japan and happened upon a hip-hop club in which all the people were Japanese, none spoke any English, but they knew every word of Biggie Smalls' "Big Papa." And they could rap it just as if they'd lived in America all their lives. There's something about art--music, film, and other forms--that transcends social and national barriers, and when people encounter these things they tend to put aside some of the baggage they'd otherwise be carrying."
Culture must never be allowed to become a tool for petty demagogues to create or exaggerate divisions between "us" and "them." Culture -- genuine culture, is invariably the expression of the artist's own humanity. The true artist, as opposed to the political propagandist, honors his fellow man with his art, without regard for race, creed, or national origin. Men and women of conscience throughout the planet have a moral responsibility to reject the misuse of "kultur" as a political tool for fomenting atavistic hatred of "the other."
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: Why Do We Make Music & Art?
Illustration(s): Todd Boyd, Robert Freeman, Rhoda Janzen, Ray Kurzweil, Todd Siler, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/206/206transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Wednesday, August 6, 2003
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Can You Learn to Be Creative? (你可以更有創意嗎?)
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
[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
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
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