Creative People Must Be Stopped by David A Owens Read Free Book Online

likely to leave you with the impression of a high-tech Goodwill store than of a world-class design and engineering firm.
    The result isn’t just something more informal and, dare I say, human, but a richer flow of sensation—that is, data. The environment gives the visual thinkers at IDEO, who work in the world of product development and 3-D problem solving, immediate access to new perceptions about problems they may be working on—for example, inventing a new way to gear a motor, gaining insight on how to paint on rubber, or understanding the process used to mold a bowling ball. Not only is the imagery at hand, but so are the colleagues who actually worked on the projects and who are enthusiastic about sharing the trials and tribulations of their own innovation efforts. Although your innovation work may not take form as gadgets and widgets as at IDEO, encouraging and legitimizing even simple items, such as mounted photos of implemented solutions, team photos, company innovation certificates, or other mementos of projects, allows people to proudly display their accomplishments, while providing clues to others about what they know and giving others an excuse to engage them about it.
    Intellection Constraints: Old Thought Patterns for New Problems
    Once we have data in sufficient quantity and quality, the next step is to work through the data in ways that can reveal new connections and relationships, which in turn may lead us to innovative solutions. This cognitive process, intellection , is what we normally call thinking. As is true of perception, several significant constraints can bias our thought processes, including the way we frame the problem, the approach we take to solving it, and the persistence with which we pursue an optimal solution.
    Becoming Captive to the Way You Frame the Problem
    When we face a problem to be solved, the first step of defining or framing the problem is critical. The way we frame a problem reflects explicit or implicit notions about the goals we are trying to achieve, and it directly affects the choice of strategies for gathering data, analyzing the data, and determining the validity and pertinence of our insights. Not examining the assumptions that are built into our framing can make the problem more difficult to solve or, worse, lead us to solve the wrong problem.
    A common error in problem framing is defining the problem at the wrong level of analysis. Much of this book is about exactly this mistake in the case of innovation—for example, framing our innovation problem as “our miserable lack of creative thinkers” instead of “how to overcome the institutional constraints (group, cultural, and so on) that prevent even our best people from thinking in more creative ways.”
    We may be tempted to operate at the wrong level of analysis partly because of the information we happen to have at hand. For example, we might lack information about the larger context of the problem or, in the other direction, about the minute details of it, and so attend only to the aspect of the problem that our data address.
    Besides forgetting that shifting our perspective to other levels of analysis is an option, we may also lack enthusiasm for changing our framing. To a big-picture thinker, looking at a situation from a vantage point deep down in the details may make ideas for innovation efforts seem disappointingly puny. For a master of detail, viewing the same situation from a high vista that takes in cultural and market forces may lead to the conclusion that the problem is too complex to solve.
    Being Seduced by Your Problem-Solving Strategies
    After deciding on a way of framing the problem, the next step is to choose a strategy or set of strategies for analyzing and solving the problem. Although it might seem obvious that we should choose the solution strategies that best suit our particular problem, intellection constraints often keep us from doing so.
    One basic constraint is