The first excerpt from The Creativity Choice
Problem finding is not a single act; it is a way to creative products and solutions
The following is an excerpt from The Creativity Choice, Chapter 5: Problem Finding: From Inspiration to Exploration
Whether we identify a problem that inspires us or are given a problem, how creative our work on it will depends on how we think about it. What aspects of the problem can we focus on? How can we frame it? When we do this, we are constructing the problem we will focus on from the multiverse of all possible ways an overarching issue can be viewed. Unlike constructing a bridge from a precise blueprint, constructing problems takes trial and error and much change.
I heard a popular YouTuber say that Pixar’s movies start as horrible ideas and gradually transform into masterpieces. The undertone was, “It is hard to believe that Pixar, a company that produces one gem after another, could start with poor ideas.”
The truth is that Pixar’s story is not unique. There is a kernel of something in the beginning, a problem identified, a spark of inspiration—something that is worth trying out. But that does not mean that any of it will make it into the end product. And that is the story not only of Pixar but also of creativity.
Pixar’s story is remarkable in one regard. In his biography of the company, Creativity, Inc., former Pixar president Ed Catmull dared to describe the company’s creative process in its messiness. He had the courage to admit that creativity is about taking problems and developing potential solutions—which includes undoing some work when needed, abandoning some when necessary, and either redoing bits and pieces or only keeping bits and pieces.
The original problem from which my favorite Pixar movie, Up, came to be, for example, had to do with escaping life when it becomes overwhelming, inspired by director Pete Docter’s experiences growing up and having difficulties navigating social situations. The story was to center on two brothers from a floating city on an alien planet fighting about who was going to inherit their father’s kingdom.
You don’t remember it like that? That’s because the movie ended up being about a grumpy elderly widower on a quest to fulfill a promise to his late wife. He ties balloons to his house to fly to South America and by accident takes along a boy. They meet a talking dog and a giant, colorful flightless bird that is being hunted by the old man’s childhood hero, a famed but eventually disgraced explorer. The only idea that survived through the changes in the storyline was the bird around whom much of the adventuring revolves.
How do two brothers become an old man and a boy? By the creators engaging in exploration. They tried out many different images that evoke the contrasts between the frustrations of everyday life and the fantasy of escape. The main character emerged after many, many sketches, until finally Docter drew an old man with smiling balloons, and something just clicked. The grumpy old man had come about after being given space for change and growth, and the end result was a character that children could relate to, like they connect with their grandparents.
Problem construction can take the form of arranging and rearranging thoughts or ideas (sometimes literally), or it can be formal testing of different possibilities. In a classic study, psychologists Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels set up an art studio in their laboratory at the University of Chicago and invited art students to create still life drawings. Researchers provided more than thirty objects for artists to choose from and observed as they selected objects, arranged them, and worked on the drawings.
Some artists spent more time than others picking up the objects, feeling their weights and textures, and trying to work any mechanical parts. They would arrange them, step back, and rearrange them. They would try sketching, look at the sketches and their physical object counterparts, and then come back to the arrangement and change the composition, the problem for their work, moving the placement of some objects, removing others altogether, and adding ones not previously included. They spent time playing with the elements of the still life before committing to a specific composition.
Other artists spent less time playing with objects and quickly got to work on their drawings. They decided what to do and spent the majority of their time doing it.
After the researchers examined the completed drawings, they found that the artists who engaged in more exploration in their process of creation were judged by well-known artists and art critics as having produced more original and appealing drawings. These artists investigated what their still lives could be and delayed making the final decision about what to draw until they had thoroughly explored different objects and their arrangements. The fundamental problem—creating a still life—was already given, but it hid many possible specific problems. They were constructing their individual problems—what could the still life be—by exploring different combinations of objects and various ways they could be put together. Each of the arrangements they tried was a problem constructed, in this case quite literally built.
It turns out that the amount of time spent on exploration to produce a new business venture is similarly fruitful. Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania examined the trajectories of start-ups for which extensive information was available in a database of more than 1.2 million companies across the United States. They were interested in what could predict the effectiveness of company scaling.
Scientists defined the start of company scaling as the point when the resources within the team of founders were no longer sufficient to continue developing and implementing ideas. To continue operating, companies would need to recruit managers and sales staff. Examining the timing of job postings for manager and sales positions provides a convenient way to measure when scaling starts to happen. Researchers were thus able to analyze 38,217 companies and 6.3 million jobs.
The results showed that early scaling was related to company failure: compared to those that scaled after two years from founding, companies that started scaling in the first six or twelve months were 20 to 40 percent more likely to fail. And this effect remains significant even after accounting for differences in timing across industries, the year of founding, and the place of founding.
Researchers hypothesized that experimentation was key to success. To test this hypothesis, they recorded whether companies employed A/B testing tools, which enable comparing different attributes of the business idea at scale. Employing these tools means experimenting with various product features, learning whether idea A or idea B results in better performance, and thus informing next steps. As they suspected, such experimentation was related to a lower chance of failure.
The implications of this research are very practical. For best results, do not settle prematurely on solutions, no matter how reasonable they might seem. Rather, explore how to approach your problem. How exactly this will look will depend on the nature of your work. Sometimes experimenting can take the form of arranging objects, as with the artists in the still life study. At other times it can look like testing that compares the effects of different product features, as in the study of start-ups. Or it can have a different form specific to what you do.
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