Apples or Oranges? Solve it with Janusian Thinking!

By Remo Nuzzolese

Janus was the first God in ancient Rome, worshipped hundreds of years before Christianity, he was probably the most important of all deities that populated the roman Pantheon. Janus, or Ianus in latin, was The Creator, God of beginnings and transitions, he presided doors, bridges, new enterprises and he is still giving his name to the first month of the year, January. He embodied elements of change and movement and because these are bidirectional, the God was symbolized with a two-faced head with the two faces looking at opposite directions, able to oversee past and future, left and right, in and out, two different states at the same time.

From here, Janusian Thinking, which is the ability to integrate conflicting elements with a unifying thought giving birth to a new idea that is coherent with the original elements and wider than them.

Many great thinkers in history have proven to – consciously or not – think and create in a Janusian way in the fields of science, politics and the arts: Einstein’s relativity theory, Louis Pasteur’s vaccine, Escher’s paradoxical images and the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile are just a few well known examples: a falling object can be perceived as steady, a poison can be its own remedy, a stream of water that falls as it ascends a tower, and so on…

Even easier to recognize it in some popular commercials: “Tough on Dirt - Gentle on Fabrics (Whirlpool Washers)”, “Bet You Can’t Say No to Yes (Dannon Yogurt)” and “Devilishly Good Taste, 90 Saintly Calories (Baskin Robbins Ice Cream).

Religions and spirituality are full of examples of opposing coexisting forces: God and Evil, Nirvana and Samsara and then we have this beautiful symbol, the Tao that integrates Ying and Yang, opposite energies functioning simultaneously as a unified larger principle.

So, how do we relate Janusian thinking to creativity and problem solving? We already know that creativity is also about connecting elements that are distant, putting things together in a new way to develop an original product. Now, imagine how much stronger and radical the answer to a problem would be if it could solve the original problem and its opposite. Janusian thinking is about increasing the complexity of a situation and use it to find more opportunities, is about thinking holistically in terms of AND rather than EITHER-OR without creating a separation between elements that are really not apart and refusing false trade-off between factors that can be integrated in one solution.

Next time you are facing a difficult problem that presents conflicting elements, imagine which are the commonalities, in which wider frame can you include both elements? It’s like being able to choose apples, oranges and the basket too.

These are some of the authors that I researched to write this post; you can easily Google them to dive deep in their interesting literature:

• Albert Rothenberg
• Blasko and Mokwa
• Annamaria Testa
• Chen Yao Kao
• Chang Dao Wen

Brainwriting

A Collaboration Tool for Introverts

By Costa Michailidis

“Innovation is for a few ‘special’ people.”

“Creativity is innate. You either have it, or you don’t!”

Part of the work we do at Innovation Bound is bust myths like these, and one of our favorite myths, that has percolated more recently, is the notion that collaboration is bad for innovation, and that true breakthroughs are made solo. Why would the individual, group, or crowd be “the best medium for innovation?” Powerful innovations have resulted from all three of these, and context (the challenge at hand, available resources, et cetera) clearly plays a critical role. We dug a little deeper and came to an interesting challenge: How can groups have effective fair collaborations that are not dominated by strong personalities and extroverted behavior?

A Quiet Idea Generation Tool

The solution we’ve found most effective is an exercise called Brainwriting. It is a powerful way to quickly generate and build on one another’s ideas. Here’s how it’s done:

• Take a few sheets of paper and draw Tic-Tac-Toe grids on them, so that each sheet is divided up into nine boxes.
• Hand one of these sheets to each participant.
• Assuming you’ve already phrased a challenge for which to generate solutions, have each participant write out three ideas for solutions; one in each of the top three boxes.
• As participants finish, they can place their sheets in the center of the table, and take sheets other participants have placed in the center.
• With a new sheet in hand, top row filled out, participants should build on each of the three ideas in the top row, and write down the new ideas in the second row.
• Repeat this process until all nine boxes on all of the sheets are filled out.

If you need more ideas, you can use larger grids. Participants can build on each others ideas very directly, or just be “inspired by” the other ideas on the sheet. You can also do the exact same exercise on a Google Spreadsheet live online from different geographical locations.

Doing the work that we do has shown us time and time again that there is always a way to overcome obstacles, to tackle challenges, and to reach our goals. Don’t let common myths get in your way.

Sources:

• The style of brainwriting described in our article is adapted from the original developed by Professor Bernd Rohrbach in 1968.
• We thank Bruce Campbell for his elegant sculpture: Untitled (Nervous System).

Can Computers be Creative?

By Costa Michailidis

Ask Siri what time it is or ask Google for today’s weather and you’ll get what you need. Punch a mathematical expression into a calculator and you’ll almost never be let down. Computers are incredibly precise and reliable when it comes to these types of tasks.

“Hey Siri, why doesn’t my girlfriend like my paintings anymore?”

“Apple doesn’t tell me everything you know.”

On the other hand, there is a world of tasks computers are terrible at resolving. Why the stark difference? Will computers ever be able to understand art or be creative? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Two Types of Problems

Let’s divide our world of problems into two types. Firstly, there are problems that have a definitive answer, or multiple definitive answers. For example: Nine is divisible by which numbers? The answers are one, three and nine. The wonderful thing about these types of problems is that resolving them can be broken down into a simple sequence of steps, a procedure or a program. That’s why computers are so great at solving them. You just run the program and it spits out the answers, often at a remarkably fast pace. It’s incredible how sophisticated these algorithms, programs, have gotten and how powerful they can be. My favorite example of this type of ingenuity is IBM’s Watson.

There is a second set of problems we deal with in our lives, and these problems have no definitive answer. They are entrenched in context, deal with changing variables or unknown factors. It is either more difficult or not useful to solve these problems by taking a prescribed set of steps to reach a conclusion. The solution is often contextual, transient, or mysterious unto itself. How to write an inspiring story or make a beautiful painting? How to choreograph a dance that will dazzle an audience? We come across these challenges in the arts but also in business. Which marketing campaign will succeed? Which logo best represents our brand? So far, computers have not been very successful in this realm. The realm of the creativity.

The Heartbeat of Creativity

When we look at this second set of challenges, and observe humans that are solving these types of problems (writers, musicians, marketeers), we find them leveraging their imagination. We find them using their creativity. So, what is Creativity? Creativity has a collection of definitions, many of which highlight two factors: Novelty and value. Something which is creative has an element of novelty, or newness, and an element of value, or utility.

When a musician writes a new song lyric or when an inventor sets out to design something she considers hundreds of possibilities before converging on an appropriate option. A marketing team generates a huge number of ideas before investing the time and resources to develop a campaign for its potential customers. The next time our musician writes or our inventor innovates, they will begin again by diverging on all possibilities before converging onto the most appropriate choice. This oscillation of divergence and convergence is what I like to call the “Heartbeat of Creativity.” There is a huge volume of scholarly articles on this pattern of divergence and convergence with respect to the psychology of human creativity.

This pattern shows up in another place that is significant to our original question of whether computers can be creative: Evolution. In evolution divergence happens in the variance produced by reproduction and mutation, then convergence happens when the environment selects the varieties most suitable for survival. Evolution, like the creative mind, is constantly diverging on possibilities and converging on the most appropriate options.

What About Computers?

Let’s return to our original question: Can computers be creative?

I see hope. Pandora is a music website that curates music for you based on your and other users’ preferences. Often times Pandora plays a song for you that you’ve never heard before (novelty) and that you’re likely to enjoy (value). Choosing music that you will enjoy is certainly the type of challenge with an indefinite, transient and contextual solution. What about the creative process of divergence and convergence? That too, is beginning to make it into modern algorithms and programs. Take a look at the science behind Watson and see if you can spot the divergence and the convergence.

Sources:

• http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/,
• http://www.education.com/reference/article/problem-solving-strategies-algorithms/,
• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=creativity+divergence+and+convergence

Decisions, decisions…

By Paul Reali

This morning, my younger daughter was having a clothing crisis. “The problem,” she said, “is that both of these leggings look good with this outfit.” I decided, as parents are wont to do, that this was a teachable moment.

“If you have two good choices,” I said, “that’s not a problem. If neither pair looks good, that might be a problem. If your leggings are dirty, or torn, or don’t fit, or don’t exist, that’s a problem. If you have two good choices, though, that’s not a problem. That’s a decision.”

She’s seven, so it’s hard to say whether she understood the lesson. I figure that at the very least, she’ll change the way she talks about this kind of dilemma: she’ll say she’s having trouble making a decision, not that she has a problem.

But I learned something from this exchange, too. I realized that she did have a problem: she was trying to make the right decision, and she didn’t know how to go about it. The leggings were not the problem; making the decision was. It was obvious to her that one of the options must be more right than the other. I know that when one has two equally good options (with zero cost for being wrong), one can just flip a coin…but she didn’t see it that way. In her eyes, there was, in fact, a right answer.

We are conditioned this way, to find the right answer, the best answer. When we make decisions at work and in the larger parts of life, in most cases, one option almost certainly will turn out better than the other, and it is important that we make a good decision. After all, that’s what they pay us for, more or less: to solve hard problems and make difficult decisions.

And so, what we do is gather as much data as we can, set criteria, evaluate, project forward, etc., and then decide. We do this with a kind of eternal uncertainty. If we choose A over B, we might never really know if we made the better choice. If A worked out fine, would B have been even better? If A failed, would B have succeeded, or would it have been an even larger disaster?

How, then, can we make better decisions?

There has been plenty written about the elements of decision-making (including, on this site, a really great evaluation tool, PPCO), but rather than revisit those, let me offer a different suggestion. Let me propose that the first thing to do when trying to make a decision is to revisit the question.

This sounds obvious, I know. Still, you’d be surprised how often the problem being solved gets lost while creating the solution.

Here’s an example. A few years ago, Blockbuster Video was trying to beat back the assault of Netflix, the by-mail movie rental company. Blockbuster had the advantage of right now; a customer could decide they want a movie right now, and they could drive over to the store and get it. Netflix required planning ahead: build your movie queue online, get the movies by mail, but Netflix had the advantage of whenever, as in one could return the movie whenever they wanted to. Blockbuster customers hated late fees, hated having to drive back to the store to get the disc in the box before closing time, hated the costs associated with right now.

The problem was how to better compete with Netflix. The solution Blockbuster arrived at was to (sort of) eliminate late fees. Briefly: rent a movie, keep it as long as you like, but if you keep it more than 30 days, you get charged $30 to purchase the movie, and if you decide to return it after that, you’d get your money back, less a “restocking” fee of $1.75.

This solution (which caused them to be immediately sued for deceptive practices by multiple state Attorneys General) mostly but not entirely eliminated late fees, which customers hated, but it did not address the real problem: how to better compete with Netflix. Because it wasn’t just the late fees that drove people from one to the other: it was the collection of things that Netflix did to make renting easier, more enjoyable, and more affordable (the online queue, the predictable monthly fee, the lack of late fees or any extra fees, the home delivery, the ease of return, the very wide selection, etc.). If the Blockbuster execs had looked at each other and asked, “Does this help us better compete with Netflix,” they would have gone back to the drawing board and arrived at a different solution.

The next time my daughter has a clothing crisis, I think I’ll ask her: what’s the problem you are trying to solve? If she says, “which to choose,” I can remind her that that’s not a problem. If she says, “which one is right,” or “which one is better,” I can remind her that they are both right…and that that’s not the problem, either. I can help her to understand that the problem she’s trying to solve is which will make her happier while she’s wearing them.

And now ask yourself, the next time you are making a decision: First of all, does this solution actually solve the problem?