A crash course in creativity - Tina Seelig at TEDxStanford

In this sparkling talk, Stanford University educator Tina Seelig explains what consists of the Innovation Engine and shows ways to be more creative.

What an amazing day!

Filled with incredible ideas.

So, where do these ideas come from?

This is a question that I have been pondering
for the last 35 years.

Where do ideas come from?

I started as a neurophysiologist,

poking little tiny cells
with even tinier electrodes

to see what they would tell me
about creativity and innovation.

After I finished my PhD,
I went out to study

and sort of learn all about
creativity in the wild,

working in big companies
and small companies,

even started my own,

and for the last almost 13 years
I have been in Stanford,

teaching classes on creativity,
innovation and entrepreneurship.

And in my classes I have done
endless experiments with my students,

trying to figure out what is involved
with unlocking creativity.

What I’ve realized
over the last few years

is that we look at creativity
in much too narrow a way.

We really need to open the aperture

and look at creativity
in a very different light.

And what I've done
is put together a model

that I'm gonna basically explain
to you in next few minutes,

about all the things
we need to unlock creativity.

And I wanna point out,
before I take it apart,

this innovation engine,
that what I call it, has two parts.

The inside is you:

your knowledge, your imagination,
your attitude.

And the outside
is the outside world:

the resources, the habitat,
and the culture.

So let’s start, let’s start
where most people start.

Most people start thinking about creativity
by thinking about imagination.

So let’s start there.

Now imagination,
one of the sad things is

that we don’t really teach people
how to increase imagination in school.

And so there really are ways
to increase our ability

to come up with
really interesting ideas,

we have to go back to kindergarten
to see what the problem is.

If you are in kindergarten,
it’s very likely you get a question like this:

What is the sum of 5 plus 5?
So what is the answer to this?

10! You guys are really smart, right?

OK, we know it’s 10 because
there is one right answer to this problem.

But what if we ask this question
in a slightly different way?

What if we ask:
"What two numbers add up to 10?"

How many answers are there to this?

Infinite!
Infinite number!

And this is critically important,

something that many of the speakers
have brought up today,

is that the way you ask a question
determines the type of answers you get.

The question you ask is the frame
into which the answers will fall.

And if you don’t ask
a question in a thoughtful way,

you are not gonna get
really interesting answers.

Consider the fact that the Copernican revolution
came about by re-framing.

The question, what if the Earth
is not the center of the Solar System?

What if the Sun is?
And that opened up the entire study of astronomy.

But you know what, you don’t have to do this
in such a serious way.

You can practice it
every single day with jokes.

Because most jokes
we tell are interesting,

because the frame switches
in the middle of the joke.

Consider this, the Pink Panther,
if you see them in this movie.

He walks into a hotel,
there is a little dog sitting on the carpet,

he says to the hotel manager,
"Does your dog bite?"

And the manager says,
"No, my dog doesn’t bite."

He reaches down. The dog basically attacks
and he says, "What happened?"

He says, "Well, that’s not my dog."

(Laughter)

Think about it!

Whenever you hear a joke,
you will find that almost always

it's that a frame switched in the middle,

and that is a really fun way to practice
framing and re-framing problems.

So that’s one of the ways
you can increase your imagination.

But there are other ways.

One of the key ways is
to connect and combine ideas.

Most inventions in the world,
most innovations come from

putting things together
that haven’t been there together before,

often in really unusual
and surprising ways.

One of my favorite ways to practice this
is with Japanese art of Chindogu.

Chindogu is yard
of creating un-useless inventions.

They are not useful.
They are not useless.

They are un-useless.

What they really are
is a way of saying

there might be something here,
but I'm not quite sure.

So in this example,
with the umbrellas on the shoes,

well, gee,
it might not be very practical,

but it unlocks some really interesting ideas.

Speaking of shoes,
here’s another Chindogu. (Laughter)

OK. Little dustpans.

Again, it might not be practical,

but you know what,
there is an interesting idea there.

Again, you can use jokes
for inspiration every single day.

One of my favorite things,
whenever I get the New Yorker,

and I’m sure anyone
who reads the New Yorker knows,

the first thing you do
is to open up the back cover

and you look at
the cartoon caption contest.

The cartoon caption contest always
puts things together that are not obvious.

Often they exert out of scale,
or things that would be

very surprising to have in a same frame.

And your job is to come up
with a really creative way

to connect these things in really
interesting and surprising ways.

So here’s a caption for this cartoon.

It is, "We’ll start you out here, then give you
more responsibilities as you gain experience." (Laughter)

Now of course, you can come up with
an endless number of other solutions.

So there are two ways for you
to increase your imagination

but there is another
that I want to bring up today.

And that is challenging assumptions.

One of the biggest problems we have
is that we ask people questions

and give them problems, they come up with
the first right answer.

So we are getting
really incremental solutions.

So what we do in our creativity class
is we give problems

that are really surprising
where there is not one right answer.

So here is an example
what I just gave recently.

This is the exact design brief.

And I gave this actually to the group
of students at the Osaka University,

and their challenge was --
to create as much value as possible,

value measured
in any way they wanted,

starting with the contents
of one trashcan.

They had two hours to do it.

How do you like to do that?

One of the interesting things
about this assignment,

and I put a lot of thoughts
into framing the problem beforehand,

is that trash actually has
a negative value, right?

We have to pay people
to take it away.

So what happens is these students
ended up spending quite a bit of time

and advanced diving into the project,
thinking about what value meant for them.

They thought about friendship and community
and health and financial security.

All sorts of things ended up
in forming the way.

They thought about the trashcan
that they were going to use to create some value.

To raise the bar even further,
I gave them a little bit more of a challenge.

I told them that I had sent a note ouot, which I did,
to my colleagues around the world.

And invited their students
to participate at the same time.

So there were students in Europe,
in Asia, in the US and in Latin America,

all doing the same project
at the same time.

So let me show you a couple of the things
that resulted from this.

A group in Ecuador started out with a garbage can
filled with yard waste.

Yard waste? I probably wouldn’t have them
picked about a trashcan

but look at how amazing thing they did!

They turned it into a beautiful mural.

Or a girl in Ireland, her mom had just gone through
her brother’s sock drawer

and at a whole trashcan of old holy socks,

you know what she did,
there were all the colors black, white, grey,

she cut them out and sew them together
and made this sweater.

Pretty cool. I hope some of you will go through
your socks drawer later today. (Laughter)

So these are three things you can do
to increase your imagination, right?

Framing and re-framing problems,

connecting and combining ideas
and challenging assumptions.

But unfortunately,
this is not enough.

You need to look at other pieces
of the innovation engine.

And one of the next pieces on the inside
is your knowledge.

Your knowledge is the toolbox
for your imagination.

Today we heard all about
medical breakthroughs

and about autonomous vehicles

and why, how could they make this?

These folks needed a depth of knowledge
about medicine

or about engineering
to bring these ideas to life.

Now, of course you can learn things

by going to school,
by reading books.

But one of the most powerful ways
to learn things

and to gain knowledge
is by paying attention.

Most of us do not pay attention
to the world around us.

Not only do we miss opportunities
to see problems we can solve

but we also miss the solutions
that might be in front of us.

And one of my favorite ways
to teach students is

to send them out to a location
they've been to many times before

and I get them to look at them
with a fresh eyes.

But I’m not the only one who does it.

I wanna tell you a quick story
about a friend of mine Bob Siegel,

who is a professor of here Stanford,

who taught a Stanford sophomore seminar
for two weeks

and it was called the Stanford Safari.

And the students basically over two weeks
acted as if they were naturalists

as if they were just like
Darwin in the Galapagos

but they were in the Stanford campus.

And they talked to everyone they could
to give a different point of view

and perspective about Stanford.

From the groundskeepers and the pest-controllers
to the librarians and the organists

and all the living Stanford presidents.

They walked away not just with
a deep understanding of Stanford,

but an incredible appreciation for
how important it is to pay attention.

But, imagination and knowledge
are not enough.

Every person needs to have the attitude,
the mindset, the motivation and the drive

to solve the problems
they are going to solve.

If you don’t have that drive
and that motivation,

you are not going to
connect and combine ideas.

You are not going to
re-frame problems.

You are not going
to challenge assumptions

and go beyond the first right answer.

Most people unfortunately view themselves
as puzzle builders.

They basically see themselves
as having a very defined task

and their job is to get all the pieces
and put them together to reach that goal.

But what happens?

If you are puzzle builder and you are missing
one or two pieces, what happens?

You can’t reach your goal.

True innovators, true entrepreneurs
actually see themselves as quilt makers.

They basically take all the resources
they have around them,

they leverage things,
even the garbage cans, right?

They leverage the materials
they are available to them

and create something
that is surprising and really fascinating.

This is incredibly important.

We have to view ourselves as those
who can leverage resources we have around us

to really make amazing things happen.

So this is our internal combustion engine
for creativity.

Our knowledge
is a toolbox for creativity.

Our imagination is the catalyst for the transformation
of that knowledge into new ideas.

And our attitude is the spark
that gets this going.

But unfortunately,
that's not enough.

And it’s one of the reasons
why there's so many amazingly creative people

who are basically not living up
to their creative potential

because they're not in the environment
to foster and stimulate

and encourage this type of innovation.

So we have to look at the outside
of the innovation engine.

Let’s start first by looking at habitats.

Now, habitats include several things.

It’s certainly the people you work with.

It’s the rules. It’s the rewards.
It’s the constraints. It’s the incentives.

But even more than that,
it’s the physical space.

Consider the fact when we were little,
when we were kids in the kindergartens.

There are stimulating
environments you walk in.

You know it’s a place
you supposed to be creative.

It’s colorful,
there are lots of manipulatives.

Your rooms are very flexible.

But unfortunately, you graduate
from this type of environment

and you get to go study
somewhere like this!

(Laughter)

The chairs are aligned up
in rows and columns.

They are bolted to the floor.

And if you talk to anybody,
you get into trouble.

I spent my entire growing up writing,
"Silence is golden. Silence is golden."

OK. And the fact is we then
get very upset because the students,

you know, they are just not
so creative anymore

and everyone laments that!

And then if you are successful
in this environment,

and you go after this environment
where they work. (Laughter)

And I know why you are laughing
because it’s all too familiar.

These type of offices were designed
to be like prisons.

And unfortunately what happens is
we again get very frustrated

that people working in these type
of environments are not very creative.

The thing is that
space we're in tells the story.

Every space is the stage
on which we play off our life.

And it tells us what role we play,
how we should act.

I'm fortunate enough to teach at D-school,
these are actual pictures of my class.

Now it might look like the kids
are back in kindergarten.

They were actually working
on a very sophisticated problem here

as are the students in this picture.

But the room is much more like
a kindergarten space

with lots of manipulatives,
lots of things to prototype.

The room is set up
like a theater

we can set it up differently
every five minutes,

depending upon what we want to do.

Nothing is bolted down.

Really innovative firms
know this well.

This is the picture from
Google in Zurich.

This is the picture from Pixar.

These are not frivolous
because these are messages

that the companies giving
to the employees that's saying,

"Innovation, creativity
and playfulness are valued here."

But this is not enough.

We also have to think about the resources
we have in our environment.

And resources come
in so many different flavors.

Unfortunately we think of resources
as things like money.

And money is a fabulous resource,

we certainly benefited from
here at Stanford and Silicon Valley.

But it’s one of many resources
that we have available to us.

We need to look at
the natural resources.

We have to look at the processes
we put it in place.

We have to look at
the cultures we built.

Unfortunately, I get a chance to see
this happening in different places in the world.

I was up in the northern Chile recently.

And it was absolutely
spectacularly gorgeous.

Up to the north of Chile, the beach was
endless, 3,000 mile beach.

And Andes are there.

And I said to the people
at the town of Antofagasta,

"Gee, what’s really getting in the way
of your success?"

And this man said to me,
"Well, it’s a really horrible environment."

I said, "Really?
Did you look outside?"

Because they didn’t see.

They were trying to replicate the resources
someone has somewhere else.

As opposed to seeing resources
they already had.

So here, picture of this city.

Think of the culture there.
Culture is important.

Culture is the last piece
of the innovation engine.

Culture is like the background music
of any community,

of any organization, of every team
and of every family.

And I'm gonna play two video clips
to demonstrate this.

Think of the music in these video clips
as the culture in each of these scenes.

And I'm gonna play
the same clip twice.

This is a clip from 1919
Coca Cola bottling factory.

OK? And I want you to think
about how you feel,

whether you'd want to be there
and what you think is in those bottles.

[Bottles are automatically conveyed
to syrup filter.]

(Merry music)

[Syrup is injected
by sanitary mechanical process.]

[Carbonated water is added.]

OK, then we’ll go to the next one.

[Bottles are automatically conveyed
to syrup filter.]

(Gloomy music)

(Laughter)

[Syrup is injected
by sanitary mechanical process.]

[Carbonated water is added.]

OK, you get the point, right?

So the fact is, this is the outside
of your innovation engine.

Let’s put it all together.

Now you might say,
"OK Tina, that’s really interesting.

But how come you have
this fancy Mobius strip here?

You could just have it
inside and outside."

But it’s the Mobius strip
because inside and outside

are completely woven together.

And nothing can be looked at isolation.

Let me show you how.

Imagination and habitat
are parallel here.

Because the habitats we build are
the external manifestation of our imagination.

If you can imagine it,
you can build it.

And in addition, the habitats we build
directly effect our imagination,

the way we think, the way we feel,
the way we act.

This is also true
with knowledge and resources.

The more we know,
the more resources we can unlock.

And more type of resources we have
that determine what we know, right?

The more we know about fishing,
more fish we are going to catch.

The more fish we have in our environment,
more likely we know about fishing.

This is also true
with attitude and culture.

Culture is a collective attitude
of the community,

and the culture clearly affects
how each of us thinks.

The wonderful thing though
is this Mobius strip

of the innovation engine is so powerful
that you can start anywhere.

If you are the manager of your organization,
you can set up --

You can think about the culture
and set up the culture.

You can build habitats
to stimulate imagination.

If you are an individual, you can start
by building your base of knowledge.

You can start with a passion and attitude
that you're gonna solve a problem.

You can start anywhere
to get this innovation going.

Most important thing is that everyone,

everyone has the key
to their innovation engine.

It’s up to them to turn it.

Thank you. (Applause)