Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

What drives creative people to do what they do and how can we motivate people to be more creative? This is a particularly important question for businesses. While an entrepreneur might start a company because they’re already motivated to innovate, they have far less control over the people they hire.

There are 2 types of motivation that dominate creativity research: Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when we are motivated from the inside. We’re intrinsically motivated whenever we do something because of the way it makes us feel. Any time you engage in some type of play, you’re doing it for intrinsic reasons. Playing is always intrinsic because the only outcome is to feel good. We’re extrinsically motivation whenever we do things for outside rewards. When we go to work for the sole purpose of receiving a paycheck, we’re extrinsically motivated. Our inspiration to take action is coming from the outside world. While there are quite a few caveats, creativity researchers agree that, in general, intrinsic motivation is by far the best when it comes to creativity.

In fact, more often then not, extrinsic, outside motivations tends to backfire. Companies that give their employees a good salary might reasonably expect creative output in return. But from the employee’s point of view, why risk their high salary by suggesting crazy ideas that have a high chance of failure? These well-paid employees are highly motivated, they’re just not motivated in the way that their employers think they are. Employees that are motivated by the next paycheck aren’t going to be risking that paycheck.

These employees are going to be motivated to pursue marginal change. They’ll still offer creative ideas, but only ones that feel like safe bets. This means linear augmentation will become the norm. This is exactly the kind of products we see coming out of large, bureaucratic organizations. They take safe bets by adding small improvements to old ideas.

There isn’t an easy answer for making employees more intrinsically motivated. One of the best ways to start this process is by validating the creativity of employees. Sure, at the end of the day they might only be here for the paycheck, but everybody loves being validated. Everyone loves being seen as unique and valuable. Simply validating other people’s creative work can boost their confidence and make them much more likely to offer future ideas. This isn’t a silver bullet, but that’s the point. People won’t be intrinsically motivated because you told them to. They need to do it for their reasons. For the creative leader, the subtle approach is the best one.

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In an earlier episode, we talked about how constraints guide your creative work. To refresh your memory, constraints are the boundaries that are placed on a product. Constraints are how we ensure that our creative work is not just unique, but useful as well. When we correctly define our constraints, we understand the full scope of the problem. We’re about to say, if I do X, Y, and Z, I should be able to create a product that will be useful to others.

Many of those constraints come from the outside world. These external constraints are things like manufacturing costs and limited technology. They’re forced upon you from the outside world.

Figuring out the appropriate constraints to place on yourself isn’t an easy task. In fact, the most important constraint in creativity doesn’t come from the outside world at all… it comes from you. It comes from your beliefs, your values, and your assumptions.

Before you put your idea out there, the only thing you can do is take a best guess at what will work. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream could come up with a flavor called “____” and despite the odds, it might become a success. We just don’t know because before you actually test it out, everything is a best guess. There are only varying degrees of certainty.

This is why defining your constraints can be so difficult. We want to create things that clearly belong in our industry, but we want them to stand out, as well. This is a contradiction. I want to be similar enough to everyone else that my customers understand what I do, but I want to be different enough to stand out from my competitors in a significant, meaningful way. Whether they’re conscious or subconscious beliefs, they determine what actions you take. They are significant constraints on your creativity.

As your creating today, remember that your beliefs, values, and assumptions are powerfully shaping the constraints that you’re putting on yourself. They often come in the form of phrases like “I can’t do that because…” How you respond to that thought will determine what action you take and where you end up. Of course, there’s no easy answer to which constraints should be accepted and which should be rejected. Each constraint is unique. What’s important is that we recognize when we are placing constraints on ourselves so that we can ensure that the way we’re defining the problem has the great chance at leading us to success.

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The history of civilization is the history of creativity. You cannot talk meaningfully about the past without bringing up the most important people and inventions of the time. We are here today because of the creativity of the past. Creativity and culture are inseparable. In no small way, creative people are responsible for the world around us.

From time to time in this podcast, I’m going to highlight different people, inventions, or time periods important to creativity. While I don’t intend to go through each era of creativity in chronological order, since this is the first episode where I talk about a creative era, I’m going to start from the very beginning. We won’t go all the way back to stone tools and cave paintings. Cave paintings are interesting in their own right, but they’re less consequential than what I have in mind.

I don’t want to turn these episodes into a history show. I’ll gloss over the dates things happen. I’m also going to do my best to make sure that this isn’t a list of bullet points about history that have no real takeaway for listeners. We’ll keep our focus on the main events of the time period, what creativity meant to the people living in it, and how we can apply the lessons to our own creativity.

Pre-civilized people had their own type of creativity. They discovered how to use items they found as tools, then how to make their own tools. And with all the time they saved, they taught themselves how to draw a mean stick figure Buffalo on cave walls.

The rate of change was incredibly slow during this period. So much time was spent on survival that there was little time to devote to other activities. Creativity is built by combining various ideas together to form something new. The more ideas you have to play around with, the more combinations you can make. This is why expertise is so important to creativity. With few ideas to build off of, creativity was relatively stagnant.

Creativity is built off of the past, so what do you do when you have no past to build off of? You’d think the creativity of pre-civilized humans would break this rule, but it actually doesn’t. Pre-civilized humans built creative ideas off the past just like we do today. They did it using two creative tools that are still incredibly important to us today: Observation and experimentation.

Civilization was largely formed on the back of 4 major innovations: The ability to grow food in abundance meant that people no longer had to all be hunter gatherers. It satisfied the bottom layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Before this, there simply wasn’t time available for the creative process to take place.

The second innovation was labor specialization. This meant that for the first time in human history, people could focus their attention on specific areas unrelated to finding their next meal.

With labor specialization, there were new opportunities to work together. Suddenly, you had something that I couldn’t make myself and I had something you wanted. We needed to work together in a way that humanity had never done before. This required the third innovation: The organization of society.

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Ideas don’t pop into our heads fully formed and ready to launch. The process from initial idea to a finished product worthy of other people’s attention can be a long one.

Each idea develops over time. Your very first attempt at a creative idea will likely only capture the general feeling of what you’re after. Your earliest work tends to be very abstract in nature. There are general ideas you’d like to pursue, but you’ll likely find yourself with very few concrete ideas to work with. This is the nature of the creative process. We begin with the abstract, and we work towards something more concrete.

It’s the next few generations that expand on your original ideas. Your initial idea is generic, but your second idea extends and elaborates on them. Over time, those abstract ideas about what you’d like to achieve and how you think you might achieve start to take shape. At this point, you’re about midway through the creative process.

Towards the end, your continuing to elaborate on your old ideas, but you’ll place special focus on problem solving and smaller details. This is where your creative idea really begins to take on a life of its own. In earlier stages, your creative idea was largely something that was in your head. It was a possibility. Now, it’s something concrete. You no longer have to imagine what it’d be like, because its right in front of you.

Thinking about creativity in this way can take a lot of pressure off of you, especially in the earliest stages of the creative process. Knowing that you’re first attempt at an idea is allowed to be flawed is freeing. It frees you of the stress you feel about getting it perfect on the first shot. You’re allowed to create half-finished ideas, because you’ll know that those ideas will evolve over time into something worthy of other people’s attention.

As your creating today, think about where you are within this process. Are you in the early stages of a creative project where you need to work with generic, abstract ideas? Are you in the middle stage where you’re trying to convert generic ideas into something more concrete and usable? Or are you in the final stage, where you want to apply problem solving skills to ensure your idea does what it promised?

Before ending, I want to invite you to the Kaizen Creativity Facebook group at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity to engage with other listeners and myself. The group is a place where we can both teach and learn from others. You have a valuable set of skills and knowledge that the group needs to hear. You also have the opportunity to expand the conversation by letting others know what issues you’ve run into and how you’ve solved them. You can join us at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity.

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What you focus on determines how you feel. When you think about happy memories, you’ll naturally feel happier. When you think about the awful thing someone did to you in the past, before long you’ll start feeling that in your body. Your attention determines how you feel.

When we’re creating, our focus powerfully shapes our motivation. When we focus on how large a project is or how there are so many moving parts that something is bound to fail… whenever our focus is predominately on something negative then motivation goes down.

But the reverse is also true. When you focus on the task right in front of you then your motivation increases. And even more powerful motivator is to focus on how your work will help other people. Most people will do far more to help a friend of family member than they’d do for themselves. Humans are designed to help other humans. It’s in our DNA.

You have the power to boost or undermine your motivation at any moment. This is both inspiring and scary. It’s inspiring because you always have the last say. You can always choose to focus on empowering meanings that inspire you to keep taking action, even when something unfortunate happens to you.

But, it also means that you can shoot yourself in the foot. You can accidentally undermine yourself by focusing too long on the wrong thing. You can choose to turn on the news and focus on all the awful things that have happened this news cycle. As you undoubtedly know from personal experience, once you’re in a negative mood, it can be very difficult to shake it off.

Pay attention to where you’re placing your focus today. Do this for both your creative work and your off-time. When you relax, do you focus on things that energize you? How often is your focus taken up by things you have no control over? And, of course, the most important question… do the things you focus on serve you? If you had the choice, would you actually choose them? You can ask the same questions about your creative process. Do you focus on things that energize you or stress you out? Do you focus on the worst interpretation or the best one? If you had the choice, would you choose to focus on the things you typically focus on? You do have a choice. Focus on whatever serves you, whatever inspires you or energizes you.

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Innovative people spend so much time questioning the assumptions of their industry, but they rarely question their own assumptions and belief systems with the same level of scrutiny. How you perceive the world has a huge influence on your personal and professional life. Those perceptions come together to form beliefs, and those beliefs have a huge impact on the actions we take.

Percept-Genesis is the process we use to assign meaning to the world. Your brain has 2 complimentary strategies for this: Bottom-Up Processing & Top-Down Processing.

Bottom-Up processing begins with an experience and the mind reacts to the information by trying to determine what it means. We perceive something happening and then search our memories for anything similar. We combine all the information together before deciding what the experience actually means. This is bottom-up processing. Something happens, we struggle for a moment to figure out what it means, then we conclude by slapping a label on it. We take the raw experience, condense it down into a neat category, and the write a label on it for storage.

The next time we experience something similar, we already have a label ready for it. This is top-down processing. In life, we’re guided by labels far more than raw experience. What you think something ‘should’ mean is often more important than what it actually does mean. For example, there’s probably a food that you refuse to eat that other people enjoy. Your refusal is a label that you’ve placed on the food. People with different labels react differently.

Our job as creative people is to do our best to work with accurate information. We can’t, and won’t, win every battle. Being highly creative is often about flipping back and forth between opposite strategies. This is no difference. We spend time using bottom-up processing until we feel that we have a “good enough” idea of what’s real or what’s possible. Then we assign a label to it so that we can make a decision and move on. However, we also keep in mind that that label is only a label. It represented our best guess at the time. It’s not set in stone. We might have been wrong. Or perhaps we were right, but things have changed since then. Using an outdated label will only lead to unnecessary limitations on your creativity. Oftentimes, this can kill your creativity. You say, “I know my first draft has to be great!” That idea is a label you place on your experience, and it will determine whether your first draft is a fun experience where you explored different ideas or if it makes you constantly feel stressed and not good enough.

This weekend, I encourage you to keep this idea in mind. Not just for your creative life, but in your personal life as well. What labels have you been using that you forgot were just labels. What are some things that frustrate you or make you angry? What are some automated reactions that aren’t serving you? These are all areas where bottom-up processing can be used to change or eliminate labels that aren’t helpful.

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Creativity is just as much an emotional process as it is a cognitive one. Creativity isn’t just WHAT you’re thinking, it’s HOW you’re thinking. The emotional state that you’re in when you create powerfully influences your process, which, of course, determines your outcome.

Being a stand-up comedian made this really easy for me to notice. I’m not paid to write comedy. Nobody cares if I spend 8 hours a day writing new jokes to tell on stage or if I go on stage and improvise everything I say on the spot. It doesn’t matter to the audience, because the audience will never know. Your audience only gets to consume the product of your work. Your process is your own.

Whenever I sit down to write comedy, whether its for myself or for a coaching client, I always get myself into the right mood first, which, for me, is a playfully curious mood. When I sit down in a playfully curious mood, great stuff happens. When I sit down in a serious, I end up with little more than frustration.

My comedy knowledge or writing skills don’t change depending on my mood. Nor does my motivation. What does change is how I respond to my own thoughts.

Your emotional state changes how your brain acts and reacts. It’s like changing the default settings in your brain. When you’re in a positive mood, your default setting is to interpret things as positive. A negative mood makes you more critical of yourself and others. It’s not that you’re TRYING to do this. Mood determines your default response.

While you’re creating today, think about what default response you want to have. What’s your sweet spot? Keep in mind that it can change over time. Curiosity works great early on while you’re dreaming up ideas, but curiosity makes it really hard to find closure and make decisions. Instead of allowing your work to influence your mood, decide what mood would be best for each task, then work on cultivating that mood.

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Some of us are shy introverts, some of us are outgoing extroverts, but we all need to market our creativity. Marketing is always a tough topic for creative people because the skills the we use to create our products is different from the skills we use to market them.

Introverts who are creative tend to be very good at the early stages of the creative process. They can find a quiet area and lots of time to thinking through their ideas.

Extroverts tend to be better when it comes to marketing those ideas. They’re more comfortable putting themselves out there than an introvert.

Some fascinating studies have been done on introversion and extroversion. A Harvard study showed that extroverts, and particularly confident extroverts, are more likely to have their ideas chosen in a group. This makes sense. The extroverts are the ones putting their ideas out there. The group can only make decisions based on what options are made public to the group. But the same study, as well as multiple other ones, have shown that it was more often the introvert who had the best idea. The members of the group responded to the confidence of the extrovert and valued their ideas higher than it should have been. They confidently lead the group in the wrong direction.

We can’t escape our personality. We can only recognize what opportunities and threats it creates for us. If you’re an introvert, the biggest threat to your project tends to come at the very end, when it’s time to market and persuade others. If you’re an extrovert, the threat tends to come at the beginning. It’s the lack of time spent alone thinking throughout the implications of your idea. We need both, but we can only excel at one.

How do you do this if you’re an introvert? The introvert needs to get feedback throughout the entire project, not just at the very end. A steady stream of feedback boosts confidence and makes it more likely that you’ll be willing to put yourself out there later. The more you know about how people are already responding to your idea, the easier it will be when that idea is complete.

It’s like a new comedian telling a new joke on stage. The first time they might be shy and timid about the joke, but the more they tell that joke, the more confident they become in it. Receiving positive feedback from earlier performances gives them confidence to take the next step.

You don’t have to fake the confidence. Confidence will come from the feedback you get. Your job is to get good quality feedback and apply it throughout the entire creative process. If you end up with a product that solves people’s problems in an elegant way, your confidence will follow. You can confidently say of your product “I know it will help you, because it’s helped so many other people.”

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Ideas are like stupid children, you need to give them a chance to grow up before you’d actually want to be seen in public with them. Of course, I’m not a father, so perhaps I’m wrong.

Incubation is about giving your ideas time to mature. When you incubate a problem, you’re allowing your subconscious mind to weigh in. Have you ever struggled with a problem, decided to go to bed, and then woke up in the morning with the perfect solution? It happens all the time. You can thank your subconscious brain.

Your subconscious brain lies below the surface level of your conscious thought. You never become aware of the vast majority of the thoughts you have because they’re edited out by your conscious brain. Your conscious brain is a serial processor, it’s like a computer that has to deal with only one thing at a time. To your conscious brain, first you think about A, then you think about B, then you think about C. You can only focus on one thing at a time. Any time you switch topics, you must drop the old one. The reason your conscious brain is a serial, linear processor is because its job is to focus on one thing at a time. Everything that is outside of your conscious awareness is given over to the subconscious brain.

Your subconscious brain is different. Because the conscious brain is focused on the important problem, your subconscious is free to work on everything else. It keeps your heart beating and your food digesting. But it also serves a supportive role to the conscious brain. Any time you make a snap decision based on your gut instinct, your subconscious brain is the source. There simply wasn’t enough time for your conscious brain to think through everything in a linear fashion. Any time you make an assumption, whether it’s good or bad, it comes from your subconscious.

Your subconscious brain is incredibly important to creativity because it’s far more powerful than your conscious brain. There’s a reason why eureka moments pop up out of thin air. When you have a sudden insight into a problem, it comes from your subconscious. If you look back at the types of solutions that came from a eureka moment like this, you’ll notice that they’re almost always elegant solutions to a problem.

Subconscious solutions are different. Since the subconscious isn’t under the same time pressures as the conscious brain, it can work at its own pace, there’s no need for the subconscious to rush. Since it’s a parallel processor, it doesn’t need to create Frankenstein solutions to problems. It’s like an insect that has 1000 eyes. It can look at everything at the same time. It doesn’t need to drop one idea to focus on another. It can do both at the same time. This is why the subconscious brain creates such amazing, creative solutions.

So how do we tap into this process more as creative people? How do we get the most from our subconscious? First, slow down your thinking. The conscious brain always wants to rush. When you incubate an idea, you allow your subconscious time to catch up. Your conscious and subconscious brain are not independent of each other. Your subconscious brain is more like an annoying little brother, constantly peering over your shoulder and saying “Whatcha’ doin? Can I play too?” Whenever you consciously work on a problem, you’re teaching your subconscious brain that the problem is important.

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One of the most fascinating aspects of the creative personality is how often creative people have contradictory personality traits. Creative problem solving is incredibly difficult. There are so many moving pieces that it’s hard to know what to even try. This is why so much advice centers on shifting your perspective. Look at the problem from the top, then from the bottom, then from the inside. Each change in perspective is attempts to find a problem’s weak point. This is how it works when using creative techniques.

The creative personality already has a lot of this built in. For example, creative people tend to be very passionate about their work, but they’re still able to step back and be cold-hearted when its time to evaluate their work. The highly emotional mental state allows creative people to dive deep into their work, keeping them curious to try new ideas and explore the unknown. However, that love for your own work becomes a problem when it comes time to be objective. How will you customers feel about your new product? The passion you used to create the work cannot be used to evaluate it. You must embrace the opposite.

Another common contradiction among creative people is that they are bounce back and forth between being very humble and very proud of themselves. Being humble is a natural result of studying the great thinkers that have come before you. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Anyone who dives into his work and understands his creativity would be humbled by someone who was so incredibly far ahead of everyone else of his time. A reporter once asked Einstein how it felt to be the world’s smartest man. His reply was “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Nicola Tesla.” Studying the greats leads to a feeling of humbleness.

But creative people are a proud group as well. Not everyone can do what we do.  We are the group that devotes their lives to expanding the lives of others. Think about how hard it would be to discuss culture without mentioning anything creative. Creativity has largely designed the culture we live in. The creative person recognizes and is inspired by this. They’re humbled by the amazing work of the people who have come before them, but proud that they are doing their best to continue their legacy.

These are just 2 of the many contradictions within the creative personality. In future episodes, we’ll discuss specific contradictions and how they affect creativity. For today, I think it’s important that you accept these contradictory aspects of your personality. It’s OK to be introverted when you want to get work done and it’s OK to switch to extroversion when you’re passionately talking about your work. It’s OK to be proud of your work, even before you’ve created a masterpiece. It’s OK to be humbled by those that have come before you. Acknowledging the greatness of others doesn’t diminish your own. Embracing each contradiction is like doubling the number of perspectives you can use to solve creative problems. Perhaps you need more knowledge. Curiosity can help. Perhaps you need to find closure on a project that never seems to end. Embracing your curiosity won’t take you there, but being closed-minded can. Each personalty trait is already inside you to varying degrees. There are times when you’re curious and times when you’re closed-minded. It isn’t about changing you, it’s about being the best part of you in each unique situation.

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