[MUSIC] This is a cartoon diagram I made that shows three of the broad entities that must be present for any solution to one be creative and to work. On the right in yellow is stimulus, it's obvious that there needs to be a well defined problem to solve and a reason to solve it. And it must be the right problem, which I'll get more into in another time when I discussed defined stage of the problem solving method, design thinking just a little later oo. Also written in that yellow circle is with constraints, because constraints can actually help you be more creative. Here's a metaphor as to why that's so, when I was younger, my wife and I took a parenting class and the teacher said something interesting about rules and a family. The instructor said quote, imagine a little playground that is wedged between four very busy roads in the city with tons of traffic, now because the kids are scared by the chaos of the traffic, they huddle in the safe area in the very center of the playground, the spot that is farthest from the big trucks and loud cars. Now, imagine that the city erects a tall fence around that playground, a barrier that signals to the kids that anywhere within this fence is safe and okay to play in. They would no longer confine themselves to the center of the playground, but instead they would run right up to the fence, maybe even climate and taunt the cars, whichever point was that a family's rules give kids structure like the constraint of the fence. They let kids know the boundaries of what behavior is acceptable and not acceptable, and what they're allowed to do. This is the way it is with creativity. Constraints define the boundaries of a creative project and a framework for what you're able to do and not able to do. They offer structure and some rules that not only allow plenty of flexible thinking within them, their constraints also fire up ideas. For example, I was working with my son's kindergarten class at their cooperative nursery school one day a long time ago, their teacher said, okay, kids, it's creativity time, let's get creative. Then, I think she went out for a cigarette, the kids just sat there not knowing what to do, and they didn't know what they were expected to do. So I gave them some constraints. They had to make a drawing or a sculpture using some color. And it must have had to have like at least two different things arguing like two bugs or animals or people are aliens. Once they had those rules, they became excited and they fell to the task, and they all came up with wildly different things that all fit within the constraints. Constraints do that for creativity and problem solving too. Constraints might be working within a small budget, they might be having a deadline, or having to work with another person that maybe you don't want to work with. So that's the yellow circle. At the bottom of the diagram is the knowledge circle in pink, you need to know a lot of stuff about a problem before you can solve it, or at least have some people in the room who know a lot about it. Imagine a bunch of professional cartoonist, no offense, I'm a cartoonist, I probably call myself one, and we're trying to solve, say why kids are getting sick in schools, and in a particular school district and what we can do about it. Well, we cartoonists just don't know enough about schools, toxic substances, and the causes of illness. So any ideas we come up with might likely be stupid. They're definitely not grounded in reality. So expertise must be present. If cartoonists partnered with experts in those areas, they might wind up drawing a step by step diagram that explained what was causing the kids to get sick, and make posters for how kids could stay healthy and safe. Lastly on the left is a blue circle for creativity. There needs to be a way to bypass our traditional conformist and fearful brains, if we hope to come up with anything remotely creative. This means having a playful mindset in a nonjudgmental relaxing environment for brainstorming, and using brainstorming tools to optimize the flow of ideas, and the likelihood of coming up with a workable solution. Now, say you just have two of these circles and not a third, idea finding gets pretty bad. If you just have the yellow and the pink circles, stimulus and knowledge and no creativity, the most of the solutions you come up with are going to be ineffective and very mediocre and predictable. They're going to be an amazing, pretty expected. If you only have the yellow and the blue stimulus and creativity, but no knowledge, then ideas will be silly and useless, like my cartoonist example. Lastly, if you only have pink and blue knowledge and creativity, but no problem to solve, no stimulus, well, then you're probably a creative consultant looking for work. [MUSIC]
