Widening the range of choices – the Zoom in/Zoom out/Zoom in framework

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From the course by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Cracking the Creativity Code: Discovering Ideas

190 ratings

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Cracking the Creativity Code: Discovering Ideas

190 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Startup Entrepreneurship

Skill at discovering new ideas, and delivering them, may be one of the most important practical job skills, in today’s and tomorrow’s job market. Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. This course aims to empower individuals who believe they have lost their innate creativity, because they, their employers or teachers prefer the three R's: replication, repetition and rote, to innovation. We show how to re-ignite rusty creative powers. During this course, you will learn proven tools, frameworks and concepts useful for discovery– generating an endless stream of new ideas implementing at least some of those ideas with skill and persistence, based on books and articles written by the instructors. In the first part of the course, you will learn a proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’ that makes creativity more accessible to everyone. In the following weeks, you will learn practical proven tools useful for delivering ideas by employing the basic principles of business and management. You will practice the method, use it to tackle challenging real-world needs and produce a 2-3 minutes video presenting your idea. Course Learning Outcomes On successfully completing this four-week course, you will be able to: - Manage a process to generate an unending stream of creative ideas - Lead a process of innovation and implement ideas through all phases from discovery to delivery. - Apply creativity to a wide range of strategic management issues. - Solve problems with a high degree of innovation, creative thinking and risk taking. - Use and apply proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’. - Develop and implement an innovation in your own practice. - Identify new and unfamiliar challenges and reflect on these challenges from a creative point of view, action they require and service they provide. - Demonstrate creative problem solving skills for defining, structuring and solving real world operations management problems.

From the lesson

What is Creativity?

Definition of creativity10:29

A first encounter with the ZiZoZi method11:00

Test your creativity: Torrance Creativity Test5:39

Self-test your ‘discovery’ and ‘delivery’ skills8:47

The Imagination Elevator – a story you won’t believe9:22

Widening the range of choices – the Zoom in/Zoom out/Zoom in framework8:05

ZiZoZi in action: Stories to inspire & aspire15:20

More ZiZoZi stories18:57

How to build your creativity ‘muscles’13:28

Summary of Week One; Preview of Week Two12:59

Meet the Instructors

Prof. (Emeritus) Shlomo Maital
Prof. Shlomo Maital Sr. Research Fellow, S. Neaman Institute, Technion
Industrial Engineering

This is session six.

Session six is about widening the range of choices.

The zoom in, zoom out framework as we explore further this method

we have of zooming in to the problem, zooming out, gathering ideas,

gathering solutions, and then coming back down to ground to practicality.

Sometimes people believe that creativity is about eureka,

a Greek word meaning, I've got it.

That somehow inspiration comes to us out of nowhere.

And we don't know where it came from, and

we have a full boned solution right in front of us.

And of course everyone has eureka moments.

But for the most part, you have to earn those eureka moments.

You have to earn them by deep, deep understanding

of the problem we're trying to crack, and then some really hard work.

And some travels, imaginary or mental travels,

or physical travels, gathering different approaches and

solutions and then putting them all together.

This is a hard, hard, difficult process.

It takes hard work.

It's very rarely one that happens with a eureka snap of the fingers.

Now one of the problems that deeply bothers us has to deal with what we teach

in schools, and the skills that we really need in the world to succeed, and

the difference, the mismatch between those two.

This is a study done by a future reasearch institute at University at Phoenix.

And they defined the ten skills that people will most need

toward the year 2020, it's not that far off.

It's five years off.

So that we should be employable and successful in the modern world.

And some of these ten skills are combining different disciplines.

Having a design mindset, in other words, designing things so

they look beautiful and functional.

Expertise with new media, collaborating with people through Skype and

other virtual systems, working in different cultures,

managing information overload.

Social intelligence, novel thinking, none of these skills,

to my knowledge, are really things that are really taught.

Except, maybe, in this course, which is trying to teach you novel thinking.

There are many skills that you may need now to succeed in future job markets.

And probably you're going to have to develop them on your own.

Because they're not something that our old industrial system of schooling

is able to provide you with, or equip you with.

Let's explore, in greater depth, our ZiZoZi, zoom in, zoom out,

zoom in method, and we'll use, as an example, the case of Edison's lightbulb.

So zoom out is taking the imagination elevator

to the 989th floor to collect [COUGH] wild ideas.

How did Edison actually do this, and then how did he make them happen?

Well first of all, understand the challenge.

When Edison began working on the light bulb, cities were lit by gas.

We had gas lamps and pipes that brought gas.

This was dangerous, it was smelly, sometimes the gas caused explosions.

And Edison had the idea that he could change

this system and light the world up with electricity.

So the first step is to understand the challenge, and

to explore different ways of replacing dangerous gas lighting

with much more convenient and safe electric lighting.

And then you go from the microscope,

a microscopic analysis of the challenge, to the telescope.

And you zoom out and you look for alternative types of energy,

different ways of lighting the world, taking the elevator to the 989th floor.

And Edison finally settled on electricity as the solution, and

creating an incandescent light bulb with a filament that would glow and create light.

But to do that, he had to find a way to generate the electricity,

transport the electricity, bring it to the light bulb, and

then create the light bulb with the filament that would glow.

So after trying 1,000 or 10,000 different formulae for

the filament, finding the ideal one, which was made of platinum and,

of course, which was impractical, taking the elevator down to the ground floor, and

asking yourself is this a practical solution?

Platinum is really hard to mine and really expensive.

If he had gone with platinum, we still wouldn't have electric light bulbs.

Instead, he chose carbonized thread filament.

Didn't last that long, but it was cheap, easy to make, and it did the job.

It was good enough.

Good enough, when you come to implement an idea is a very important idea,

good enough gets the thing out to the market.

So you take your wild ideas, bring them down to the ground,

and then you implement them as Edison did.

With great persistence, and with great skill.

He took his phonograph to show the president of the United States and

got a lot of publicity.

He used his light bulb to light the house of a big banker, JP Morgan.

Guess who funded his work?

Guess who funded electrifying New York and America?

It was JP Morgan.

His house was the first to be lit up by Edison.

So summing up here, you need two different

qualities to work on ideas and make them happen.

The quality of patience and

discipline to understand every possible element of a problem, zoom in.

the soaring imagination to collect many different wild

ways of solving a problem, widening the range of choice.

Incidentally, some of your ideas, if you try them on people, they'll laugh at you.

You'll draw laughter and even ridicule.

That's a sign you're on the right track.

People will laugh at you if the idea is unusual, weird,

uncomfortable, strange, unfamiliar.

That's a good sign, that's a sign you're on the right track.

And many people are deterred from that, they don't want to seem ridiculous.

But many great ideas seem totally ridiculous

when the author of the idea first presented them.

And then you take these ideas, and you put a different shirt on it, different hat,

and you become the practical manager, implementor, you make this happen.

Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, and

those different stages take different skills, and personalities, and mindsets.

And sometimes we need a team of people when we ourselves are not

excellent at every one of those stages.

That ends our session number six.

And next, when we move on, we will talk about some

stories about human creativity and how they changed the world.

What happens when you use your creativity.

And how you can change the lives of many people.

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