Using Creativity Champions as a medium

Every day of our lives we can connect through the internet. Through Creativity Champions we can do much more than simply send emails to our contacts.

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Comment by Ana on July 17, 2009 at 1:00am

I love this!!! I spend my days trying to encourage others to be creative and I am too tired to delve into my own creative powers. I miss that!! Hopefully this space will help me be a more engaged creative individual, as well as a better creativity driven manager.

Comment by Jack Hipple on July 16, 2009 at 9:06pm

After a week preparing and working with the government on a program for the Dept of Homeland Sefcurity (don't worry, it's part of my chemical engineering other half of my life), I welcome the opportunity to reflect on creativity for a while.

I have had constant dialogue and discussion about TRIZ and the difference between left and right brained creativity. I think I've finally found an analogy. In CPS or similar processes, we "diverge" and then we "converge". Well, we do the same thing in TRIZ but in a different way. We "generalize" and then we "ungeneralize". Let me explain.

The fundamental belief in TRIZ (and I have not seen an exception in almost 10 years of practice) is that there are a very limited number of inventive principles and problem solving principles that we constantly reuse. One of the reasons we can't see this is that we're all caught up in the special language, acronyms, and verbage of our industry or technology. We truly believe that our problem is special and unique and no one's ever solved it before. That's never true! So the first thing we have to do is to get people to translate their problem description into words that a 10 yr. old could understand. Then this makes the problem "mappable" against the known problem solving patterns. This will identify a general way of solving that kind of general problem. Then we have to "ungeneralize" and use our specific technical expertise to "translate" that general solution into a specific one. This comparison came to me like a light bulb this evening and I welcome any comments about it.

For those of you skeptical about what I am saying, there's not time to have a TRIZ class on the web now, but let me show you two problems that I use in my workshops to illustrate my point. This is the first one:

THE SCHOOL BUS PROBLEM
To send 300 scouts to summer camp, several buses were reserved; however, two buses did not show up at the required time. Therefore, each bus took five scouts more than planned. How many buses were sent?

THE PHYSICS PROBLEM
Let’s assume that 300 electrons, in several groups, must jump from one energetic level to another. However, a quantum transfer has already taken place by two groups less than were originally calculated; consequently, each group now has five more electrons. How many electron groups were there in total? This complex problem has not yet been solved.

I divide a group in half. The school bus problem is a trival algebra problem and is solved with little difficulty. No one gets the answer to the second problem. THEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM. Maybe it's the statement that "no one has ever solved this problem" or the scientific jargon, but that's the result.

So we want to generalize/get specific as a more productive way of diverging/converging. This process is just more eficient with TRIZ, but you have to BELEIVE that there a limited number of inventive principles.

Comment by William R. Nash on July 16, 2009 at 12:15pm

Our ability to be creative may be our most powerful personal attribute. 1) As we develop our talents, we build our identify and our self-confidence. 2) It allows us to share with others, sometimes even the world. 3) It serves a mental health function by helping us navigate difficulties, even tragedies.

Comment by Winfried Laane on July 16, 2009 at 10:36am

Great idea alan, to use this medium.
First comment is a question to you: did you think of the roles and if so why didn't you add facilitator as role?

Witty winfried

Comment by Kimberly Johnson on July 16, 2009 at 9:09am

I am heading out of town tomorrow to attend an annual Vietnamese Culture Camp that my mother, daughter and I attend each year. We stay in the dorms on the campus of St. Olaf college and it is SO MUCH FUN!

Comment by Heather France on July 16, 2009 at 3:39am

Just been to the UK Creativity conference in Greenwich, London and we launched our new web site take a look www.wholebrainthinking.co.uk. It was great to see old friends and meet new ones.

Comment by Cathy on July 15, 2009 at 10:57pm

I am savouring the last few days of my holiday before I return to University next week....but on the otherhand I wanted to achieve a number of things over the break 'but' I sprained my lower back mid-way...nevermind the weather hasn't been all that nice anyway!