Creativity

American creativity is declining according to a recent Newsweek article. The article says that America is embracing rote learning just as China is embracing creativity.

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. … When faculty of a major Chinese university asked [Jonathan] Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Ken Robinson argues in his TED Talk that rather than encourage creativity, schools kill it.

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In his book Made by Hand, Mark Frauenfelder quotes Peter Gray on what’s wrong with contemporary education. Gray says that school is about

always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something, instead of doing things now. And that’s such a tedious approach for anybody to take to life — always preparing.

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From Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse:

I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me just a dreamer. That offended me, the just part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing your dreams.

I’m reading Remarkable Engineers to write a review for a web site. The prose is pretty bland, though it got spicier in the chapter on Thomas Edison. It seems the author felt he needed to take Edison down a notch.

The career of Thomas Edison was not that of a great man of science, or even that of an inventive genius … His only major scientific discovery was the fact that a vacuum lamp could act as a rectifier, passing only negative electric currents. … He was said to have invented the business of invention.

So Edison was an engineer rather than a scientist. This criticism seems odd in a book devoted to remarkable engineers.

Surely Edison was an inventive genius; he held over a thousand patents, more than anyone has ever held. That is not to say anyone believes he came up with over a thousand unprecedented ideas completely by himself. He built on the work of others. He coordinated the work of his employees. He took ideas that were not being used and commercialized them. Perhaps he was more of an entrepreneurial genius than a scientific genius, but he was a genius nonetheless.

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Frederick Brooks is best known as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software project management first written in 1975 and still popular 35 years later. Brooks has a new collection of essays entitled The Design of Design that was just released this month. In his chapter on collaboration in design, Brooks notes

“Many hands make light work” — Often
But many hands make more work — Always

Collaboration may reduce the amount of work per person, but it will certainly increase the total amount of work to be done. In addition, collaboration is likely to reduce the quality of a design. Earlier in the same chapter Brooks says

Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

He gives a long list of designers to support this claim: Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Michelangelo, Watt, Edison, the Wright Brothers …

The great works Brooks alludes to may have been implemented by teams, but they were not designed by teams.

You can hear Brooks explain why he believes design work doesn’t partition well in his talk “Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design.” There’s a link to the audio in my blog post on Brooks and conceptual integrity.

Simplicity is costly. You have to give up something to achieve it. You can’t just add it on top. William Bridges illustrates this in his book The Way of Transition where he describes his moving out to the country.

… I had been infatuated with Thoreau’s Walden and its story of living a basic life, close to nature. The heart of that undertaking, he had written, was to simplify your life. … In retrospect, I can see that although I thought that this was what I was doing, I was really just trying to add simplicity to my life. In addition to all the old things I had been doing … Of course, my life grew more and more complicated in the process.

A simplification has to remove or replace something else. You can’t just add on simplicity.

There may be an exception to this. Sometimes you can add a few missing pieces to make something more symmetric. In that case, the additions simplify the whole. (Mendeleev did something like this when he drew his periodic table.) Even then, I suppose you could say you’re removing the asymmetry. In any case, achieving simplicity usually requires more subtraction than addition.

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The latest episode of the Startup Success Podcast features Seth Godin talking about his new book Linchpin.

Bob Walsh: What’s next for Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: This. This is my life’s work. This is what I didn’t realize I was working on for the last ten years but I am. There’s no new book in the works. There’s just this mission to help people see how the world just changed really violently and to encourage them to do work that matters.

Seth Godin has always been passionate about his projects, but this one is different. His clarity and intensity are remarkable.

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Destination ImagiNation is a non-profit organization that encourages student creativity. This is my family’s first year to participate in DI and it has been a lot of fun. One of the things that impresses me most about DI is that they have strict rules limiting adult input.

This weekend I was an appraiser at a DI competition for an improvisation challenge. Teams could prepare for the overall format of the challenge, but some elements of the challenge were randomly selected on the day of the competition. This year the improvisations centered around endangered things. Teams were given a list of 10 endangered things ahead of time, but they wouldn’t know which thing would be theirs until just before they had to perform. Some of the things on the list were endangered animals, such as the giant panda. There were also other things in danger of disappearing, such as the VHS tape. The students also had to use a randomly chosen stock character and had to include a character with a randomly chosen “unimpressive superpower.”

There were 13 teams in the elementary division. What would you expect from 13 teams randomly selecting 10 endangered things? Obviously some endangered thing has to be chosen at least twice. Would you expect every item on the list to be chosen at least once? How often do you expect the most common item would be chosen?

In our case, three teams were assigned “glaciers” and five were assigned “the landline telephone.” The other items were assigned once or not at all. (No one was assigned “the Yiddish language”. Too bad. I really wanted to see what the students would do with that one.)

Is there reason to suspect that the assignments were not random? How likely is it that in a competition of 13 teams that five or more teams would be given the same subject? How likely is it that every subject would be used at least once? See an explanation here. Make a guess before looking at my answer.

Here’s some Python code you could use to simulate the selection of endangered things.

from random import random

num_reps     = 100000 # number of simulation repetitions
num_subjects = 10     # number of endangered things
num_teams    = 13     # number of teams competing

def maxperday():
    tally = [0] * num_subjects
    for i in range(num_teams):
        subject = int(random()*num_subjects)
        tally[subject] += 1
    return max(tally)

total = 0
for rep in range(num_reps):
    if maxperday() >= 5:
        total += 1
print float(total)/num_reps

Here’s a short video from Tom Peters on starting an exciting business in a dull industry.

Tom Peter’s video reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Richard Feynman:

… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …

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Charlie Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians. But unlike most artists, he had a cavalier attitude toward his equipment. He would pawn his saxophone for drug money and show up for a concert without an instrument. He assumed that he could always borrow a saxophone at the last minute. He even used a plastic saxophone for one concert. Parker could take a cheap piece of plastic and make it sound good.

Good equipment helps. I’ve played cheap saxophones and professional quality saxophones, and I much prefer the latter. But a good sax didn’t make me sound like Charlie Parker, nor did a cheap sax make Charlie Parker sound like me. A poor craftsman blames his tools.

For centuries people have searched for the secret of Stradivarius violins. What did Antonio Stradivari do to create his legendary instruments? Was there something special about the wood he used? Something special about the varnish? A new theory says that there was nothing unusual about the materials he used and that he simply did excellent work.

It’s hard to think of a worse programming environment than DOS batch files. But I worked with someone who was able to do amazing things with batch files.

Hugh MacLeod calls it “hiding behind pillars” when you think you must have the best tools before you can work. He summarizes hiding behind pillars this way:

The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props. Mee­ting a per­son who wrote a mas­ter­piece on the back of a deli menu would not sur­prise me. Mee­ting a per­son who wrote a mas­ter­piece with a sil­ver Car­tier foun­tain pen on an anti­que wri­ting table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY sur­prise me.

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From Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser:

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. … However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

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From Eugene Peterson:

Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.

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When Thomas Edison was sixty-seven years old, his factory was destroyed in a fire. This was his response the next morning:

There’s value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew.

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Dan Wineman shared a profound insight on Twitter:

You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”

In place of “creativity” Wineman might have as easily said “persistence.” I found Wineman’s quote in a post by Dan Meyer responding to criticism of his research projects.

I’ve said that someone has too much time on their hands, but not since I read Meyer’s post. I see now that the phrase is often a sour grapes response to creativity. I don’t want to do that anymore.

When we see that someone has spent a thousand hours on a project that we think was a frivolous, it’s easy to say “what a waste of time.” We think how much good could have been done with that same amount of effort. But what was the realistic alternative? If that same person had spent a thousand hours in front of their television instead, no one would ever know and no one would ever criticize them. Instead, they created something.

Tree house photo from Succeed Blog. Full size photo.