When’s the last time you did some cloud watching?
Now there’s a creative, relaxing activity to do with the kids! Think about a kid who looks up at the sky and sees a cloud in the shape of a camel. The shape of the cloud is, of course, determined before the child attributes it with the function of being a camel. 
How does creativity change in the transition from a process that begins with a function to a process that begins with a form? The cognitive psychologist, Finke, examined this in an interesting experiment:
A test group was given the task of creating an idea for a new product. The invention had to be made up of 3 items (or forms) out of a collection of 15 items that were presented to them. The items included a circle, a cone, a rod, wheels, string, and … additional 10 shapes.
Each person was asked to create a new, useful, product out of 3 items.
To keep the thinking process more focused, a general category was chosen - toys, for example, and their invention had to fit in to this category.
Here’s an example: the rod, string and cone could be used to create a mobile. We’ll hold the rod horizontally and tie the string to the rod (not in the center) from which the mobile will hang. We’ll then hang the cone on one end of the rod (the end closer to where the string is tied) and this will balance the other side of the rod when the mobile is hanging up. (OK, I know this isn’t the idea of the century, but I needed an instant example!)
Now let’s get back to Finke’s experiment. According to the usual procedure in these experiments, the test group was randomly divided into two sub-groups. One group was told to choose 3 items out of the 15 items presented to them, and the second group was given 3 items that were randomly chosen by a computer without the individuals themselves having any choice.
As mentioned previously, each individual had to create an idea for a new product. The ideas were to be evaluated by a panel of five judges (who, of course, were not aware of the source of the ideas.) The judges were asked to evaluate each idea according to two criteria - originality and applicability. (The idea was to be considered creative if it had a high score in originality and applicability)
And now the question we’ve all been waiting for: Which group produced more creative ideas? Was it the group whose members could choose freely or the group in which the items were chosen for them? I’m sure you know the answer, but I’m going to keep you in suspense a little longer!
The participants of the first group (those who could choose three items) are in a position to allow themselves to think about an idea (function) and afterwards to choose the item (form) to support this function.
The participants in the second group needed to make do with the three items that were given to them. Most likely, this group played with the items until they came up with a form that seemed to fulfill a useful function.
As you probably realized, but in complete contradiction to the intuition of most people regarding creativity, the participants of the second group (the ones whose freedom of choice was taken away from them) produced more creative ideas by far (almost double).
This is how Finke proved that people tend to me more creative when a form is dictated to them and the function is open. Paradoxically, a more constrained situation proved to be more successful in allowing people to be more productive and creative.
It is also further proof of the importance and effectiveness of the Closed World condition! (Sorry, I had to put this in…)
Incidentally, the producers of the comedy TV show, ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ which is based on ‘real time’ improvisation, are well aware of this. That’s why, in one of the segments, the comedians are given an object for which they need to come up with various uses.
For a detailed information about Finke’s experiment and other very interesting experiments related to creativity read the book:
Creative Cognition : Theory, Research, and Applications by Ronald A. Finke, Thomas B. Ward, Steven M.Smith
The book is highly recommended - one of the very few real good books about creativity.
See you all in my next post,
Roni
Roni and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.
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Visit Roni at the start2think website
First of all, being a camel is not a function for a cloud. This sounds like a trivial point. I will come back to it later.
More importantly, your post seems highly agenda driven. No good scientist would speak this way and I rather doubt that Finke is an exception. Peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology will highlight how results offer evidence in support of X but they really don’t say things like “see, I’ve now proved that…” There’s a reason that scientists speak the way they do and since you tend to base your work on academic psychology, I would advise you to communicate with at least as much humility as do the academics in their peer-reviewed work.
Finke’s experiment is interesting as is your post. The explanation (theory) is plausible. But I’m not completely sold. For one thing, I’m not sure the experimental paradigm adequately simulates real-world problem situations. Also, I’m not convinced that these 5 judges are in any position to decide what is creative, original or innovative.
Now on to camels. Your post is a strenuous effort to fit not only the point of a piece of research to your way of thinking, but even the very language. I can see where you are matching up the terminology of the experiment with SIT terminology. You needed to use the word “function” because that is a critical SIT word. But it doesn’t fit the example at all. Even kids - with all of their imagination - do not think the camel-shaped cloud has the function of being a camel. They understand very well that it’s just a shape. You’d be better off calling that a form.
This is just another example of how you come across as agenda drive. Your bias is very clear and it seems to me that you are highly selective in how you pick data and talk about it. Biases are fine. We all have them. But my feedback to you is that when I read your posts I find that the strength of your conviction greatly exceeds the strength of your evidence and this erodes the credibility for me.
Adam Hello,
Thank you for your detailed response to Roni’s post. I tend to agree with you that the Camel isn’t a “Function” of the cloud, but I think that lingering on this detail misses the main point of the post, which - to my understanding - is about the benefits of imposing constraints on our thinking, and going from “idea form” to “function” when we ideate. This method of idea generation is SIT’s principle approach when it comes to idea generation with companies for the simple reason, that it proves to be very effective. People simply find it easier to get to new ideas for a particular problem, when applying a process of evaluating “virtual forms” and discerning their potential function or value from a market or business perspective. Not only do good ideas come quicker, it also helps people overcome many of the assumptions or fixedness that in our experience, prevents them from getting to the really fresh, unchartered ideas territory.
Michal:
My issue is primarily with the overall thrust of the post as I tried to make clear in what I wrote. Citing academic studies as “proof” of anything is not very responsible or respectful to the process of science and the advance of knowledge. My comment about the cloud was less about whether camelness is a function of clouds - which it clearly isn’t - and more about Roni’s need to call it a function in order to make the language fit the point he was trying to make. This is evidence of a not very open-minded perspective and I take issue with the use of the language of certainty and the selective citation of academic studies.
If, in fact the primary support for SIT is a utilitarian one (i.e., it works) then why not make the argument on those grounds and highlight the academic and scientific background as a support rather than using the almost religious language of proof and certainty as if scientific studies could ever offer that.
As a former academic psychologist, I am very turned off by the way you guys talk about what you do. As a former innovation manager I am intrigued by your work and would want to try it out. Why put me through that cognitive dissonance?
Now on to the substance: I am not surprised that constraints make it easier. In the real world I have never seen a brainstorm that took place without constraints. The reason that people try to emphasize that nothing is off limits is that people already come with so many built-in constraints that telling them there are no constraints might pull them closer to the middle. In the end though, I feel you are arguing against a straw man here.
So constraints make it easier. Sounds great. But do they lead to more creative or innovative ideas? I don’t know. And I’m not convinced by Roni’s post or Finke’s study.
BTW, very cool of you guys for not moderating my post out. I’m impressed!
Adam
As a person who is usually a bit bored with blogs and posts, I was pleasantly surprised with this lively and biting Adam-SIT dialogue (BTW - why would we ever even consider “moderating out” your post Adam? I dont think it even occurred to any of us.)
Disclosure - Rony is a good friend of mine (and partner), so my first concern is to defend him from what I judge to be misplaced accusations. I agree, though, that the phrasing “This is how Finke proved that people tend to me more creative when a form is dictated to them and the function is open.” is not so great, although i tend to ascribe it to the superficiality of the blog medium more than anything else. I think also that Rony, and the rest of us, have quoted so much of Finke’s work that what I at least mean these days is “Finke, in numerous experiments, has demonstrated how much more effective people tend to be in searching the need space based on a form, than on searching the function space based on a function, and our experience in 14 years really bears this out pretty convincingly.”
As to the camel-cloud reference, here is how i understand it. There are, among others, two approaches to develop a child’s visual imagination. The first (more common, and Form Follows Function) is: think of something you want to depict, say a camel. This is now the function of the form you will create, because what you will do with pen on paper is to try to create a form that corresponds to the function you defined. Then one can check how well your created form corresponds to the function. The other approach, which lazy Rony recommends, is the opposite. Point out to your child a form (or clump of forms), and tell them to now “work back” and answer the question “If this as yet non-defined form would be something (thus fulfilling a “function”) what would it be?” Working back in this manner the child is taking a form and ascribing to it a function (”be a camel”) in the sense that a form’s function is to depict or represent an object in the world.
I recommend interpreting the camel story in this way, rather than the more sinister “push SIT’s wares” version. True, we do hope our blog will help spread the SIT word and expand the SIT business, but i think we’re being pretty soft sell about the whole thing - for example, it took us a couple of months of deliberation just to add the relatively innocent “we’d be happy to talk to you about innovation” at the end of each post.
I agree by the way, that there are all kinds of methodological challenges one can pose to the Finke experiment. It is possible, for instance, that at least some people in the other group also used a Function Follows Form approach, but since they could select whichever components they wanted, they lost precious time on selection. In fact, my (anecdotal) observations are that the immediate advantage of constraining options in workshop settings is a huge saving in time and reduction in procrastination. Even before the difference between FFF and FFF kicks in, the great advantage of constraints is that they facilitate focus.
Someone should really constrain the length of these comments, BTW.
Thanks for the kick in our intellectual butt, Adam(:
Amnon
Very helpful Amnon. Thanks a lot. And BTW, I don’t mind you guys pushing your wares at all. There’s nothing sinister about that. But the standards of science are higher than the standards of business and if you guys mean to use science as a key differentiator then I’d like to keep you honest. If you had said from the start that you guys have been doing this stuff for a while and find that X works, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
BTW, I LOVE that you wrote: “the difference between FFF and FFF”!!! This is maybe the most innovative thing I’ve ever seen
Shana tova,
Adam