We all know that taking the stairs is better for our health when compared with riding the elevator or the escalator. But, let’s face it, when presented with the choice, wouldn’t we opt for the “automatic” option?
If the exact same stairs, however, made fun sounds when climbing them, would that make a difference?
You will find the answer to this question in the following clip which demonstrates that assigning stairs a new task of “convincing” people to climb them can result in a fun, innovative and perhaps unexpected situation.
Modern American poets John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz and Anne Sexton were all hospitalized for bipolar disorder during their lives. And many painters and composers, among them Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Mingus and Robert Schumann were similarly afflicted.
The belief that “madness” is related to creativity is not limited to artistic creativity. Consider for example the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, which tells the story of Nobel Laureate in economics, John Nash, who suffered from Schizophrenia.
My husband and I decided to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary by visiting Petra, the amazing Nabataea site. We crossed into Jordan just south of the Lake of Galilee and drove down the Jordan Valley. On our way, we noticed that many of the vehicles transporting agricultural produce were decorated in a way we’d never seen before:
These vehicles are decorated by the farmers themselves. They caught my eye because they are the only colorful objects in an otherwise arid landscape. I was curious why a poor farmer would invest time and money to decorate, sometimes elaborately, what is merely a functional vehicle. What are the origins of this phenomenon? Cultural? Commercial? Something else?
I asked around but no one had a good answer. So I decided to flip the question: if the farmers are spending this much money, what is the benefit that they get? Continue reading ‘Designer pickup trucks’
“None of us is as smart as all of us” is the Japanese proverb that opened a recent NY Times article citing the SIT method. The article talks about some of the downsides of the traditional brainstorming technique, within the wider recognition of the positive aspects of the meeting of minds, collective creativity, and the fact that innovation is a team sport.
If you were at risk of losing your only source of income you’d probably stretch your creativity to the limit to find ways of preventing this from happening.
There’s one ‘profession’ that is constantly under threat - crime. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we can find many creative ideas in this field. It’s also not surprising that professional criminals are usually more creative than law authorities - they have a lot fewer resources at their disposal and they therefore need to look for solutions within their closed world.
I believe that criminals often find creative ideas not because they are really creative people (research shows that they are less creative than average…), but simply because they have no choice.
And not having choice is the mother of creativity.
So here’s a story I once heard on the radio. It’s about an interesting car theft method:
A gang innocently rented a car, but then forged the documents making them identical to those of an existing car of the same make, and replaced its license plate with that of another car (that’s the dirty part. Well…if you want to steal cars, you probably have to get your hands dirty too!)
They then sold the car. There was no problem selling the car because of the forged documents, but there is still a different problem… the car needs to be returned to the rental car company.
Last week I visited MSR - The Israel Center for Medical Simulation –in the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, and met with Dr. Amitai Ziv who heads it. We talked about innovation and simulation and possibilities for cooperation, and following the meeting, Amitai referred me to a recent interview (published in the McKinsey Quarterly, March 2008) with Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, apparently one of the leading and innovative medical institutions in the US.
The interview’s title was “Innovation in health care”, and indeed innovation was the central theme. Dr. Cosgrove mentioned three “seismic shifts” (his expression) in health care, on which Cleveland Clinic was taking the lead. What struck me about them was, more than anything, how these three trends, touted as the absolute cutting edge of novelty, were exactly what any grandmother with common sense would probably have recommended. Please judge for yourself: Continue reading ‘Your grandmother, the innovator, and second-order innovation’
