Order of European Inventors and Innovators
by Ileana Vlad, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
“Be creative” is the most useless advice in the world. It says nothing about what to do. Creativity is not a state you enter by decision; it is something you do to a problem. And what you do can be described, taught and practised.
What a heuristic is
An algorithm guarantees the result: follow it correctly and you arrive. A heuristic guarantees nothing — it only raises the chance of finding. It is the difference between a recipe and good advice from someone who has cooked a great deal.
The heuristic structures of technical creation are a handful of simple operations, applicable to almost any problem. They are not magic. They are useful because they move attention out of the place where it has jammed.
Six that work
Invert. What would happen if it did exactly the opposite? If instead of heating, we cooled? If instead of the part moving, everything around it moved?
Exaggerate. A thousand times bigger. A thousand times smaller. At extreme scales the working solutions are different ones, and sometimes one of them can be carried back.
Remove. What happens if we take this part out altogether? The question sounds absurd, which is why it is useful: it forces you to state the function the part was performing, and a function, once named, can be obtained another way.
Move the function. What else in the system could do what this part does? Many elegant solutions are parts that do two things.
Borrow from far away. How does a completely unrelated field solve this? Biology, cooking, music. The further the field, the less obvious the borrowing — and the less likely it has already been made.
Ask what else it could be good for. Not what you meant to make, but what you actually made. Several important inventions are the result of that question put to a failed experiment.
Functional fixedness
Almost a century ago, Karl Duncker described an experiment that became a classic. Participants are given a candle, a box of tacks and matches, and must fix the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip on the table. The solution requires emptying the box and using it as a shelf, pinned to the wall with a tack.
When the box is presented full of tacks, many fail to find the solution. When it is presented empty, next to the tacks, they find it far more easily. The full box is “a container” and stays a container. This is functional fixedness: the object is seen through the function in which it was presented to us.
The six operations above are, in essence, so many ways of breaking that fixedness. “Remove” and “move the function” attack it directly.
About idea meetings
Here something must be said that contradicts a very widespread practice. A meta-analysis gathering the results of more than thirty studies, with over two and a half thousand participants, found that brainstorming groups produce fewer ideas, of lower quality, than the same people working separately and pooling their ideas afterwards. And the loss grows with the size of the group.
One of the explanations is entirely mundane: in a group, one person speaks at a time. While you wait your turn, you either forget what you meant to say or change your mind, because in the meantime you have had the chance to evaluate your own idea.
The practical consequence is simple and changes the outcome of a meeting: ideas are generated alone and evaluated together. Ten minutes of silence with a sheet of paper, then the pooling. Not the other way round.
How to practise it in a classroom
A teacher can do this tomorrow, with no resources. A real, open problem written on the board. The list of six operations beside it. Ten minutes in which each person writes alone, applying the operations one by one — not hunting for “the good idea”, but going down the list. Then five minutes of reading aloud, with no comments. Only at the end, the evaluation.
What is learned is not any particular idea. What is learned is that when you get stuck there is something to be done — and that being stuck is not a verdict about you.