Creativity Is a Skill: Jeff & Staney DeGraff on the C.R.E.A.T.E. Method (Clarify to Evaluate)

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
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(00:45):
Today's book is a practical no nonsenseGuide to everyday creativity, not
the mythology genius type, but theincremental, observable, learnable
kind available to each one of us.
The central argument is that creativityis not a gift, but a skill and the
most transformative innovation happensin small compounding moves rather

(01:06):
than in lightning bolt moments.
The book is built around the acronym,C.R.E.A.T.E. six sequential skills,
clarify, replicate, elaborate, associate,translate, and Evaluate with each having
its own chapter, worked examples, personalstories, and practical worksheets.
, More of a workbook than a book, but it'sfull of beautiful stories and it's a

(01:32):
pleasure to welcome back for part two ofthe, DeGraff series, the authors of the
Creative Mindset, Jeff and Staney, DeGraff
Welcome back.
Thanks for having us, Aiden.
to be back.
great
to have you back.
And I thought we'd get straightawaystuck in, because the book
really demystifies creativity.
It doesn't come from thislone genius, et cetera.

(01:54):
Maybe we'll just demystify that andget stuck into the acronym thereafter.
the book has an interesting origin and itreally sort of relates to, our careers.
I'm the last graduate student of a fellownamed Rudolph Arnheim, and Arnheim is
the guy that gives us almost all theseterms for creativity, visual thinking,

(02:16):
design thinking, all that kind of stuff.
And he starts writing in the 1920s.
And in fact, when he died, the New YorkTimes has a two page obituary for him, and
I was very lucky to be a very young man.
And he, is the link to all thisbecause the whole study of creativity
starts at the University of Berlinin about 1900, where a man named
Max Heimer Heimer has, these famouscolleagues, Kurt Kafka, Wolfgang

(02:41):
Kohler, and they create this schoolof thought called Gestalt psychology.
It's basically perception and howyour brain creates, new ideas.
Arnheim is the guy that sort of takesus forward into that, and I'm the
last of the, of his disciples, ifyou will, and some of the other ones
become very, very well known as well.

(03:02):
So, the origin of the book was to saythat there are different levels of
creativity and that anybody can kind ofdo them, but it's like climbing a ladder.
Right to get to the higherforms of creativity.
And the whole idea was to make itreally practical for the classes Stan
and I teach on creative thinking,what's called creativity at work.

(03:23):
How in fact you bring these in andwhen it started, you gotta remember
when I started teaching this class,it was crazy, that anybody in the
business school would teach this.
But of course now with designthinking and everything else,
every business school has one.
So, you know, 40 years downthe line, oh, it's whatever.
But I could tell you when westarted this, it was absolutely

(03:44):
considered, very much out of boundwhat you did at the business school.
I love those stories, man, because itjust shows you what we forget that most
ideas started out being misunderstoodand the people driving those ideas were
definitely misunderstood and sometimesostracized as well or considered weird.
I think the whole idea hereis to demystify this and build

(04:05):
it more like a curriculum.
it's quite literally a curriculum at theUniversity of Michigan and it relates to
everything else because you can't haveinnovation if you don't have creativity.
So let's add a sharp edge to it if we can.
You can have all the ai, large languagemodels in the world, which is the
field Staney and I both come from.
But the notion is, if you can't thinkcreatively, then you're not gonna

(04:25):
have anything that's unique, that'sreally significantly better and new.
So the, it all started with, an veryearly book that I wrote, and I coined
a term in the late eighties, whichI hit, which we had the presence
of mind to actually trademark.
I coined this term creativeizing to creative eyes.
And what I meant by creativeeyes was adding creativity to

(04:46):
ordinary, normal standard things.
So this is taking creativity fromthe realm of, I'm Isaac Newton,
or I'm Orson Wells, or whoeveryou're thinking about to, we all
do this, but we don't recognize it.
And so we start the book with just somebasic things that people should do,
So one of my favorite ones, if I couldjust, get us started here with this,

(05:07):
is what time of day are you creative?
Some people, Staney's a nighthawk.
I'm a morning, I'm amorning person, right?
Real early morning person.
So why do I come into my sanctuaryhere at the University of Michigan
is if I'm here at my desk at six 30,no one's here for a while, right?
And because I need mental space,I'm doing my creative work at that

(05:29):
time, Staney, she'll stay up late.
That's when her creative work happens.
So it's just paying attention tosimple things like what gives you
energy, what takes your energy?
What is this happening?
Who's around you?
Is music playing.
once you start doing that, you startto understand something that most
people don't understand at all.
It's not creativity on demand.
It's creativity whencreativity demands it.

(05:51):
But everyone is different.
So it's like learning your instrument.
So step one, what is your instrument?
then before we get intoany of this other stuff,
we talked last week abouthow innovation needs courage.
You need to actually be able to feelconfident in yourself to actually try
something really different because people,like you said, could ostracize you.

(06:14):
Creativity is the same thing.
A lot of people havelost confidence, right?
In terms of, am I really creative?
So actually the book takes them throughsimple exercises to more to progressively
difficult ones and more complicatedones at the end because it's really
like, okay, so let's just, you know,start with take a walk, you know,

(06:38):
field trips, that's what we call it.
Or, you know, look at thethings in the world and see are
there, things , that inspire you
I love how the book's laid out and Ilove how practically you make it and,
you know, you end the book on thisidea of getting into a flow state.
I think for me, that is the piecemost people miss about this.
Like, people will go to me andI'm sure you have the same thing

(06:59):
to go, how did you think of that?
Or how did you write that?
Or, where do you find the time?
And literally, you have to actuallycreate the time you have to create,
but ideally, what works well for you.
And I wondered, do youfind this as well, Jeff?
I know you go early into the office.
For me, it's the same.
, I need the studio I have here.
It has a atmosphere that I've createdhere, but also I have to graduate up

(07:24):
those brainwave states to get into aplace where I'm actually going to write.
And also I'll think about what I'm gonnawrite for a few weeks before I write it.
And it's almost like puttingthe ingredients into marinate.
then they'll mix with my thoughts.
I'll come up with analogies andmetaphors, et cetera, and then the
idea seems to pop out, but you'veconcocted the recipe for it to happen.

(07:46):
Yeah, I think everyone, Ithink that's exactly right.
Everyone is different.
And I, you know, I start out withthese, um, I'm gonna read here a
little bit from the beginning of thebook, but just so let me give you what
I think the preparation should be.
And it's not all of these catch, know,they don't, so one is notice when and how
you're creative, That's the fir Second,prepared at all time to capture ideas.

(08:09):
I'm, I carry notebooks around.
I drive my wife crazy.
I leave notes everywhere.
I'm a note guy, right?
nodding furiously for
Yeah,
just
I know I, I'm a mess that way.
There's notes everywhere, youknow, pay attention to who
and what gives you energy.
I mean, I know this sounds verykind of new agey, but it's not.
I mean, the notion iswhen, when does it show up?

(08:32):
Um, consult the muses in your mind.
I'm very big on thingsrattle around in my mind.
I just had a Psychology Today articlewhere I talked about, to me, when
some, when a soundtrack, I havesoundtracks that show up in my mind.
And they're really not earworms.
They're just, somehow things show up.
And when they do, I pay attention to them.
Because a lot of times what I'm wigglingaround in my brain is in those my big

(08:57):
one, look for signs, incongruitiesand most importantly anomalies.
Things that don't make sense are golden.
They're gold, They don'tmake sense for a reason.
And my big thing is, instead ofsaying that doesn't make sense,
you gotta dive into those things.
Challenge boundaries and authorities.
Creative people have a lotof self authorizing behavior.

(09:19):
meaning that people aregonna create a lot of rules.
Now, this is where it gets alittle weird 'cause boundaries
actually create creativity, right?
So this is making sense.
So create, it's not out of the boxstuff that, and in the research
says it's nonsense anyway.
The issue is constraints actually help.
But you have to challenge 'em.
You have to engage in them.

(09:39):
escape assumptions abouthow things should be.
This is a hard one for me.
You know, we all havethat voice of judgment.
into things and being aprofessor, that's really hard.
I just got off of all of these.
These telecasts right before this one.
And there's a part of me thatwants to get in and go, eh,
that's not a very good idea.
Whatever.
But you gotta escape that andgo, okay, because here's why.

(10:00):
Here's what your listenersneed to understand.
No matter how bad the idea is, yougotta say, that's a great idea.
Here's why.
if they actually start to implementit, they'll get disconfirming
feedback and they'll make adjustments.
This is like being a parent.
There's two kinds of parents onthe aren't there on the playground.
There's the don't do it parent.
And then there's the hurt, didn't it?
Parent?
Now assuming that junior's not, you know,on playing on the freeway, hurt, didn't.

(10:24):
It is how we all learn.
That's how we become creative throughthe failure cycle, which people don't,
you know, they don't wanna acknowledge.
And finally, this is as important,and I really see this in you, Aidan,
in the way you talk about things,you have to have a sense of destiny.
So positivity doesn't mean happy.
Happy, happy, happy.
I don't know where people get this from.
Positivity means.

(10:45):
I'm going, I'm going here andreally focusing on getting there.
So those are kind of the things that westart the book with is saying Before we
get into techniques, let's start with you.
What you need to be ableto do that you can do.
You don't have to be genius.
You don't have to be smart, right?
You don't have to beperfectly good person, right?

(11:07):
Just be yourself, understand yourinstrument, and move forward.
There's a book you mentioned inthe, in your book, it's by Paul
Torrance, 1993, and he talks aboutthis idea of becoming a beyonder.
I really like this and I wanted to sharewith you, I dunno if you've heard about
this beautiful study where they hadchildren playing in a playground and

(11:29):
when the playground had no fence, thechildren would center around the middle.
But when they put a fence aroundit, the children would go right
to the edges of the fence.
And me it was speaking to this idea of theboundary, also that when you have that,
like you said, when you have some type ofconstraint, it leads, gives you somewhere
to go as far as you can in that moment.

(11:50):
And I, I love this in the book thatyou talk about, that's the beauty.
It's not thinking big, it'sthinking big by starting small.
And this idea of beyonder is key to that.
There's a lot of studies that actuallyhave talked about, psychological
safety and safe spaces and everything.
But that's what it is though, when youhave actually a guideline and you know

(12:12):
that you are safe in that environment,you become more creative and you tend
to try more things, and I think that'swhat it is with the fence, right?
, I have a colleague who's now retiredwho's very famous named Carl Weick.
Wonderful man.
And his whole thing was sense making,but his, and he's very famous for
this, but the other thing was smallwins and here's what people don't get.

(12:33):
So when you think about like a venturecapitalist and you think about a
round money, the beginning money,when you start seeding money, right?
To your listeners who don't know whatthat means, what a venture capitalist
is looking for is a huge return.
So they're not looking forthings to be tightly wrapped.
They're looking for thingsthat swim out farther.
And the issue is you give a lot of ofcompanies or organizations a little

(12:58):
bit of money so that their smallwin is a small risk, but they're
trying something radical in it.
So you hedge.
So going big doesn't mean I'mtrying to do something huge.
Going big means I'm trying somethingsmall that's significantly different.
Um, and, and you can see when you goto Picasso's museum in Barcelona or

(13:18):
wherever you're at in the world, youcan see Picasso trying small things that
are quite radical and they're not very,they're not their works of progress.
We all do that.
So when you talked about writing, oneof the things that I have to laugh
about is I talk into my phone whenI go on a constitutional every day.
I go on a long walk, talkto my phone, I come back.
Throw it on my computer, makeoutlines, and I'll probably write

(13:41):
six or seven drafts of something.
And what I'm doing is it'snot imperf perfecting it.
I'm working out my thinking, right?
I'm working out the creativeact as I'm working it out.
And the mistake that I make, and I stillmake it at my age, which is embarrassing.
say, I've got time on theflight from here to Singapore.
a long flight.
And I'll write and I never can.

(14:02):
And anything that I dowrite is terrible, right?
And then I'll say, okay, when I getto Singapore, I'm gonna do these five
things and I'll go for a long walk.
And all of a sudden I realize I canwrite and I go back to my hotel room
for the next two hours I'm writing.
So even there's a bit of hypocrisyin this, in that, even though I know
better, I fall into this trap thateverybody else falls into, which

(14:26):
is I'm gonna be creative there.
Even though at my advancedstage, I know I'm not.
I love it.
And you know with the Picasso thingI heard this great, the an acronym

FAIL (14:37):
First attempt is learning.
You are pitting on a really key thing,and that is creativity and learning
are inextricably linked, and that'spart of the reason for this book.
Was to say, if we are buildinga curriculum every, what the
iterative cycle is, what the failurecycle is, it's a learning cycle.
And what you're trying to do in alearning cycle is you're trying to

(14:59):
diversify your thoughts as far as you can.
That's why the, that's why, incidentallyfor your listeners, innovation doesn't
happen at the middle of the bell curve.
It almost never does.
It happens at the edges where youhave a crisis or you're on a roll.
And the reason is riskand reward are reversed.
Think about it.
People change when they get a divorce,when they lose their health, when

(15:21):
they lose their job, whatever.
And the same is true for big companies.
You know, apple, the first trilliondollar company, basically is on the
verge of bankruptcy and when riskand reward are reversed, right?
So it's not the 80 20rule, it's the 2080 rule.
It's easier to change 20%of an organization, 80% than
80% of an organization, 20%.
The innovation moves in.

(15:42):
Well, the same is true for people.
People have a tendency to be reallycreative at the edges of the bell
curve, and the reason is you haveless to lose and more to gain.
So these experiments, really, again,coming back to how to think about
this, it's almost counter to theway we've trained our children.

(16:03):
These experiments eventually moveback into things that are, productive.
But this book isn't reallyabout being socially productive.
This book is about developing yourinstrument, about being more creative.
This could easily be a self-helpbook as it is an organizational book.
Before we move into the acronymcreate, there's one last thing I

(16:23):
wanted to ask you, and you work withFortune 500 companies all over the
world, all over different industries.
This idea of.
Thinking big by starting small.
And you mentioned about this idea ofseed money inside an organization.
One of the things you see often is thatan innovation team is given unlimited

(16:44):
budget and straight away it drowns them.
And I, I heard this great idea, itwas, , Sadhguru this Indian mystic,
and he had this idea of gold crushes,ants, that if you give a piece
of gold to an ants, you crush it.
Now, he was talking about if you givesomebody a gift that they haven't
developed the muscles to carry yet.
Or if you give them a position tooearly, maybe it's nepotism, you

(17:07):
give them position and they haven'tdeveloped the requisite skills to
be able to carry that position thatthey actually flounder and fail.
But I thought about it thesame way as if you give an
innovation team too much budget.
That they actually can fail quickly ratherthan giving them incremental budget.
And I wondered for the many people wholisten to the show who are innovation

(17:28):
leaders, what is your advice andwhat's your experience of that?
I think whenever you create anorganizational hierarchy for
innovation, it always fails.
Here's a way to think about this.
Organizational leaders,
the farther away you are fromheadquarters, every expat knows this, the
more likely you're gonna see innovation.
Right.

(17:48):
And the reason is not becausethey're more ingenious, because
they're the way to solve the problem.
They don't have the resources to doit, so they have to find a new way.
So there's something about innovationthat over resource doesn't help.
Now I can go into, talk about a lotof stuff we've worked on over these,
but I want you to think about this.
Great innovators they're neverat the center of the circle.

(18:11):
They're always standingat the edge of the circle.
And there's a part to this.
I know I'm guilty of it in big time.
There's a part to this.
If you get too close to thecenter of the circle, everything
has a tendency to converge.
Everything has tendency to maintain.
And what you call innovationat scale is by definition,
because it's operationalized.
Incremental.

(18:32):
So the larger the innovation is.
that the more, because you have to buildit, the more incremental it's gonna be.
So you have to proof the concept,so you have to swim way out.
I know that, IDEO says this, and anybody'sbuilt stuff for a long time will tell
you this, that you have to be at theedge of the circle, which means are
people don't think like you, they'reprobably not in your subject area.

(18:55):
you have to do is look at thesecities like, I think like going to
Cambridge in the UK or Ann Arborwhere, where Staney and I live.
Where are the greatinnovation ideas coming from?
Now they get built in the universities.
I'll give you that, the big companies.
But the great ideas are coming fromthe coffee shops, the pubs, and
where people are connecting in waysthat they wouldn't normally connect.
And the experiments are starting,which have a high de, a high failure

(19:19):
rate, but there's very little loss.
So I am very much against.
These kind of huge corporate incubatorsystems I get brought in all the time.
I'm in one right now.
The billings, they a lot of money.
And don't get me wrong, we needbig corporate centers to build,
the revolution doesn't start there.
So I was just on, let me justtell you this story just quickly.

(19:42):
So I was just asked by this groupof architects, so I was just at
this, , panel discussion with all thesearchitects and they're talking about
all the stuff they're building andall these incredible new buildings.
And I said, where have youbuilt places for people to hide?
And they said, what?
And I said, where have youbuilt places for people to hide?
They said, people to hide.
I'm like, yeah, innovatorshide in plain sight.

(20:05):
then one of the other panelistssaid, I built a building this place
that I was at called ATS Right?
And people said, because it soundedlike he was building a big innovation
center, the person was ATS standfor, he said, across the street.
And I thought the first InnovatriumStaney and I built was across the street.

(20:25):
The whole idea is you have to haveplaces for innovators to work it out.
I was even thinking in my office, right?
So I'm, I'm the only person ofthis big office takes 10 people.
I'm the only person here, and Isit in the corner with nobody.
Nobody can see my screen.
But there's nobody here.
I, and I was actually talkingabout innovators about that,

(20:46):
and they were all like, me too.
And this idea of, you wanna find a kindof comfortable place, but we better get
stuck into the acronym because I knowyou're under a bit of time pressure today.
I thought the best way to set up the firstone, which is clarify, which is getting
the challenge, right, was this study thatyou mentioned where it asked business
leaders and school superintendent.

(21:06):
The simple question, whatdoes creativity mean?
And the startling difference intheir answers of the superintendents.
Now in schools, 48% believed thatproblem solving is the skill that
best demonstrates creativity.
the business leaders, it was actuallyidentifying the problem articulation.
I thought that was fascinating.

(21:27):
'cause it just shows you, and we'lltalk about this later on, different
perspectives, how you even see whatclarification is in the first place.
I would tell you myclass at Michigan, right?
The one that started 40 years ago,you're not even allowed to start
creative thinking until you identify theproblem, which takes half the semester.
You don't know what's wrong.

(21:49):
have to go through manyiterations to find the center of
what's, what the challenge is.
It's either a, you know, problemor an opportunity, right?
So, step one is not just clarifying whatthe, what the endemic or real reason is.
The other one is why you.
Why are you working on this?
And one of the things I tell peoplea lot, which I think is really

(22:10):
important is, whenever you're workingon a problem, you have to really
ask yourself who owns the problem?
nobody cares about your creative idea.
I hate to tell listenersthis, but they don't.
they care about is yousolving their problem.
This comes back to the CEO of theexecutive issue that you're raising.
So step one is how do you actually clarifywhat is at the center of the issue?

(22:35):
Because most of the time I always, Ialways tell people the most important
book of the 20th century, according to theNew York Public Library, was Anna Corina.
And of course, it startswith happy families are all
happy for the same reason.
And unhappy families are unhappyfor multitude of reasons.
And my big thing is whenever you'vegot a problem, there's a multitude
of reasons that it's not working.

(22:56):
gotta start with, okay, can I reallyhandle here and what can I, how
much of this can I really take on?
What's my level of ambition?
And I just wanna add in our programs,with corporation and also with the
military, this is the one singularthing that is the most difficult.
It's because in order to reallydeep dive into this problem.

(23:17):
You are also faced witha lot of, ambiguity.
You really don't know.
You don't know what's actuallyis being solved, right?
And a lot of people areuncomfortable with that.
what you're really looking for at thebeginning is disconfirming feedback.
This is a hard thing for people to get.
You're looking for where you'rewrong , and so the creative

(23:37):
process is highly iterative.
You think all these big projectswe've ever run, whatever,
we started with a group thatthey're sure this is the problem.
Six weeks in, they're sure it'snot, it's a different thing.
Well, that's part of it.
You're learn, you're learning aboutwhat's really going on here every
time you sort of take a step forward.
So the, so it's a work in progress andpeople who are trained differently,

(24:00):
and this is where they really confuseproject management with being creative.
You know, where they say, thisis the part we're gonna have.
It's like, well, is that what you found?
I was just on a call right beforethis one where they have this very
big, complicated technology thingand they had this assumption.
They got on this call with the ownerof this assumption, and probably
halfway through the presentation,one of the key assumptions was wrong.

(24:23):
It's like when you pull thatout, a lot of things start to
fall and people start to panic.
I'm like, don't panic This is normal.
This is a normal thing.
Now you're going to haveto build it up again.
That what we think is thechallenge is a little bit different
than what we thought it was.
And it's important, actually what Staneysaid there about the psychological safety.

(24:44):
They don't want to be seen to be wrongin front of people wit witnesses.
And that's one of thebig problems, isn't it?
And you're like kind of go, no, weencourage that 'cause you wanna fail
early because it's less expensive,
I like what you said though.
That's something I think that that reallygreat creative people do is there's a
vulnerability that you have to show.

(25:05):
To say, I don't know at this point whatthis actually is, but I'm brave enough
to go figure it out, but I need everyoneto know that I'm still figuring it out.
in that chapter, you give tons ofexamples of how to do this way, finding
techniques you call them, and very, verysimple these way finding techniques.
But let's, jump to the next one,the next in the acronym which

(25:28):
is the R which is replicate.
this chapter because I've afascination with biomimicry, but
also this idea of reapplying ideas.
So I'll let you guys take this one away.
I have a picture hereof Buckminster Fuller.
If your listeners don't knowwho that, Bucky Fuller was very
influential in my early career.
If you go to Disney World and yousee the big ball at the beginning of

(25:49):
Epcot, it's a spore, it's part of thegeodesic dome thing that Fuller did.
And if you go to the museum in,Singapore, the science museum with the
hand, it's a, it's Bucky Fuller, right?
The notion is, the beginningis just seeing with new eyes.
That's all it is.
And I like, one of the things I do inmy class with artificial intelligence
when it comes to making new friends.

(26:10):
Is, I call them heroes of the Imagination.
Two of my favorite books of all timewere written by Dan Borston, who
passed away, of course, was the Libraryof Congress who wrote these books?
The discoverers, the creators, right?
The amazing, think he's won thePulitzer Prize like two or three times.
But one of the things that I really likeabout, the heroes of the imagination
is that you can use artificialintelligence to create personas.

(26:32):
So my class does that.
So I make them think around problems.
So they have to consult people , becausewe know a lot about Emerson, or we
know a lot about William Blake, right?
So imagine you build a persona, right?
Which a large language model can.
So the notion is, in my class,you're required to consult
these and I call these matches.
So they're gonna give you matches.
And it doesn't mean you, youpick everything, they're not

(26:54):
doing your creative work.
But the notion is you'regetting a lot more texture.
In your inputs, just like youwould if you start talking to
people outside of your field.
So the beginning of replicateis simply what we sometimes
call search and reapply, right?
Go find it and go put it in your area.
One of my favorite stories comes fromTom Kelly at ideo tells a story about

(27:17):
he had this problem at the Mayo Clinicthat with, patient satisfaction.
So what he did was he had thedoctors go live in the Ritz
Carlton for a week, right?
And they got a lot of ideas aboutwhat that was like and great service.
And then the next week he had'em live in their hospital bed.
So they learned a few things andpatient satisfaction went up.
So these are the kinds ofthings that anybody can do.

(27:39):
It doesn't take any time.
It's your normal day.
I mean, you get a pair of binocularsand go on a walk on Saturday
morning and watch how birds fly.
Watch how fish swim.
You'll get a lot of ideasabout how things are designed.
Yeah, the other day my sonwas talking about owls.
And about how their flat patternsand their wings are designed very
differently than an eagle, like a raptor.

(28:01):
Because, that's why they'reso quiet when they des descend
I I love that.
My son's still looking for royalties formany of the ideas he gave me from my book.
he was always giving me ideasfor metaphors, et cetera.
I love that idea that you mentionedabout the Mayo Clinic getting outta
the building, going and seeing places.
An example I experienced firsthand isthe Accenture Research and Innovation

(28:23):
labs here in, in Dublin, in Ireland.
And the team actually went a step further.
So you were saying aboutthe Mayo Clinic guys.
Went to Ritz Carlton, saw howpatients were treated, brought some
of that mindset back and they werelike anthropologists observing.
in Accenture, they actually hiredpeople from places like Ritz

(28:43):
Carlton as the receptionist.
So there's this beautiful welcomethat's totally unlike a consultancy.
So I thought that was a niceadd-on to something there.
But I love this chapter replicate and thiswhole idea steal like an artist, the whole
idea of engage in bio mere, et cetera.
But the next one then is elaborate.
So this is multiplyingideas by adding new ones.

(29:07):
And again, another term.
I love how you pepper in all theseterms, and I love how you knew many
of these people as well, that youworked with them and studied with them.
The idea of bisociative, this wascoined by the controversial art
novelist, Arthur Koestler in 1964.
I really liked Arthur Koestler, althoughhe was, uh, his views of the world.

(29:30):
I didn't share, I'll leave it at that.
Because he wrote Darkness atNoon and some other famous books.
Very brilliant man.
And, uh, the SalzbergFestival and all that stuff.
So that, you know, that goesback to sort of my origins, these
connections to Europe, right?
But, um, the whole idea of elaboratewas at a very superficial level,
your brain is, functions on language.

(29:51):
You know, you don't have to be wiensteinand be a, you know, be a philosopher
mind person to get this, but by movingwords around in your brain, it's
relatively easy to see new combinations.
Now, of course, AI does this prettydoggone well, but there's kind of,
there's some very simple things here.
So let me tell you what thethree things in the book are.
The first one that's relativelyeasy is just random words.

(30:11):
, And there, there's actually an oldtechnique for divination called,
biomancy And famously in, St.Augustine's confessions, he talks
about how he has this conversion toChristianity because he opens up a
book and points his finger at a word.
And it's, the notion is anybodycan do this with anything.
It doesn't have to be divine.
I wanna point that out.

(30:31):
It just bissociates things.
It takes something that you normallydon't connect to something else.
Incidentally, you can reversethat, which is called, , to
disassociate things, right?
There's a way to do that.
It's called defamiliarization.
There's a different way to do it., Soyour brain works both ways with language.
So that's easy.
Anybody can just take a book at any time.
When you're stuck, open up the book andpoint your finger at a word and just

(30:53):
do this like five times, and your brainwill automatically, because your brain
assimilates and accommodates, your brainwill automatically make a connection.
That's the way yourbrain functions, right?
So you don't have to worryabout the neural net.
Just make sure you've had enough, youknow, iced tea or whatever you're drink
to make sure you're, you, you know,make sure that you're, that uh, the,
the sugars in your brain are working.

(31:13):
The, the second thing in there is,uh, something that actually comes
to us from an advertising executive,, Alex Osborne, people forget.
Alex Osborne an advertising executive,and he noticed that people who made
great ad campaigns were able touse certain words that were active
words, like substitute and combine.

(31:34):
So he called it scamper.
S-C-A-M-P-E-R, Scamper.
And this, and, you know, and some ofthese people came outta these, uh, that
he's talking about became Jay WalterThompson and these big ad agencies.
And so they ad agencies like the fiftiesand sixties use this stuff all the time.
So if you watch, mad Men, you knowthe, you'll see this stuff in there.

(31:57):
So what he's doing is he'staking words, not just random
now with a little more oomph to.
And then the final one comes froman English guy who lives in Italy,
a very famous guy, which you calllateral thinking in Europe, right?
A guy named Edward, Deb Bono.
And he called these thinking hats, right?
So he has these different kind ofarchetypal hats and saying, you know,

(32:17):
can you look at the same problem,from these different points of view?
But the reason they're all underelaborate is they're all just
highly fluent fluency based terms.
The four things we doknow about creativity.
It's number one fluency.
If you have more ideas than , otherpeople do, you're much more likely to

(32:38):
come up with something too is whichis what we talked about in replicate.
If you go from one area and applyit to another one is freedom.
The notion is you can have reallybad ideas, but the notion is once
you start to implement those ideas,you'll get disconfirming feedback.
the final is flow, right?
Which is, , Mihaly, rightCsikszentmihalyi, right?
The famous, know, the famous Hungarian,, cognitive scientists who talks about

(33:02):
we, run in certain periods of time.
So all of these concepts under elaborate,kind of fall into that brainstorming,
moving pictures and words aroundin your brain, which is actually
not very hard for your brain to do.
This is not high level stuff.
you mentioned the
Bono there.
I had all his books up there andhe passed away a few years ago,

(33:23):
so unfortunately before I hadtime to get him onto the show.
But, one of the things I do nowwith ai, you mentioned this, was
you can actually get it to do a sixthinkings hat review of what you write
or what you produce or your ideas.
But also one of the ones I used thatyou, I was delighted to see you mention
in the book was Think and Grow Rich.
Napoleon Hill's work, this idea of amastermind that Napoleon Hill wrote

(33:46):
about, you, I get it to do that as well.
So you actually can have people,different viewpoints from different
people in society, different authors.
,That's where my board of advisors on AI came from.
I make 'em build a board of advisorsand I make them do AI and go get a board
of advisors, a mastermind alliance.
Right?
So, and I make them read thisbook by Robert Green Mastery.

(34:08):
I make them all read it.
I think that young people need toknow how mastery is really developed.
Uh, and this is back to the book,you know, the creative, the whole
idea here, the creative mindsetis that we're building capability.
We're building, as you know,we, we now need to go to a,
now it's a harder thing to do.
So each time it gets alittle more advanced.

(34:31):
did it this way, but itcould have been a pyramid.
I love that.
And you know, Green's work, he'sreally focusing on helping people
today, I feel, find purpose, et cetera.
We keep going 'cause we're gonnarun outta time and not get through
We can run a little long.
We're fine.
There's, there's one thing, defamiliarizeI thought was just, , I paid attention

(34:51):
to all these little terms and youknow, I'll mention another quote by
a, painter, which is Henri Matisse,
He said there's nothing as difficultas a truly creative painter to paint a
rose because first they have to forgetall the roses they've ever seen before.
And it made me think of defamiliarizebecause actually that's the problem.

(35:12):
'cause we have this functionalfixedness with everything.
you're right on it.
I think the hardest thing todo self-help across the board
is get people outta your head.
It's very hard to do.
And to me that's the biggest thingis what do you actually think?
Right?
Can we get people out of our head?

(35:34):
Can we get, you know, what , theBuddhist called beginner's mind?
Can you get back to a beginner's mindAristotle is a great term for this,
the biologists use, but Aristotleuses this a very different way.
It's called neoteny.
It means to be childlike,not childish childlike.
And so when we look at, you know,biology, there's this very specific
thing that goes on with that.
But what Aristotle's writing aboutalso is, can you get back to that, what

(35:58):
Staney was talking about, that, that,that child wonder, the ability to, to,
you know, to, to, uh, free associatein some ways as an, as an adult.
I'm gonna keep going 'causeyou're, sparking lots of ideas.
For me, one thing to justmention, the idea of the axolotl.
the axolotl for me is actually aperfect metaphor for an organization

(36:20):
needing to stay young because it'scapable of actually forever staying
young because of stem cells, et cetera.
And this idea of an organization,Bezos Amazon letters to shareholders,
and he talked about Amazon stayingin day one and straight away it
talks to the axolotl on this idea ofconstantly embracing your inner self,

(36:41):
your inner youth, the whole time.
But we, we better keep going ontoassociate because the steps come in
a specific order for a reason, whichis why the acceptance of discomfort
and the readiness of the unexpectedcome first because they paved the way
then for associate, which is next.
Yeah.
Associate is of something your braindoes that we think only humans can do.

(37:03):
So we used to think only humanswere creative and then we realized
that Chaldean crows and orangutans,everybody else's elephants are creative.
Right?
So, you know, we've come along way in a hundred years.
But one of the things that your brainis capable of doing, associative,
is what's sometimes called, we callit adaptive reasoning in the book.
The technical term is analog thinking.
Right?
You can say something is likesomething, and the fact that we can

(37:26):
communicate that is quite interesting.
And of course, marketing people love this.
So somebody's trying to sell Sprite andjumps on a hot day into a cool pool, and
we're supposed to make the connectionthat Sprite is refreshing, right?
Which of which it is.
But the whole idea of adaptive reasoningis something, is like something else.
And why that's so important isbecause people have creative ideas.

(37:47):
They usually try and glue them together.
A bunch of things that don't really fit.
And what metaphors andanalogies do incredibly well
is they bring things together.
So one of the things I write abouta lot are, I don't, I think that
innovations are not in ecosystems,they're in solar systems.
'cause it's easier to imagine a sunor binary stars trading planets.
It's easier to imaginehow things go together.

(38:11):
They orbit.
They have an organicway in which they fit.
so the whole idea of, analog thinkingor adaptive thinking here is saying,
how are these parts like this?
it moves on to what Icall imaginary friends.
And imaginary friends are people whohave built, they're systems thinkers.

(38:33):
They're people who have alreadythought about how systems go.
So it's not just sort of abstract.
How would they have put this together?
You know, what would theyhave done about this?
And we could go backto Picasso, et cetera.
But when you start talking about,like Bezos, it's a great example of,
you know, he wasn't cash positive for15 years and he had a picture, , you
know, I knew Steve Jobs, right?

(38:53):
My relationship there when peoplesay, did he really understand
what he was building out?
And the answer was yes, actually he did.
Even when he was beingkicked out the first time.
Right?
So the, so the issueis there's also people.
Who have this idea of, you know,how all these things coordinate.
And then the final one, of courseis something called synetics, and
it's really timely because this guynamed William Gordon was brought in

(39:17):
very early on to the space program.
He was MIT, there were two of 'em.
There was MIT guys.
And basically what they did was they usedanalogical thinking to say, let's take
the problem and deconstruct the problem.
What's really wrong?
Then they have all these, what are calledexcursions where we go off and think
about all the kinds of things we could do.
But then the most important thingis now we have to force fit our

(39:41):
metaphorical ideas back into the idea.
Now, this is the part that'sreally hard for people.
It's really hard cognitively,because what you're doing is using
metaphors in reverse, saying.
So let me give you anexample that's very famous.
One is Ecoimagination, which we worked on.
We are, we were part ofthat whole thing at General
Electric, the $16 billion spend.

(40:01):
And what they started with, whichis something I didn't understand
very well, was how, how doall these pieces go together?
Like nascar?
Now, I'm not a NASCAR guy, so Idon't know, what was interesting
is as we got all the pieces,there were things in NASCAR that
we didn't have in Ecoimagination.
we had to reverse and go, well, whatwould we have to build to be like that?

(40:23):
And that's how things got built out.
So in this stage, we're synchronizing,we're coordinating, and we're
using our brain's ability to lookat complex clusters and relate
that to the creative activitythat's at hand, which is not easy.
a beautiful segue for the next of theacronym, which is translate because

(40:48):
this metaphor or analogies give youideas, then to be able to translate
into a story that encompass everybodyand bring everybody on the journey.
I will say the big thing about this is allyou have to do is look at a child, have
a child try and tell you a story, havean awkward adult try and tell you a joke.
And what you realize is telling a storyis a very complex, cognitive activity

(41:15):
because you, because there're characters.
There's actions, there's plot,there's folk color, there's a lot
of things that have to happen.
So in this chapter we talk about thebeginning of this is about storyboarding.
What Walt Disney, da Vincidid it, do you take ideas?
And of course, those peoplewho are fluent in PowerPoint,
you're already storyboarded.
That's a storyboarding tool.

(41:35):
So what you're doing with PowerPoint isyou're trying to get the story right, and
if you tell the story in a chronologicalway, you're probably not very interesting.
So, you know, you have to aroundand the book tells you why people
don't tell interesting stories.
How, you know, sometimes you have tostart with, you don't start with, let
me start with telling you how I wastrying to build this thing at Domino's.

(41:56):
You start with, let me tellyou, I met Steve Jobs, right?
And then you work back.
You gotta catch the reader, right?
And you just, what you said, youhave to bring everybody into the
story, People wanna be part of story.
Then the next part of this, Ithink, which is really interesting,
but very, have to really be intothis or what I call morphologies.

(42:16):
Alright?
And this actually startswith the Brothers Grim.
I know this is weird.
The people who write the fairytalesand Vladimir prop, the famous Russian.
But the notion is if you start thinkingabout like cases and case studies.
I've had three student groups win the bigMcKinsey case study, national competition
right here at the University of Michigan.
And the, it's a simple way to do it.
On one side, on the, on the Y axisyou say players, and on the x axis you

(42:41):
say actions that people could take.
whenever you deconstruct what's calleddeconstruct or reconstruct, whenever
you deconstruct to reconstruct,you see millions of possibilities.
And where this really takes off is likethe fashion industry where, you know, what
if I took orange and I put it on this kindof purse, or they do this all the time.
the notion is when you get intothese kind of like you go to Milan

(43:02):
and you see people do this, whatthey're really doing are morphologies.
They have their own words for it,but it's really a morphological one.
And then the final one, which ofcourse business people do all the
time now, and AI is very helpfulfor, this is scenario making.
Which is now saying not just whatcould go right and what could go
wrong, here's all the drivers, becausethere is no data on the future.

(43:25):
The only thing we can reallyknow is the things that we, we
know are gonna drive the future.
So, for example, you know, teachingat this large university, we
know that Americans are havingfewer and fewer babies or other
parts of the world even worse.
we're not gonna have as many collegekids, That's something that we
can actually know in a scenario.
The challenges of scenario and thechallenges of innovation and creativity

(43:49):
is very simple, Aidan, and that iswhat's called event driven innovation.
The things you didn't see, right?
And those are always the ones thatwhenever you're creating, you have to swim
out farther in order to anticipate those.
This chapter is actually extremely hardto do because you have to have developed

(44:10):
a lot of the other skills from theprevious chapters to get to this point.
But I think it's also the most impactfulbecause story can really change your
life, . When you wanna innovate orwhen you wanna change something, you
need to know, and you need to havethis vision in your mind about what
that is in the story that you tell.

(44:31):
It can come true though.
If you do have it right
it's not that it's hard to do.
It's hard to do well.
All you have to do is thinkabout a novel who writes well.
So the notion is everyone can do allof these, but what we're trying to
do in the book to say, to be reallygood, I mean to be world class at this.

(44:51):
So there's a difference between if you'redoing it for yourself, that's great.
The book will work great for you ifyou're trying to get better, the book
work book will work great for you.
But if you've got a team going backto your leaders and you are trying
to build something that no one elsehas, imagine when you go to your pitch
day, If you can tell a winning story,and we see this all the time, you

(45:11):
know, dragons layer in the uk, right?
Every that
All right.
if you can tell a winningstory, right, you win.
Right?
That's that.
Because that's a very complicated thing.
And if we would've had more, ifthe book would've allowed us to
go farther, which it didn't, I, wewould've talked about things like
meditation, which are higher orderthings, you know, dream theory there.
So there's a lot ofthings your brain does.

(45:34):
That's super creative.
That doesn't fit in the book becausethese were things that you can develop.
Right.
Were the other things, I think thatwe, maybe you should to somebody in
ashram or somebody who's in a cathedralsomewhere or something that's,
although I do wanna acknowledge thatthose are higher forms of creativity.
you can see why this book is sovaluable for you as a person, as well

(45:56):
to shape your own life, to own yourown story, to create your own story, to
Yep.
your skillset, and recombinethem in new ways as well,
which is why it's a great book.
It's full of exercise,full of tools as well.
And we have a copy for grabs.
Don't forget if you're a memberof our substack, we better finish
before you gotta go, Jeff, onthe final one, which is evaluate.

(46:16):
I'm guilty of this.
I'm an idea aholic.
I probably should be ina 12 step program, right?
I've a lot of, I've notebooks ofnotebooks of notebooks of ideas.
So when people say, how do you writeso many articles or whatever, just
like you, I, well, it's not hard.
In fact, I forget a lot of stuff.
I have to go back and look at my work.
But evaluate is basically saying,it's like being an editor of a film.

(46:37):
How you evaluate will largelydetermine which ideas win.
And so in the book, we give you fouror five ways to evaluate ideas like
force choice evaluation and matrixevaluation, the GE workout method, you
know, which I think is very valuable.
What's hard to do?
Big payout, easy to do,small payouts, et cetera.
So these are the kind of things youwould see in, really in any engineering,

(47:00):
, course or any business school.
But why that's important.
Is the people forget that this is the mostimportant creative step you'll take how
you evaluate will determine what you pick.
And one of the things Staney and Ihave experienced over and over and
over again we will be in these groupsand someone will have a billion

(47:23):
dollar idea and they'll leave it onthe, they'll leave it on the wall.
the notion is you're not, look, you'reevaluating this for an incremental idea.
and then, so the creative partis, let's evaluate it this way.
And so we have a long track recordof some really big ideas that became
very valuable simply by saying,you're evaluating this the wrong way.

(47:45):
And this goes back to whatStaney said at the beginning.
Evaluate our children the wrong way.
We evaluate college people the wrong way.
We're evaluating the wrong way.
it's hard to not evaluate them that way.
Right.
I mean, it's hard to, to figureout this idea that could be great,
but you don't know what to do withit because it takes a lot of time.

(48:09):
But it's also the ambiguity.
And again, we're always,reluctant to do that.
And I think a lot of people havemore trouble with that than others.
And this is why I said also in thebeginning that it's just like innovation,
creativity takes a lot of courage.
And that's the journey.
The book, again, I wanna put thebook in the right perspective.
This is a book like learning howto speak another language, or

(48:32):
learning how to master an area.
It's a book about how youactually develop that skill.
it takes you through the thingsthat are easier to do harder to do.
point of this is you're able to do allof this, but it really has to do with
how much, what the level of ambitionand what the reader's trying to do it.
So at the University of Michigan,what I want these young people to be

(48:53):
able to, so they wanna be to go onand be innovators in these businesses.
That's why they're in my class, right?
It's creativity at work, right?
But if you are a person, if you're aperson who's trying to write a novel,
then this is the way you do that.
If you're a person who's trying to starta business, you're a person who's stuck in
their career and just wants to feel morecreative and doing something, this is a
book for you because it's gonna take youon that journey in a very practical way.

(49:17):
And with each step, you're gonna developmore competency, more confidence as well.
And that's kind of the idea of the book.
And again, as I said, so valuablefor you on a personal level.
You reminded me of a quote therewhere you were talking about
these ideas, these ugly babies.
It's a quote by, whatone of your favorites?
Buckinster Fuller.
There's nothing in a caterpillar thattells you it's gonna be a butterfly.

(49:38):
One of my favorite Bucky quotes.
Maybe we'll share wherepeople can find you.
I know you do workshops, youdo keynotes all over the world.
Where's the best place?
Oh well, JeffDeGraff.com is theeasiest place for everything,
including the business.
It's JeffDeGraff.com I'm one ofthe original LinkedIn influencers,
so you can find me on LinkedIn.
I'm easy to find and I publish regularly.

(49:59):
So you'll see the stuff I write forBig Think and for Inc. Magazine.
All the other places I write forwill all show up on LinkedIn.
So JeffDeGraff.com and onLinkedIn and Aiden, I just
wanna thank you for having us.
This has been a delight.
It's an absolute pleasure havingyou, and we're gonna be back for
part three, the finale, the trilogy.
So to cover that baby behind me there,same colors, I can see you like your

(50:20):
colors because they, they bring into someof the concept we talk about in part one.
We're gonna cover the Artof change in part three.
Don't forget, you can win a copy of this.
It's really a toolkit.
It's not really a book, and it's apleasure to have had you on the show.
Stan and Jeff Degra,thank you for joining us.
Well, thank you.
Thanks again to our sponsor, Kyndryl,who underpin the IT infrastructure

(50:43):
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(51:05):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Creativity Is a Skill: Jeff & Staney DeGraff on the C.R.E.A.T.E. Method (Clarify to Evaluate)