CM 274: Keith Sawyer on Group Genius
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A lot of these communities have this innovation structure where the creativity is distributed throughout the whole network of individuals. And that kind of social network, I call IT a collaborative web, is the source of really almost every significant invention.

What would the curious minds at work on your host to gale Allen, whether we realized IT or not, creativity is collaborative. Yep, you heard that right? And we have lots of examples.

The development of the airplane, the internet, the mountain bike and so many more. We're school in the notion that creativity is an individual thing. Yet research shows again and again that it's not instead through connecting with others than working alone and then connecting again that we innovate.

Key sowar are studied groups and creativity decades, his book group genius, the creative power of collaboration elucidates, what group genius looks like, why IT works, and what IT takes to cultivate IT so we can develop game changing innovations. This book changed how I see groups, creativity and the connection between the two and the research is fascinating. Before we start one quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on itunes or wherever you subscribe.

Your feedback sends a strong signal of people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with kid sowar kid soir. Welcome to the podcast. IT is great to have you on. Well.

thank you. It's a pleasure to be heard.

Keith. We're in love with the idea of the lone genius, someone who is incredibly innovative, all on their own. But you point out that the idea of the loan genius is a myth that is really about group genius. How so.

well, the longing Smith comes along with the whole package of myths about creativity. We tend believe in america, in the rugged individual, right? The person, I guess you could say, out in the frontier, whose resisting structures that are constraining and fighting civilization, right? That's a sort of american myth.

And IT fits in with this belief that we just sort of instinctively have. When we see something new and creative, we tend to look for the inventor, right? And we think that this amazing new invention must have come from a flash of insight.

So that's a second myths that goes along with the lone genius myth. This this idea that creativity originate in a really big idea, in a flash of insight, which we'll talk about some more in a few minutes, is also a myth. And that myth kind of reinforces the loan genius smith.

You give a creative example in your book of group genius at work, so the focus can see that, you know, it's more than this individual person. And what are the examples that really resonated with me? Was that of the mountain bike, IT didn't come to a kind of fully formed IT wasn't something that sort of existed when people created the bicycle IT has a really interesting group genius vx story. Can you share that with us?

That's a great example. It's in the first chapter of the book and it's really it's because I am a mountain biker and myself had been doing some pretty serious mountain biking for over decade before I even started writing the book. So I had a book on myself called fat tire, which is a wonderful book about the history of the mountain bike.

And it's distinct because IT actually has uh, by tire tread on the cover of the book, like the real trade is on the cover. So you have to have this book if you're a mountain biker, right? So I had learned a little bit about how the mountain bike was created.

And you know, we have the lone genius smith, just like we do IT with every other invention. Gary Fisher invented them out by and started a company and got rich by inventing them out. But again, IT turns out, like all these long genius mith IT turns out that's not the real story.

The real story is one of what I call collaboration through time, where it's not a group of people in one room, which a lot of group genius is, but in this case it's a group genius s through time where individuals in retributive, collor, ado, marin county, california were traveling back and four, they were are engaged in these all annual competitions. Ah they made their own bikes, so they modified the gears of the shifting mechanisms and you know, they would see something someone else had done in their garages and theyd say, oh, I like that idea. I'm onna.

Do that on my bike. And then they would take that new dera and modify IT in a little additional way and make IT a little bit Better. And then that new development bounced around the community. A lot of these communities have this innovation structure where the creativity is distributed throughout the whole network of individuals. And that kind of social network I call IT a web is the source of really almost every significant invention.

To that end, you explain that within these groups is about more than individual traits. It's about how group members relate to one another. Tell us about this.

I got that idea from my experience with chicago and productions theatre, where I had joined the group as the pianist because I have a background in jet, so i'm able to improve SE. I was the new musical improv sor in the group. Everybody also was up on stage.

So that LED me to this understanding that people in improve groups have they say that you need to get out of your head and focus not on what you're thinking, but focus on the group mind to a envision, or detect or be aware of what's going on with the group, what's emerging from the group. So you switch your mind away from, you know, your own intention, or your own goals or your own creativity to the group's creativity. And that's a core of improvisational performance, whether it's jazz and musical group of provisions or whether it's improvisational theatre, you're shifting the focus from the individual to the group, and that's what the performers do.

So as a researcher and an analyst, I thought of switching the focus the same way for my own research, instead of focus on god, how an individual mindset drives creativity, but instead to shift the focus away from the individual to the group. And I believe in group genius. The real source of innovation is interactions among the members of the group.

And of course, all the members of the group are individually creative. And psychologists to study individual creativity have a lot to help us with with their research, but a lot is going on at the group level. And that's been my contribution to creativity research.

Could you say a little bit more about the methods that you use to look at how these group members relate to one another?

Oh, thanks for asking that. Because I am A, I say, an empty social scientist, which means I go out in the world, I gather data. I use rigorous methods to analyze data. So if you are interested in a creativity book about groups, there are loads of books out there that are great books about group creativity that are gone to give you good advice. What's different about my book is that I am a rigorous ous researcher.

So I use methodologies, in my case, I call IT interaction analysis where I focus on improvisational theory groups, for example, and I take videos of these performances that I transcribe the dialogue using some really sort of unusual transcription methodologies that allow me to capture pitch izis like that and um you know thread features of someone's conversation or if you pause like I just did, or if you stretch out as possible. All those features of interaction Carry interacting subtle information that we don't consciously see IT, but it's the essence of improvisational interaction between people. So as a scientific researcher, I need a way to get a handle on those aspects of interaction, which are below the level of consciousness.

And that's what i've done with my interaction analysis. It's a really powerful tool. It's very time consuming. If you can imagine a transcription methodology that captures the micro second rythm and pauses of how people talk.

And when you're talking on stage, a lot of that conversation overlaps people talk at the same time people and erupt each other if doesn't work very well for a podcast. So we're very carefully taking terms or we don't step on each other, but stage and an interception that actually can contribute to the emergence of group genus. So you have to analyze all the aspects of conversational interaction. I could easily do .

a deep dive on that because I find IT fascinating. But i'm just going to ask one more question about IT. Then i'll move on. And that is when you're listening for or looking for the types of things that you just mentioned is IT cause and effect.

If you see this to you then assume that there is a high probability that you'll have see that or is a part of like a almost like I quilt like it's when you see these patterns uh of interconnection looking a certain way, then the quilt might look like this or the outcome might look like this or both of those wrong and it's something else. What's the goal and and what does that data help you with? Well, actually.

that's a great question and it's pretty heady stuff I call IT by directional causation. And that's a complicated way of saying individuals come up with new ideas when you are on stage and providing each person creates a new line of dialogue. And it's a creative contribution, right? No one else could have predicted what that person was going to say.

Then the next person responds by saying something that's a creative contribution that no one could have predicted and no one do what they were going to say. And this happens moment to moment. What happens? The first direction of causation in by directional, the first direction is from the creative contributions of each individual S A combined together.

Over time, you experience what I call emergence. You have an emergence of a group level, a group level phenomenon that is a collective property of the group now that has emerged from the individual creator contributions of each performer coming one after the other very rapidly. So that direction of causation, I think of IT as upwards, upwards, from the individuals to the group.

But then, and the other direction of caution is downward downer causation, where this emerging group phenomena, something, a collective property, the group which is basically the scene that's being created oh, you know what? Now we're at a bus stop. Um so now that bus stop plot is the collective creation of the group.

But that bus stop plot now has downward causation on the individuals who are performing. Now you need your creative contributions to alive with your bus stop skid or your bus stop scene. So the a collective group phenomenon that you are created now IT turns around and could strain you, but IT also enables you.

Now, you know, you're at a bus up and actually usually new creative possibilities, but is still a form of downward causation. So yeah, IT causation works in two directions. So that's why I call IT by directional caution.

Here we've been talking about improve, improve sation. And you make a clear in your book that improvisation of loan will only get us so far, that we need a baLance between planning and improvisation. Say more about this. I could .

build on the by directional coalification example to answer that. so. Now i'll go back to the the simple exam apple of the bus stop so now the bus stop has emerged from the first few lines of dialogue.

People go up on stage, someone in the audience shouts of relationship like husband life um the actors start performing. And after a few lines of dialogue, we realize there at the bus stop waiting for a bus that late. So now that's an emerging collective phenomenon that now constrains the creativity of the individuals.

So you know, in many cases, when we think about creativity, we think that constrains are the opposite of creativity, or that if we have structures in place, conventions, constraints, that all those things are gonna lock creativity, they constraint creativity, but they also enable creativity. So the fact that you've created a bus stop scene doesn't mean that now everybody's creativity drops because we're stuck in the bus stop now we can't go to space, you know or we can to go underground and go to the center of the earth um no, the bus stop. Uh emerging structure actually enables new possibilities, and IT helps a guide the improvisation of the actor.

So there's always this dialectic, if you will, between structure and provocation. There is no such thing as pure improvisation where every moment, forever, you can do anything you want. No, that's not the way in improvisational performance works and it's not the way the group genius worksite.

There's always going to be a relationship between the provisions potential of the moment in time and the constraints and conventions and structures that are guiding what you do. And you need to, I would say, think about those constrains and structures as enabling rather than you know, fighting them and thinking, if only we could do whatever we want to IT, we'd be more creative um IT would be a horrible performance for the audience. If you went for a bus stop in the two seconds later, you were going to the center of the earth and then three seconds after that you were going to other space, IT would be a mess. So structure can be your friend.

One of the things that you talk about in your book that I was really happy to see, but hadn't really thought about a lot, is how you can have what's called a group flow state. You know, it's something we tend to associate with individuals, that if you went to a flow state at an individual thing, yet you talk about how IT applies to creative groups, how does IT play out in a group?

Well, that turned out to be one of the big contributions of my book because this concept, group flow, and it's because my P. H. D.

Advisor was my chick and me. I, who was, has now passed. But he's known for the concept of flow.

He is the guy who coined the term in ninety ninety. He published a called flow, the psychology of optimal experience. And he is, like me, an empirical social scientists st. And gathered data from lots of exceptional individuals and identified links between getting into the flow state of peak experience, links between that and being created.

So the people tend to be more creative when they're in a flow state, when they are completely focused on the task, when they lose track of type, and in particular, when they're doing the task out of what's called intrinsic motivation. They're doing IT for the sheer joy of engaging in the task. They're not thinking about how much money they're going to get.

They're not thinking about which museum their painting is going to get in or how much money in their gallery is going to be up the salary for. You just love being there in the studio and painting that intrinsic motivation. I supposed to the extrinsic motives of doing IT for some external work ward, like money or or fame.

That was mike chicks and me high's contribution to positive psychology. So I having had this experience of being his student and being very familiar with this flow research as and as a just performing in myself and performing with improvisational theatre groups, I got into the photos s day. Well, I was performing right.

That's why you keep going back and you keep doing that because there there is no money in performe, just certainly not at my, you know, amateur sami professional level. But I just love doing IT for the sheer joy of doing IT. So that was intrinsically motivating.

I think IT is for all musicians. But then, as I was saying earlier about shifting my focus from the individual to the group level, I thought, what is IT about groups when they are at peak performance as a group? And that's when I had the idea, all its group flow.

The group is at a peak performance state, and that is what we can call group flow. So there's an analogy with this individual flow state of peak performance. But now we're talking about the group being in a state of peak performance, and that's why I call IT group flow.

In this interview, kid saw your talks about how groups hold the key to innovation. If you'd like to learn more about the important world mind watering place and innovation, check out episode two fourteen motion bar auther of the book mind, wondering how your constant mental drift can improve your mood and boost creativity. Bar points out the importance of master in our self talk.

It's pretty standing when you think about IT is almost half of your waking hours. You're not what your bodies you're actually inside. You're looking in and you're thinking in and you .

almost completely environment. Now let's get back to my interview with kid soyer. Kid, you you talk about the importance of the goal, that said, and how, you know, the goal has been second, and nail group flow. And that goal, as you describe, IT, can lie along a continuum of problem solving, the problem finding. What's IT work here?

Oh yeah, that's a really important concept. And IT has been studied quite a bit and creativity research, the concept of problem finding creativity and the contrast with problem solving creativity. And that's something that again, my trick at me. I was one of the pioneers of research into problem fighting creativity.

Um I think now you hear in a lot of this sort of entrepreneurship or design thinking, uh, research that people will talk about what might be called wicked problems or ill structured problems and contrast that with a well structure problem where you pretty much know where you're going. Everybody understands the nature of the problem. Everyone knows what they have to do to get there.

Everyone knows what the solution is going to look like, basically. So they really are in any surprises. You just have to do the work to solve the problem. And that's a well structured problem, and it's a well structured problem solving process. But more interesting are those problems, which are very hard to get a handle on, like everyone sort of they know there is a problem and they know we need a creative solution, but we don't exactly know what the problem is and we don't know what the solution is going to look like, and we're not sure what sort of methodologies or tools that we're going to need to go down this path to the solution that we can even see. Those are what are called um with the problems or real structure problems and the process so that get you to a solution that's called problem finding creativity.

And the reason is because you don't really know how to put the problem towards a you are finding what the problem is as you're engaged in the task of solving, I say quote and quote solving because you don't exactly know how to talk about the problem, but you know there's a problem and you know you need to get something done. So your sort of you're kind of wandering through a problem space as you try to get to the end in that kind of situation, the power of the group is very important, because groups have this ability to engage in a problem finding process successfully in a way that individuals have trouble with the course. Individuals also engaging problem finding creativity.

But with my own interest in group genius and always thinking of the metaphor of improvisational group performance, this is what you see with jazz on sobs, where know the musicians are up on stage performing, but they have A A musical chAllenge that they have set for themselves. But a big part of that jas performance is everyone working together to really, we could say, to formulate the nature of the musical problem. And that's what we're watching.

We're watching musicians collectively expLoring a very complicated problem space and trying to figure out exactly what the problem is at the same time that they're solving the problem. So that's problem finding creativity. Flats and lots of research shows that problem finding creativity leads to more breakthrough innovations.

So the more problem finding IT is, the more important the creative solution is. So more likely to be a break through, uh, qualitatively forward, whether a problem solving creativity tends to be more incremental, uh, you could have an innovation that may generate a product that generate a lot of money for your company, but it's not surprising. And you know IT doesn't uh IT doesn't change the industry. IT doesn't change the way people work on to dated a so we call that problem finding creativity problem, sorry, problems solving creativity, the problem finding creativity, that where we get the major world changing innovations.

what's an example of a problem finding creativity that maybe we could relate to? Would that be like? I don't know. I'd rather have you talk about IT here, the expert, what would be a concrete example that something we can look to, the people can say, oh, I can see that what that came from a problem .

finding perspective oh yeah, a lot of famous innovations that we're all familiar. So i'll start with the story. Where are most of the listeners want know where it's going.

So it's gonna a problem finding story for the listener. So going back to I think IT was twenty ten software programmer in sick valley named Kevin system right at that time, smartphones had developed the GPS feature. And I don't know how many people today remember when smartphones didn't have a GPS, which you didn't know, where do you work?

So now you have the ability to detect where you are with the GPS feature. Um around the same time, phones started to have cameras. So there was a time before twenty ten when phones did not have cameras.

So you have these new technologies, G P S, location detection in canberra. And a lot of companies were developing new apps to take advantage of these technologies. So Kevin system decided i'm going to do a location sharing APP so you can log into my APP.

You can say, hey, I met starbucks. You don't even have to say that they have no ocean starbucks. And then you have a network of friends where you share your location with these other people.

And so this was the nature of Kevin systems APP. He said, okay, i'm gona release this in the APP store. Lots of people are gonna download IT, then, you know, you know, go public, make lots of money.

The APP was called burbo B U R B N. And very few people. I've heard of burbo because IT was not successful. Turns out people really aren't sharing their location. Are they just more and excited about IT? But system had added a feature to turbin where you could take a photo of where you were so when you are going to share your location.

So now phones have this camera feature, so why not add that to your APP so you would take a photo and you would share that? And he released the APP again. And IT turns out that people still weren't sharing their location, but they were sharing the photos.

And this was an example of the problem finding, right? Because system had thought the problem need to solve is location sharing, hadn't even thought about photo sharing, but now he's realized by engaging in the process of creativity and interacting with users, that there actually is a problem I had and thought about. And that problem started to come together in his mind.

He said, you know, how can I develop a photo sharing? APP? Uh, he developed a version of IT.

He called scotch. So, you know, he like burgin, he like scotch. Scotch was bugging people, were not sharing photos, came out with another version.

So we have this kind of wandering in provision, really is in provision process associated with problem finding. And then he re named the APP instagram, instagram, the photo sharing up. That was not what Kevin systems started out.

That wasn't the problem he was trying to solve. He was trying to solve the location sharing problem. And along the way discovered a new problem.

And that LED to a more important break through than just another location sharing up. And of course, we all know instagram now. It's just an incredible success. So that's a great example of a story of this improvisational wandering process that uh leads to the formulation of a new problem and that sorter process being more significant, more surprising innovation because of the need to discover a completely new problem.

So let's go a little deeper on this concept of creative insight that you've talked about the aha moment or what you cause Sparks. You write in your book about insight problems and how researchers have been studying the way this, the set of Sparks happens. And over the years, researchers have changed in terms of what they believe about how those problems get solved to the point where there is a Spark or in a harm moment. Can you give us a sense, just kind of an overview of of where we came from, where we are today? When IT comes to those Sparkly aha moments, we were really in a different place today.

The importance of this concept of the Spark of creativity is that IT contrast with the insight is the creativity. When we think about creativity being a big insight, sometimes people will call IT a flash insight. And in fact, I will book on myself called flashes of insight.

So that flash of insight is associated with this myth of creativity as originating in a really big and significant idea. But all the research on creativity and innovation in the world, world shows that almost never how significant innovations happen. They don't happen from one person having a really big idea, a big flash.

Instead, what we see, our very small ideas, lights and lots of small ideas over time coming together that lead to the emergence of an important and surprising new innovation. So I call those individual small ideas. I call them Sparks.

So I think of Sparks being small ideas and contrast with the insight view, or it's a big idea or flash of insight. Each of those Sparks involves the moment of insight, right? IT takes human creativity to come up with new ideas.

But the research shows that generally one idea doesn't lead to success that doesn't have an impact. Most innovations, most inventions, involve lots and lots of small ideas over time that come together again, generally in a wandering improvisational process. So that's why I talk about Sparks of insight to emphasize that creativity comes from small ideas over time.

So there's all a lot of really nice the correlations without one of the being small ideas are easy to have. Anyone can come up with small ideas. It's a huge chAllenge for yourself to expect to come up with a huge flash of insight.

And that's what leads people to think they're not creative. I don't have these big clashes of insight, but anyone can have the small ideas. And that that gets back to the cognitive psychology research, which shows that everybody has this capability in their brain to come up with small ideas and to come up with these small ideas on a regular daily basis.

It's it's not a mystery. Psychologists know how this happens in the brain, and it's based in cognitive capabilities that we all have. Everyone has the same cognitive material that allows you to have these small Sparks of ideas.

So a lot of the psychology research ah, I will study exactly this. What IT goes on in the mind when someone's having an idea, or as researchers is often call IT, uh, creative insight. Those cognitive capabilities are just part of being human. We all have this potential disability to have these small ideas, and that's the the psychology of creative insight.

K, I love this quote from your book you write. Creativity isn't about rejecting convention and forgetting what we know. Instead, it's based on past experience and existing concepts. And the most important plastic experiences are in social groups filled with collaboration. I think sometimes, I think sometimes we forget, right, that we're building on or we're referencing things we've experienced, things we have, we've known things we've uh, thought about. And so yeah please say say more about that.

New ideas are always combinations of existing ideas. You don't create with an empty print, uh, you need that, uh, cognitive material in the way people become more creative isn't took, just change themselves into a new kind of human being. You fill your brain with raw material.

You gather and motion from different people, from different disciplines, different countries, different subject, is whatever you can do to fill your mind. Because these small Sparks, these new ideas, are going to be combinations of material authority in your mind. The more material, if you have your mind, the more potential there is to have these small Sparks, these moments of insight and lots of psychological research showing that these cognitive combinations are conceptual combinations.

They are more likely to be surprising and new and truly innovative. If you are combining two mental concepts or two ideas, combining two concepts that are very different from each other, or sometimes researchers will call IT uh, distant combination or, uh, remote association. So these uh, psychological researchers who studied the cognitive basic of conceptual combination, we realize that all of these new ideas are grounded in material that's already in your mind, and you're more likely to be creative if you have different counts, helps coming together.

So that leads to the power of group interaction or group collaboration. You're ggt na get conceptual material from the people you're interacting with that is not already in your brain and which you might not have encountered any other way when you put people, dig other in groups and have them interact. That's the power of how I can enhance your own personal creativity. Yes, there is a group genius, but being in the group also increases your own creative potential because IT gives you that opportunity to bring a lot of new information into your brain that wouldn't have been there if you'd SAT alone at your computer.

keep. What world do analogies play? How do they pop up?

Analogies are a basic feature of our candidate architecture, where, as I was saying earlier, your brain has all sorts of cogent material in IT you know memories um but not only memories of facts and details but we have much more complex cognitive tive structures like concepts and conceptual relationships and entire theoretical frameworks.

We understand our own culture and what sorts of conversation you generally have with different kinds of people. You talk in a certain way with your spouse, you talk in a different way with your child, and then a third way, you know, with people at work. So our brains are able to do a lot of different things. I'm calling all of that cognitive of architecture .

and analogy .

involves multiple elements of what's going on in your brain. You're making a comparison on between, uh let's say a concept from um a book that you recently read and a concept, let's say a chAllenge you have while you're outside gardening. An analogy brings together two very different fears of this cognitive architecture in your brain that tends to be associated with what i've referred to as a distant combination, or remote association.

They all share this characteristic of bringing together two things in your mind that are very different from each other. And then the potential is what we call analogy or metaphor. They are based in a very similar talk to the processes. The potential is that you can take the the conceptual structure of one part of your mind, and you can apply that conceptual structure to another part of your mind. And that's what we will call an analogy. So that allows you to restructure the target area in a way, uh, that the source of the analogy and that restructuring often, not always, but the potential of that restructuring is that you'll have a new kind of conceptual combination that you wouldn't have come up with any other way. A lot of new ideas come from this kind of analogy, where you take an area from one sphere of your life and you apply IT to a chAllenge your problem in another area.

The key da understanding innovation is to realize the collaborative webs are more for the creative people. The one that I found unforced ating in your book was thinking about boston versus ili on valley. And how those collaborative webs are different. Give creative sort of these different clusters?

Yes, absolutely. So a collaborative web is a network of lots and lots of people who are exchanging ideas with each other in a similar improvisational way to address or a theater group. So a social network, facebook is an example.

But a you also have uh, innovation ecosystems, in particular regions or cities that you could also take up as a collaborative web. Anything that brings together lots and lots of people, resulting in what I call emergent innovation, new ideas that emerged from a collective of individuals. This, a historical case study, is just fascinating.

If you go back to the nineteen and eighties, and I graduated from M I T. In ninety eighty two with a computer size degree and at that time, the boston area was just as important as silicon valley in computer technology. Um whatever was going on in silicon valley was also happening in and outside of boston.

So they were peers in contributing to the the roots of the information age, generating personal computers. You know, the internet was based for a long time, bult, barna and newman on right, one twenty eight in boston. So now we look back to that time, and all we talk about is silicon value.

Boston has many successful companies, but we don't think about at the same way as silicon valley, even though back in the nineteen eighties, they were peers, they were equivalents. So what is a fascinating book that analyzed the history in the book now? Say twenty years old, but came twenty years, you know after the nineteen eighties by sex, anyone.

The book has called regional advantage, analyzing what is the nature of the collaboration connections in a region that makes IT more likely for that region to be successful as an innovative region. And IT has to be an emergent collective. You don't have silicon valley being more successful than boston because Steve jobs just happened to live there. There's a lot more going on than having just one individual uh gets us again away from that lone genius myth to um we're really looking at an entire regional ecosystem that I think of as a collaborative web.

Key, there are two questions then I wrap up every interview with, and the first one is focused on the theme of the podcast, which is curiosity, what most curious about today.

I'm fascinated in how artists and designers approach their work. I've done a lot of interviews with professional artist, professional designers in new york, class s Angeles, chicago. And what i've discovered is that they engage in an essentially improvisational process.

And that improvisational process has a lot of characteristics that are similar to group improve sation that you have small Sparks of ideas for a moment to moment, and the Sparks come together over time and result in a problem finding process. There is a problem formulation that emerging from the act of engaging in a creative process. So there, I guess I could say i'm going back to individual creativity, if you will, because i'm looking at, uh, individual painter or architect, graphic designer.

But i'm seeing a lot of parallels with what I see with improvising on sambo, this kind of watering improvisational pet, the importance of small ideas connecting over time, and the emergence of a new way of thinking about the problem as supposed to problem solving. You're not just trying to paint something where you know what I was when you start of the painting emerges from engaging in the world. And yes, I just find that so fascinating that we see this improvisational emergent process at the group level, also at the individual level. And like we were saying at the regional level, all these different levels, we see very similar processes of emergence through and provision interaction and .

keep the last thing I wanted to ask, anything I haven't asked, that you'd like to speak to, anything you want to leave our listeners with.

We could do A A whole another interview with very specific practical advice about what you should do. So i'll leave a listener's with uh technique garn approach to the day that uh couldn't enhances your creativity. It's a the kind of awareness or mindset of looking around you and seeing what's going on in a way that you might not Normally see that often is associated with greater creativity.

If you're just stable, top open your eyes and see new things, uh, down the side walk you walked on every day that you wouldn't have seen before. Uh, so that's a an important way to enhancing creativity is to look more closely to open your eyes to not be looking at your phone. And that's a good way to start.

Um and I would say try looking up at the roofs of buildings. Let's make IT really simple and you walking by building, look up at the roof and really try to notice what what is up there, what's up there on the roof and look for something on a roof that you're not really sure why it's there, that that of looks a little weird. What's going on with that roof? That kind of mind set is associated with exceptional creators, especially artists and designers, so that something I can recommend for your listeners, I have a lot of different techniques about this in my book called zig egg, the surprising pt, to create a creativity. But just look up at the topes of buildings tomorrow and the next day and look for something where you're not sure why it's there is a wonderful .

thing to leave us with. And i'm to put a little plug in to build on this idea of noticing. Several years back, at least, I had an author on the podcast, rob Walker, and he wrote a book called the art of noticing one hundred and thirty one ways to Spark creativity, find inspiration and discover joy.

And the every day. And the things he shares in there are these wonderful practices or exercises, is to cultivate what you're talking about. And i'll be sure to add that to the show.

Note that is a great companion peace to what you just described. I can't thank you enough. IT has been such a pleasure to speak with you.

kid. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Curious minds at work is made possible through a partnership with the innovative circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer in editor rob make a belly for leading the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen. Each episode, we give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity this week at salmon rushest mewar knife meditations after an attempted harder in IT, he describes the twenty twenty two attempt on his life is a story of the people in the art he turned to throughout his healing process. IT is response to the question, what do you do when your worst fear is realized?