Take inspiration from a diverse range of habits which all have one thing in common - to improve your chances of getting to better breakthroughs.
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Take inspiration from a diverse range of habits which all have one thing in common - to improve your chances of getting to better breakthroughs.
Creativity can appear mysterious. It's impossible to force ourselves to be creative and have ah-ha! moments because so much of what the brain does behind the scenes doesn't involve our direct attention or control. But, what if something as simple as briefly drifting into sleep could help?
What are the next two letters in this series - O, T, T, F, F…..? Sleep pioneer, William C. Dement, set this challenge to 500 students, with an instruction to think about the problem for 15 minutes before going to sleep and to write down any dreams they remembered as they awoke.
Do you struggle to get out of bed in the morning? If so, it could be your advantage. Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman suggests that when we’re stuck on a difficult problem, one of the best things we can do is set our alarm clock to go off a few minutes early.
Take this challenge: You have a cardboard box full of sand and some buried coins. You’re given a set of chopsticks and a spoon. Without tipping the box over or touching the sand with your hands, how do you get the coins out?
You are taken into a room with a table which has three items laid out i) a box of tacks ii) a book of matches iii) a candle. Your task is to attach the candle to the wall using any of the items available, without the candle wax dripping onto the table below. What do you do?
If we asked 100 people, how many do you think mull things over or sleep on things as part of how they routinely work? What’s your best guess?
How are you feeling? It turns out that your mood could be the difference between solving a problem, or not.
One evening, single parent Jerry Swartz simply wanted to occupy and entertain his three children so he brought home a laser pointer to show them. He started by shining the light onto different objects in the house and eventually started to shine the pointer onto moving objects to keep them engaged. They were simply relaxed, happy and everyone was in a good mood. Then he recounts that unexpectedly, “I knew I had it.”
Are you someone who tends to jump straight in to solve a problem? Or do you step back and sense check what the problem is about first? You may well be familiar with Einstein’s famous quote,"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” But what should you actually do in those 55 minutes? Flipping the problem around may be one of the best ways to spend that time.
The world is full of stories of nature inspiring real-world problem solving - sometimes in life saving ways. Business legend and philanthropist Bill Gates gives one of his favourite examples as being how the kangaroo inspired baby care. In the 1970’s two Colombian paediatricians, Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez, were struggling to care for pre-term infants due to inadequate and insufficient incubators in Bogota, Columbia. They turned to the natural world and took inspiration from how kangaroos care for their young.
How often do you consider the opposite of what you want to know? If you’re like most people, the answer is likely to be not very often.
The 19th century German mathematician Carl Jacobi was known for his ability to solve difficult problems by following a strategy of ‘man muss immer umkehren’ which means, “Invert, always invert.” If you haven’t yet heard of Carl Jacobi, it's worth taking a moment to acquaint with his ideas since he is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring teachers of his time and one of the greatest mathematicians in history.
What if we didn’t need to start from scratch when trying to solve a problem or if a partial blueprint already existed? The trick is often knowing where to look. How often do you take inspiration from nature and the natural world as a place to start?
One example (from many!) is how the porcupine quill is inspiring the design of surgical staples to help improve the healing process.
What happens if you are faced with a problem where you can't define the objectives in advance and there’s no apparent ‘right’ answer? What if there’s not enough known about the goals or that things feel too tangled and complex to work out?
There are some problems which can’t be solved very well through using the usual route of identifying the objectives, defining the desirable outcomes and working through a series of scheduled tasks to get there. The Psychologist Gary Klein recognised these as ‘wicked problems’ that need managing in a different way*. It’s these problems where experiments may be the only way to find the route forward.
At a time when many are in lock down, with the usual routines gone and people left trying to work out new ways of spending their time, what if we used this time to tackle problems differently too?
Studies show that incubating ideas substantially increases our likelihood of solving a problem. Interestingly, this is most likely with longer incubation periods and when not cognitively overloaded with tasks*. So if you find yourself facing longer periods of time indoors and with less routine or demanding work to occupy your mind, you may be able to make particular use of this habit to incubate ideas.
In February 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had a dream. It turned out to be quite an important dream which delivered an important outcome – the periodic table. Mendeleev had been working tirelessly to solve an incredibly complex problem: how to logically organise all the known elements in the universe. He had created a set of cards of all the elements that he would regularly shuffle and deal, with the hope that he find the rules that would explain how they all fitted together. He did this repeatedly and failed to crack the code. However, it was his dreaming brain that eventually solved what his awake brain could not.
Many of you may intuitively agree that the best ideas can often come from time in the pub, rather than time at work. However, before you down the bottle, there is a clear tipping point - we’re talking a small glass of wine rather than several.
Do you ever collide together what you know from completely different areas of your life to see new connections, similarities and opportunities? It's sometimes called the 'polymath mindset'*, this is all about synthesising and combining apparently disparate ideas together in new ways to create novel solutions.
People who take naps are twice as likely to solve complex problems than non-nappers*!
10 to 20 minutes is the perfect amount of time to nap to measurably boost your energy and alertness. NASA found that pilots who napped for 26 minutes improved their task performance by 34% and alertness by 54%, compared to pilots who didn't nap**.
The great Leonardo Da Vinci wrote in his notebooks that you should always assume that your first impression of a problem is usually biased towards your usual way of thinking. He always started by looking at the problem one way, then moved onto looking at the same problem a different way and then in other ways again. He called this “saper vedere” which translates to “knowing how to see”.*
When stuck on a challenge or problem, try thinking specifically about what you can learn from nature.
It’s a particularly fruitful area for inspiration and has led to many fascinating innovations; from hospital surfaces inspired by sharks, to the bullet train inspired by the kingfisher.
It can often feel like we’re chasing the clock, constantly rushing to meet never ending deadlines. However, it can be incredibly helpful to not just momentarily step away and come back to a challenge, but to go away and actually 'sleep on it'.
When facing a problem, our confidence can fluctuate – and widely so. Psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, called over-confidence, ‘the most significant of the cognitive biases’. In getting to grips with this bias it’s critical to understand when we are most prone to it.