Access Teams of Expert Solvers led by World-Class Facilitators
TECH SCOUTING
$2,000Pressure Sensitive Adhesives for Metals $10,000 Design and Development of Precicion Planting Equipment HEADHUNTING
$2,000Corn Genetic Project Lead PRIOR ART
$10,000CITATION SEARCH Hueing Dyes for Fabrics $10,000 Water-Soluble Detergent Package |
Finding Your Animal Metaphor
So I designed a creativity course set in a zoo. Of course, fun and stimulation, while absolutely necessary for boosting creativity, won’t do the job all by themselves. A good training program needs more. See “The Training Sandwich.” First of all, if we do the zoo, our lesson plan and the location will have to tango. The zoo and its stimuli, the animals, will have to provide the lesson. They will teach us how to be more creative. It won’t do to simply set a creativity seminar in a zoo. From that challenge came the Creative Animal Safari. Why Animals The giraffe’s neck, the tiger’s sharp claws, and the skink lizard’s ability to drop off its tail give these animals successful survival advantages. Likewise, we human animals are still standing because we have evolved a totem pole of adaptations, the crown of which is creativity. Driven by natural instincts—our Seven Creative Juices—we are no less wild than zoo animals. Like animals in the zoo, however, we surround and enclose ourselves in cages—Knowledge, Order, Affinity, and Success—the Four Cages of Context. Surely you’ve noticed how much easier it is for you to advise someone else about their problems. At the zoo, observing animals in cages, it’s even easier to imagine how you might advize them on how to escape their confines. Let's flip that idea on its head: In a Creative Animal Safari, you observe zoo animals, find the one with whom you identify the most, and as you see how it might free itself, you understand how to help yourself release the creative animal in you. That's right. The animals teach you a thing or two! Animal Metaphors Fundamental to creative thinking is the idea of association. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler calls the combining or association of two previously unconnected ideas “bisociation.” Paul Plsek, the man behind directed creativity, calls it simply “association.” Using metaphors to solve problems and gain insight is a form of association not unlike using examples to train or parables to teach. When we hear the fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” we learn, without having it spelled out to us, that nobody believes liars even when they tell the truth. We understand the lesson better than if it had been spelled out to us, because we feel the boy’s pain and fear inviting his fate. We associate his fate with what could happen to us if we followed his bad habit of repeatedly raising false alarms. In a Creative Animal Safari or any other metaphor-based creativity exercise, we creative animals employ the human adaptation that enables us to associate, draw parallels, and empathize with someone in a similar situation. Our ability to make metaphors helps us objectively consider alternatives and foresee consequences, and use what we learn to develop an improved plan of action. Whether you visit a zoo or wander your own backyard or a public park, you’ll find that Mother Nature provides plenty of associations or metaphors you can apply to your issues. After all she’s had a few billion years to solve most of the world’s problems. Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems. 171 Right Brain Workouts are available in the 134-page paperback Right Brain Workouts: Aerobic Exercises for the Creative Side of Your Brain. Right Brain Workouts Explained |
Become a
Paid Problem Solver Sign up for
our free weekly Innovation Newsletter |
© 2007-2012 IdeaConnection Ltd. All rights reserved.