What does a pinecone have to do with reading and writing?
Think for a moment about a pinecone.
What does a pinecone have to do with reading and writing?
In the year 1818 in France, a nine-year-old boy accidentally blinded himself with a hole puncher while helping his father make horse harnesses.
The story goes that a few years had passed and the boy, who had loved reading was sitting in his garden, probably feeling great sorrow and despair over his inability to enjoy his books anymore.
Imagine a loss of that scale.
His brother hands him a pinecone. The boy runs his fingers over the cone, feeling the distinctively raised differences between the scales.
An idea intuitively flashes through the boy’s mind. He conceptually integrates the feel of different pinecone scales with an alphabet of raised dots.
These dots could be put on paper, so the blind could feel and read what was written on it. It’s a way of coding.
Louis Braille had just invented a method for blind people to read. Not the details yet, but the idea.
In this way, Louis Braille opened up a new world.
Braille made a creative connection between two things that don’t go together, a pinecone and reading.
When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will try to fill the gaps and form a whole to make sense of it.
This willingness to use your imagination to fill in the gaps produces an idea that most people would never imagine.
This is perhaps why Einstein claimed that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Although Louis was unfamiliar with the term, he had just used conceptual integration to create a solution to a universal problem.
Blending ideas, concepts, or methodologies that don't seem to belong together, to create something new is the basis for creativity that solves problems, disrupts the status quo, and, well… makes the world a better place to inhabit.
Conceptual integration is a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious process, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language.
The mind is a pattern matching machine
Pretty cool, huh? This is a program your brain uses to conserve energy.
We become what we practice.
Neuroscientist Donald Hebb first used the phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together in 1949 to describe how pathways in the brain are formed and reinforced through repetition.
In yogic thought we would say, where the energy is, there is your consciousness.
The more the brain does a task, the more developed the pathway becomes, making the process more embodied over time.
Our brains always follow the path of least resistance. Homeostasis is an essential survival process, “the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements.”
We use patterns to make decisions. This is why you often see people repeat the same old mistakes — or get involved in the same bad relationships time and time again.
Our brains create repeatable pathways to save energy. The same goes for decision-making. According to current research, we make 35,000 decisions a day.
99% of the decisions are made unconsciously. This is why our thinking is often flawed by biases and poor programs, which are shortcuts in our unconscious decision-making process.
This also explains why our creative thinking often isn’t very creative at all.
Our brain programs keep running the same old patterns generating the same old ideas. Our innovation becomes stale and we fall into the herd thinking.
We must disrupt our patterns, surprise them into new connections, and override our traditional way of thinking to generate new ideas.
The good news is there are frameworks you can follow to help you come up with creative ideas and solutions. Coaching is one of those frameworks because it makes you dig deeper and find new perspectives.
“If you put three or four dissociated ideas together and create awkward relationships with them, the unconscious intelligence that comes from those pairings is quite startling sometimes, quite provocative.” — David Bowie
Disrupt thought patterns to create new connections.
One of the best ways to inspire creativity is to create a playful environment. The most innovative companies in the world understand this. A company is a culture. So a good question to ask is…
“How might we make our workplace more like a playground and a living laboratory?”
How did Google answer this question?
When designing its corporate headquarters, Google created many spaces and services that function like playgrounds:
Google clusters creative teams into groups of three or four, with tentlike awnings overhead that cut down on ambient noise and create a quirky sense of clubhouses.
Google offers free chef-prepared breakfasts, lunches, and dinners in fanciful cafes. These meals inspire employees to stay and talk with each other—most often about their work. By paying for a $10 lunch, Google gets a $50-an-hour employee to collaborate with others as they eat.
The walls in the Googleplex are whiteboards so workers can stop and write on the walls when they discuss ideas. Other workers then may stop by and add to the ideas there.
Employees have access to free fitness centers, video games, pool tables, massages, haircuts, child care, and even on-site physicians. Employees want to be at work.
Google HQ is designed to be a creative space. Employees are encouraged to come up with wacky ideas and invite employees to pursue 20 percent of projects—developing their passions for up to 20 percent of their paid time. This invitation to “play” in areas of personal interest causes the employees to bring their excitement and learning back to their regular work.
The Google ecosystem understood that the best ideas are rarely logical. It is often the illogical ideas that resonate and lead somewhere brand new.
Conceptual integration has been used forever.
Leonardo Da Vinci used conceptual integration. He blended art and science and did alright for himself.
In 1787 Levi Hutchins blended a clock with an alarm.
In the 1940s, bored surfers in California put wheels on crates (crate scooters) and invented skateboarding.
John Lennon and Yoko One used art and social activism to imagine the peace movement in a fresh way.
Thinking differently is a choice.
Random Objects
Select 20 objects at random. You can select any objects, objects at home, objects at work, or objects you might find walking down the street. Or you can imagine you are in a technologically-oriented science museum, walking through the Smithsonian Institute, or browsing in an electronics store. Make a list of 20 objects that you would likely see.
Make two lists of 10 objects each on the left and right sides of the paper (see example below). Pick one from the left and combine it with one on the right. When you find a promising new combination, refine and elaborate it into a new invention.
It’s a very interesting exercise to imagine how things that don’t appear to go together might go together.
“ If you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never truly be right.
Creativity and innovation are humanities greatest skill. We wouldn’t be here without them.
If we have a growth mindset, we can start to understand our creativity and learn to think differently.
We can serve our world better, create work that truly matters to us, our companies can drive innovation, make the world a better place, and make good stuff happen.
We will never be comfortable and creative. The sooner we accept that and lean into uncomfortableness, the better ideas we will create.
To explore the opportunity to work with David, book a free consultation here.