What Can You Do With A Brick?

How many uses can you think of for a brick? Or a paper clip?  Or a broom handle? These questions are part of a classic measure of creativity called the Alternate Uses test.    Your creativity is measured by the fluency (total number of ideas), originality, and flexibility of your answers.  
 

There are two competing ideas about creativity and expertise.  One is that the better you are at something the more locked into conventional thinking you will be.  Ask experienced builders, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?” and you get -- build a wall, build a bigger wall, build a wall over there.  

In their Harvard Business Review article “The Experience Trap” Sengupta, Abdel-Hamid & Van Wassenhove showed that experience in project management actually hurt managers’ performance. 

We conclude that managers find it difficult to move beyond the mental models that they have developed from their experiences in relatively simple environments or that have been passed on to them by others. When complications are introduced, they either ignore them or try to apply simple rules of thumb that work only in noncomplex situations.  

They don’t create new ways of approaching a problem even as they can see that the current approach is not working.  This is explained by the automatic processing that goes along with high-level expertise.  When we get really good at something, say driving for example, we don’t think about what we are doing anymore – we perform on auto-pilot.   This approach says that if you want new ideas, you want people who are creative and outside of or new to a field.  Then you will get answers like this…….

The opposite view is that radical breakthroughs require a high level of expertise. The majority of research on creativity and high-level expertise shows that innovation that redefines a field does indeed come from people with extensive expertise in that field. (Weisberg, 2006).  It also shows, however, that expertise is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for disruptive innovation. 

So what are we to do?  Well, it turns out that you can “turn on” your creative potential.   When students participated in creativity exercises prior to problem solving, they produced more creative solutions.  You can work on problems and puzzles that require creativity before you tackle that new project.  No time for puzzles? Doing anything that is completely different from your normal way will help to put you in a creative mindset -- write with your non dominant hand, walk backwards, the list is limited only by your imagination.  In general, incorporating more variety into your normal routines builds your creative muscle -- drive home from work a different way, talk to strangers, learn to dance.

So what can you do with a brick?  Maybe you could set it on your desk to remind you to turn off auto-pilot and warm up your creative muscles before problem solving.  Maybe that brick is the metaphorical whack upside the head that turns loose your creative genius.    

Sengupta, K.,  Abdel-Hamid, T.K., & Van Wassenhove, L.N.  (2008). The Experience Trap. Harvard Business Review, 86 (2), 94-01.

Weisberg, R. W. (2006). Creativity: Understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention and the arts. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley