Creativity requires us to collaborate with others. This course is designed to make you a better creative collaborator. Creativity can require us to bring together knowledge from different areas, often known by different people. We need to foster effective collaboration rather than have those differences lead to misunderstandings and conflict. The ideas that we generate, individually or collectively, will be evaluated by others, such as bosses, funders, and customers. These audiences will likely have different concerns when they hear about your ideas and are likely to evaluate ideas differently than you do. We need to pitch our ideas in ways that get others excited about them, rather than bored or confused, so that we can expand the group of collaborators in our creative efforts.
1-2 Changing Others' Perspectives
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Del curso dictado por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Creativity Toolkit II: Creative Collaboration
82 calificaciones
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
82 calificaciones
Curso 4 de 7 en SpecializationInnovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship
Conoce a los instructores
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
So beyond making people more open to our ideas,
we might also want them to learn and actually understand the ideas.I know it's crazy.
But I mean, it just means that part of what we're
talking about when you pitch is, it may charismatic.
Do I have a look and feel but then there's
another element of what are they going to remember later.
Are they going to remember me,
are they going to remember vaguely liking
an idea or are they going to remember the idea, right.
It is my goal to actually get them to understand the idea.
Change their perspective.
And that will be challenging in and of itself.
So we have to help them work through that process as well.
Right. So how can we get the person we're
pitching to go through that perspective change process?
"We can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second,
but it can take years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull".
It's a great quote from Charles Kettering who is the head
of GM research in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
Appreciating a new idea,
a creative idea, generated by other people,
can be really hard.
Other people may not understand the idea,
they may have no sense of what it is you're talking about.
Other people may not see the potential in the idea,
they get it but they don't see why it would matter,
and where it would take them.
Finally, other people may see an idea is failing on the very criteria they tend to use.
It just doesn't sound good.
It sounds like it won't work.
It's not as good as what we already have.
And this is why we need to find ways to get other people to
understand and appreciate the ideas that we are pitching to them.
So, what does it mean to get someone to understand and appreciate our ideas?
By now the answer I'm going to give you probably won't be surprising.
It means we have to encourage other people to change their perspectives.
Communicating is not just handing facts from one person to another.
We want them to learn to come to see the world differently.
So they can recognize the value that we see and an idea for themselves.
And that means our task as communicators,
is to help others learn to change their perspectives.
Well, how do we change our perspectives?
Well we've talked about this.
So who are we trying to pitch, right?
So think about our audience.
What are the pages of their perspective.
What are the parts, actions,
goals, events, self-concept, that they might have.
Who is our audience.
What role will they put themselves in.
What event do they think they are in.
What goals do they already have.
What actions and parts are they already thinking about as being relevant,
and important, and obvious.
Now, which of those pages might need to change.
What aspects of pages could be different for your audience and they are right now.
Right so how is their perspective going to have to change.
Is it a goal change?
Is it an event change? Is it a self-concept change?
Maybe just a part change.
What is it that, they're going to have to change their perspectives about,
in order for them to appreciate the idea that we have.
Next, once we have a sense of the kind of change we want them to go through,
then we can think about what cues might trigger
them to start making that change to their perspectives.
We've talked about a variety of cues,
but the three most relevant and communication are surprise, dissatisfaction, and impasse.
Can we say something to someone else that they
won't expect and that they didn't see coming.
That might surprise them gather their attention
and therefore make them interested in hearing what we have to say next.
Can we point out something that they should be dissatisfied with,
so that they're willing to undergo the effort to think a
little differently and be open to a new possibility.
Can we tell them that we're at an impasse, that we're stuck,
we've gone as far as we can go,
and there's no point continuing.
We have to change course and head in a different direction.
Which cue can you use to prompt them to want to
change their perspective or at least be open to the possibility.
Finally, what tools do we have to make them change their perspective.
Can we offer them an analogy.
Can we offer them a way to recategorize something.
Can we form a novel combination that encourages them to see the world in a different way,
than they had seen it previously.
So for example, maybe we have a new idea and we want somebody to do something different.
So we then can think about what cues can I use,
what tools can I offer.
So I can guide them to make a change to their own perspective some aspect of their pages.
And as a result,
arrive at a new understanding by which the idea makes sense,
has value, seems relevant,
and seems valuable, and important, and useful.
That might be a little indirect.
So there's a wonderful quote from Antonie de Saint-Exupery,
the famous author of The Little Prince who talked about it this way,
"If you want to build a ship,
don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them to tasks and to work,
but rather teach them to long for the immensity of the sea"
So let's try an example pitch.
Here we go, situation, right?
Your hotel has gotten complaints about noise,
you just upgraded the sound proofing.
Your larger goal though is to enable guest to feel as if they had done more than travel,
they have truly gotten away.
What can you say to employees,
so that this goal will guide their actions.
So, you could just tell them,
"Hi everyone, we spent all this money on soundproofing.
We want people to appreciate how quiet it is.
We want to take great care of people." Okay.
Yeah, I'm going to remember that.
I practically fell asleep.
So those are the pitches we often hear.
They're incredibly boring, they're incredibly abstract.
It's just raw information.
Memorable.
Yeah, I mean it's better than after focused ethnographic exploration.
We developed empathic connections,
with our core users and curated a collection of innovators. I mean.
That sounds like a professor giving a seminar,
no one is going to remember that. That's terrible.
So no matter how well intentioned and maybe the actions are fabulous,
it's just noise as a communication.
It's not a story.
Right. So you could tell them alternatively, "Hi everyone,
we want you to take great care of people in our new quieter hotel.
For every guest note of thanks and appreciation for your efforts.
We will pay you $20."
So often, you think people are motivated by incentives, right?
And then we try to create simple financial incentives to align behavior.
And then we spend lots of time making sure they are
genuine about it and not just gaming the system.
Why not go deeper? Can we go into,
what are the values that you connect with?
What makes you your best self?
Hits home with you as a human being and fits what you
want to do to produce meaningful work and activity?
So, I don't maybe there's a simple analogy here.
So, let's use analogies as a tool.
What would make someone connect with the idea of
really taking care of someone and enabling them to really get away?
I think of things like holidays or birthdays.
So, if it's your birthday,
I don't want you to work on your birthday.
I want to take care of you on your birthday.
I don't want it to be a problem.
So, now we have an analogy.
Our guests are like family who arrive on their birthday.
Right.
We're the host, and we're going to do everything we can for them.
Right.
So, that's a way to meaningfully connect it.
A very simple analogy,
that makes it super concrete.
How it is we're supposed to treat people?
it puts the situation into context people familiar with it.
It means something to them. It allows them to empathize with the guest too.
I think it's a really great approach.
Yeah. So, and then now cue.
So, that's the analogy.
So, how are we going to set that analogy up?
There's surprise, there's dissatisfaction.
There are a number of cues.
So, here's one that I got the other day, which is,
I had one of our guests today in my office yelling at me.
I was really glad. I was like, are you kidding me?
He said, "No no. " I was really glad.
If they don't tell us what's wrong, we can't fix it.
Right.
So, I thank them for coming and telling me what they had to say and what was the issue.
Which is shocking enough for me to want to process the information.
Yeah.
So, that's a cue that I should pay attention to.
Exactly, and then I can tell you the story of what they yelled about,
and what I learned from it.
Now you're ready to listen to me.
Yeah. It reminds me of the strong culture organizations that have stories like Nordstrom.
The stories about customer service that really make you wake up and take notice.
They're communicating those cues to their employees in really effective way.
Indeed. Yeah, I'm gift wrapping the chain saw.
Exactly right.
So, that's a really concrete example of above and beyond customer service.
So, anyway so, the idea is what are
the tools that we can use to set up the idea we want to convey,
and then what are the cues that we can leverage to grab
people's attention and make them ready to hear an alternative interpretation,
and that alternative interpretation that is a perspective they can use moving forward
Michael thank you for joining us.
We're very pleased to have you here.
I would love to just start by asking you
about your work and what it is that you do in museums,
and what role does creativity play in
the work that you've done and you've had so many varied experiences?
So, I've spent my whole working career in museums and
heritage from being a curator, and then through a manager,
and then into leadership roles,
and creativity is not a word that you
use to associate with museums except of course artists,
and makers, and scientists whose work was represented in collections.
But the people who ran museums didn't do creative.
They did curating, they did cataloging, they did cleaning,
and putting in cases, and dolls,
and that sort of stuff but creative was not a word that was associated.
I was just conscious having watched a lot of visitors
go around historic properties and actually having gone round a lot myself.
How actually crushingly boring the experience was?
I mean people wander around,
they engage at a certain level,
they have a pleasant time,
they leave and mostly it just gets forgotten.
So, it seemed to me that if you can make different interventions which provoke wonder,
or surprise, or curiosity,
then people are more predisposed to learn.
I've always believed that learning starts with curiosity and wonder.
It doesn't start with information being thrown at you.
It just reminded me of experience I had in a museum.
I think it was in Sicily actually and it was in a castle,
and they had two mummies set up playing chess with each other.
We walked in and my daughter was just, "What is this?"
I think it's interesting that there can be
different ways of presenting the information that-.
Your daughter's experience is really interesting because if she says, "What is this?"
That's the first brilliant reaction.
However, it needs to be followed with some working out which is,
"Oh I see what this is,
and I see what this is making."
You need to go on from the what is this.
So, if the intervention is just surprise,
it's just shock, then it doesn't do the job.
So, just plunking art that doesn't fit in
the space just for the benefit of shock is not for me enough.
It has to then lead on to some insights about the space,
the people who live there,
the stories that inhabited that you wouldn't have had otherwise,
and then they have to add up to something as you go round.
You want to seeing people to have an insight that they wouldn't
have had otherwise if they just had a conventional presentation.
That it's most profound it can stick with you forever.
It can really do and there will be one or two moments
when that intervention can really stay.
So, when I do teaching around this,
I often ask people to think about a piece
of information they learnt in a historic site or museum,
a fact and in the main most people can't remember anything.
Yeah.
Because actually they're thrown information and they don't absorb it,
and then if you ask people there to think of
one moment that they were really moved at an old place,
the historic site, an old house, a castle,
most people have gotten experience that it normally is in here, and not in there.
It says it's telling a story rather than presenting objects out of order. It's.
The story is the thing.
So, generating durable change in how people think means we
should think about how to guide somebody else through
the creative process of changing their perspective.
It's a little bit like education.
How can we encourage someone else to reconsider what they think,
and find some new way of thinking interesting and useful as
opposed to irrelevant, incomprehensible wrong?
That's, When you guide someone through that process.
Yeah. It's the task of a teacher but obviously as a pitcher that's part of our job.
Right.
Is to teach an idea that you will find memorable,
interesting, worthwhile, and capable of being used.
Leading them to that conclusion.
Yeah. Making it so they want to learn.
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