Hello. Welcome back to Cracking the Creativity Code, Part One, Discovering Ideas. I'm Shlomo Maital. I'm especially happy that you've come back to continue our course together. We have two more weeks. Some very important tools and approaches, methods, tips, to help you discover ideas, creative ideas that change the world. Let me give you a brief preview about what we're going to do in our ten sessions during this week. We'll continue working on our method called zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, and talk about first, the role of mistakes, accidents, and serendipity, hitting on things by mistake. We'll talk about how to sharpen your vision, your observation skills. I'll teach you a tool called empathic design, empathy, feeling empathy. We'll talk about failure, how important failure is in actually attaining success. In terms of zoom out, we'll speak about how to collect data by directly observing. We'll do a case study about a great design company, an innovation design company, called IDEO based in Palo Alto, California, and their approach to building creative ideas with a team based approach. We'll talk about how to take wild, wild ideas and then tame them, and why that's a good idea. And then we'll discuss how to sell your ideas, how to present your ideas to get people on board your team to get people to invest in you, to help you implement them. We'll talk about creativity in large organizations and how to become an intrapreneur, an entrepreneur working inside a large organization. And finally in our last session, we'll talk about narratives, building stories. A story is a powerful way to present your idea to other people, to sell it, and actually implement it, and I'll go through a number of cases studies. So without further ado, let's launch into our first session, and our first session is about the role of serendipity and accidental discoveries. I'm very fond of a book by a former colleague of mine here at Technion, who is now working in America, astrophysicist Mario Livio. He's written a wonderful book, Brilliant Blunders from Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and Universe, and the key point that he makes is that mistakes are not only part of creative thinking, they're actually an essential part of our progress. If it weren't for blunders, we'd be going down blind alleys. In order to be creative, you have to be willing to take risks, that's obvious, but you also have to be willing to make mistakes, and this troubles me a bit because in our schools, what do we teach our children? We teach them to take tests and that they have to get everything right, and they get everything right by repeating the answer that the instructor, the teacher, wants to hear, and so it's a bad thing to make mistakes, but, in fact, many of our great world changing breakthroughs are a result of errors, mistakes, failures, and here are a couple of examples. Let's begin with Alexander Fleming. So we recently marked the 60th anniversary of Alexander Fleming's death. Alexander Fleming was a Scottish pharmacologist and botanist, and in 1928, he was doing an experiment, and he had a Petri dish, culture growing on the Petri dish, and he looked at the Petri dish, and he saw what you see you your screen, he was growing Staphylococcus bacteria, and there's mold on the Petri dish, mold. Most scientists would have discarded the Petri dish in anger that they had mold on their Petri dish, on their culture of bacteria, but Alexander Fleming was curious, and curiosity is so, so crucial. I spoke yesterday with a scientist who's 76 year old, years old, tremendously dynamic, creative, still active, inventing, and I asked him, what's your secret, and he said one word, curiosity. Fleming was curious. He looked at this Petri dish, and he wondered, how come the Staphylococcus bacteria are not attacking this mold, what's going on? Well, my friends, that mold was, as you know, penicillin, and penicillin later saved the lives of a great many soldiers in World War II who were wounded, and whose wounds would have become infected, or were infected, and were cured by the penicillin. Fleming saved many lives, but there's another point here, discovery and delivery. Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, but he shared the Nobel Prize in 1945 with two other scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, and they discovered how to manufacture penicillin, and that was not a simple matter. You can't just grow mold. So the Nobel Prize for the first antibiotic was given to the discoverer of the antibiotic and those who made it possible. Discovery and delivery, those two things are absolutely vital. Now in our book, Cracking the Creativity Code, we have a number of stories in chapter five about the zoom in stage where people make observations that occur, often by accident. An Ethiopian shepherd who noticed that his goats were behaving strangely after they ate the fruit from one of the bushes they were grazing on, that was the discovery of coffee. In 1865, that's 150 years ago, Charles Goodyear discovered a new kind of rubber, vulcanized rubber. By accident he spilled sulfur on a hot stove. Sulfur mixed with natural rubber. It was a mistake, it was an accident. He spilled it on the stove, but he was curious enough to look at what came out, and what came out was rubber with superior qualities. So Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanized rubber by accident, and many of you may drive cars that ride on Goodyear tires to this day. So the point here is that creativity demands that we try things, that we take risks. It demands that we be willing to make mistakes and if you've learned in school that making a mistake is a terrible thing, and you have to avoid mistakes at all costs, this will damage your creativity. The greatest risk that we can take, I believe, is that we never take any risks in our lives, in our thinking processes, in what we do, in what we try, in what we eat, in what we listen to as music, and so on. And a great many world changing things are built on mountains, mountains of failed ideas. So Mario Livio's wonderful book talks about five scientists, Einstein, Darwin, Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, the great astronomer, and they all made major discoveries, but they all made mistakes. Darwin gave us the wonderful theory of evolution, but he built his theory of evolution on a mistaken idea of genetics because in his time, people believed that babies were kind of like a paint. You got some blue paint from the husband, and yellow paint from the wife ,and they were mixed together and they make some kind of blend of genetic characteristics. That's not how genetics work, and in fact that theory of genetics, they don't work very well with this theory of evolution where traits occur by accident that help people survive and procreate, but the traits come from one person, not from two blended together, and if genetics were a blending, then each generation, the excellent mutation, the excellent accidental mutation, would be diluted by half, and then again by half, and it would soon disappear. So Darwin got it wrong, but his theory was actually right, and there are a great many examples people willing to make mistakes. So bottom line, try things. Try things, be willing to accept mistakes, be willing to make errors, learn from your errors. Don't be afraid, and recognize that part of creativity are enlightened errors, enlightened mistakes, serendipitous discoveries, curiosity, risk taking, boldness, courage, and willingness to screw up. That ends Session one, please join us for Session two.
