Hello, welcome back to our course, Cracking the Creativity Code. This is week two of our four week course together. I'd like to give you a brief preview of some of the topics that we're going to address. [COUGH] We'll do a review of zoom in, zoom out. The method that we're teaching you, how to apply to become more creative in a practical sense. This week, we're going to talk about creativity research, Picasso, how to make creativity almost a kind of autotelic, meaning a self-generating process. An example of creativity and zoom in, zoom out, how you get to Mars. Am I going to Venus? On becoming Walter Mitty, we'll talk about Arie Ruttenberg and how he got a job with an ad agency in a very unconventional way. Creativity, challenging assumptions, self-test discovery and delivery. And finally, a summary. The reading for this week is the book, our book, Cracking the Creativity Code, chapters seven and eight, and the epilog. Without further ado, let's move ahead to session one. We'll review the zoom in zoom out framework and see how it works in action. So again, reminding you of the method, and hopefully this is becoming part of your DNA, part of your thinking, our method. The zoom in, the microscope, grasping every possible detail and fact related to the challenge at hand. So, we've given you seven challenges. In fact, the seventh challenge is a choice of two, so there are really eight challenges there. And using the ZiZoZi method, the first step that you will take is to understand every possible fact and relevant detail related to the challenge, so you really, really understand it. Look at it under a microscope. When Edison invented the light bulb, he did a zoom in on every aspect of electricity, dynamos, creating electricity, transporting the electricity. Creating the filament in the light bulb. He did a very comprehensive zoom in on the problem. Then once you are sure you really, really understand the challenge, the details of the problem, the facts. You do the zoom out. It's basically a change your mindset. Your mindset becomes one of wild ideas and you go up to the 989th floor of the imagination elevator in order to collect wild ideas, to collect solutions, to widen the range of choice. And you do this with a mindset that says there is a solution. There is a way to do this. And to find these ways, I have to explore wild ideas, head in the clouds and then collect these ideas. Search the world, do benchmarking, and we'll talk about that this week. Scour the world for different approaches, technologies, methods, solutions and then collect them, and then bring them back down to the ground. We'll learn about a method for challenging basic assumptions as a way of becoming creative. And then finally, the zoom in. We return to the ground floor with a shopping basket full of ideas. And then we converge by selecting the best idea. So, we diverge and zoom out to collect ideas and then converge, discarding impractical ideas and picking the one best choice. And by the way, we may need to zoom and zoom out several times until we actually hit on that one solution, that one creative idea that's going to work. As you can see, the zoom in zoom out method is a kind of a combination of discovery, ideas, and delivery. Choosing ideas and then making them happen. Making them practical. And there is a tradeoff between these two things because they're very different mindsets. A mindset of wild imagination and then hard-headed practical management. Very few people have those skills together in high, high levels. So you may need to find a partner or you may need to work on your own skills and this week together, we'll work on self-exploration. And we'll do a self-test on discovery and delivery so that you can learn more about yourself, whether you're a delivery person or more of a discovery person. Or are you a rare person that scores high on both of those key qualities. I'd like to refer you to our book, to chapter 3 [COUGH] and page 23. And in this chapter, we quote an interesting man named William Bernbach. William Bernbach created one of the world's great advertising agencies called BBDO, a legend in the advertising world. One of the B's stand for Bernbach. He was one of the founders. The O in BBDO stands for Alex Osborn and Osborn wrote a famous book about creativity, and we'll cite his method later in this week as well. Osborne method is rather similar to our own, zoom in, zoom out. The advertising world is interesting for people who study and teach creativity. Advertising companies are the only organizations really that have a department whose official name is the Creativity Department. And the job of people in the Creativity Department is to come up with creative ideas. And they hand those ideas off to a production department that turns it into a commercial or a print ad, or some other actual tangible form. But the passage that we quote here in chapter 3 on page 23, from Bernbach, says that, in the advertising agency, in his experience, the best and most experienced idea people always say whatever was in their minds at the moment, without filtering it, without apologizing. So, Bernbach is recommending here, in the zoom out stage when you're discovering ideas, float those ideas without constraints. Move along the creativity road at 200 miles an hour without stopping and throw those ideas off like sparks, and don't pause to consider them or reject them but just create them and then put them in your shopping basket and collect them. So, the idea, people pour out the ideas and in the advertising agency, there is a hunter who is searching for ideas. And the hunter is the person who has to choose among the different ideas. And sometimes the people who had the ideas found that the one that was selected was not the one they thought was the best. So the discovery and delivery is sometimes done by separate people. And the people who do delivery are specialists in knowing what will work, what is pragmatically feasible. Bernbach says the final choice surprised many people. They didn't think that, that idea was the best one. But, of course, the creative director is the one who gets to choose from all of these ideas. The creative people know their rule is to generate a vast number of ideas and then spread them out. Stick them up on the wall. And then someone experienced with feasibility and pragmatic applications and implementation knows the budget, the time, the place. They can make the choice which of them will be implemented. Which idea will move into the delivery stage rather than discovery. So, we've now had several passes at the zoom in zoom out framework. By now, you've understood it well, heard some stories, heard how it's applied. By now, we hope you are beginning to make this a part of your own DNA, a part of your own thinking. The wild imagination and the practical examination of the facts, the details, every aspect of the challenge that is relevant. This ends session one. Please stick with us when we go on to explore further our zoom in zoom out method.
