Getting a Handle on Creativity

The Design and the Designer - Part 2

I made a brief mention about systems thinking and associative thinking in the last post. In this post, I shall describe them in some detail, and explain their relationship to creativity.

There are basically two methods of formal thinking – one is analytical thinking and the second one is synthesis.

If you are asked to design a product – and if you are applying analytical mode of thinking, then you start to decompose the product into its parts, sub-systems, the relationships between the parts and so on.

If you apply systems thinking – you don’t start by decomposing the product or system into its sub-systems. First you place the system into the larger environment or the larger system of which it is only a part.

Sounds very abstract? I don’t blame you. Here are some examples:

Suppose you are asked to design a washing machine. An analyst engineer will probably apply law of 3, and divide it into three sub-systems – the control unit, the electrical unit, and the main rotary unit.

But, a designer will approach it differently. The designer starts by asking questions about the environment in which the washing machine will be used. She will ask who will use it. Where will it be used – in a usual apartment house hold, or in a hotel, or in a rural area and so on. Basically, what you are doing is to first study its relationship to the larger environment in which it is a part. These relationships give you very useful design parameters. A large part of the design is the study and understanding of the products’ place in the larger scheme of things. In a technical language, you may call it “usability”. But, philosophically, what you are doing is to apply systems thinking. If you understand this very well, then you can start to apply it as a mode of thinking, instead of usability study, functionality, ergonomics etc..

Some examples of how it is applied in modeling societies may be in order here, just to drive the point I am making. Russell Ackoff made systems thinking into a formal management subject. He is the first one who understood the need for studying the relationship to the larger system of which any system is but a part.

Once, Ford Foundation did a project in India to educate people about the need for family planning. The Ford people would visit many rural parts of India, gather all the villagers, tell them about the need for family planning, give them condoms and a transistor as a gift. All the Indians would attend the seminar dutifully, fully agree with everything that the Ford Foundation people said, nod their heads, smile gently in agreement and collect the condoms and the transistor.

They would then go home, put on the music and make babies.

The Ford Foundation project manager met Ackoff one day and complained that Indians are irrational. He said that they all understood the need for family planning, but they wouldn’t practice it. Ackoff said that may be he was solving the wrong problem.

The project manager was very agitated, and asked – “what do you mean – solving wrong problem??!!”

Then Ackoff showed him a news paper cutting about a Brazilian women who gave birth to her 42nd child. The Ford Foundation project manager gave up – he said “if this is not irrational, then I do not understand what is rational”.

Ackoff’s point was simple – if a woman can give birth to 42 children in a life time, why are Indians stopping at 4.2? This means that they know how to practice control and they do. And, then he explained the reason for the Indian’s approach to life. In a society that has no retirement benefits, no social security – the only security is to have three sons. And, statistically, you need to produce 4.2 children to have an average of three sons.

So, Ackoff asked the Ford Foundation Project Manager – “do you think you can rob them of their retirement planning by giving them a transistor? Who is irrational – you or them?”

Do you see the point? What Ackoff was doing is to study the problem in the context of the much larger social issues, not isolate it and study it as sub-systems – for example - what is going wrong in the project, whether the transistors should be changed to tape recorders, or whether the presentation should have more stories etc..

The results vindicated themselves eventually. As the middle class grew in India – with assured incomes and pension benefits – there was no need to educate people about family planning. They would automatically do it. The issue is not about female discrimination or anything like that, it is simply securing our own lives. This is perhaps the reason why salaried class practices family planning more than the self employed and business people.

Another example, again from Ackoff’s writings. This one deals with the model of the society to explain corruption.

There were a group of Mexican farmers. As it happens with many poor farming communities, they are always at the mercy of the middlemen who buy the produce from them. The prices are in general fixed by the middlemen, who will pay very little to the farmers. The farmers complained to the government. The government duly appointed one official supervisor who is charged with buying the farm produce directly from the farmers at the government decided “reasonable rates”. But, like any government initiative, the farm produce is accepted only if it meets government specified quality standards.

Things went on well for about a week. After that the supervisor started to reject all the produce on the quality grounds. And, the farmers had no other recourse, but to sell it to the old, wily middleman. This time, he had a good reason to pay them even less – because their produce does not meet “government specified quality standards”.

Basically, what happened was the middleman started to bribe the government supervisor.

Now, if you are given this as a design problem, what do you do?

Ackoff provides a beautiful solution. According to him, in a democratic model of the society, the individuals pursue their own goals that may not necessarily be in alignment with the larger society’s goals. Basically, this means that the supervisor is interested in the future of his own family and his children’s education. And, he needs money for that. In essence, he is not a match to the middleman. His social status is that of the farmers. By making a person from the same community in charge, you are not helping that community. It would have been different, if he was chosen by the community itself, but in this case, he was appointed by the government – probably he lives in the nearby city, and not in the same village. The Americans solved such problems very effectively – they encourage more middlemen to compete with each other. Competition is the solution, not control.

Ackoff applies the same principle again – study the larger environment and its dynamics. The solution is not to change the supervisor, or appoint another senior manager who will investigate corruption charges and so on.

Can you see that much of what we call as creativity is nothing but application of this principle. If I had explained these problems without the principle, they would come across as very “out of box” solutions. But, they are produced by a systematic application of a simple principle.

The beauty of the solution depends on how well you understood the larger environment, but that doesn’t take away the importance of the systems principle.

There are some very good references on Systems Thinking. Here are a few:

Russell Ackoff: Re-designing the corporation for the 21st century. This is a fantastic book on the core systems principles. This is not the kind of design book you will read in your design course. It is not about “form follows function”, or about color theory, or about creative thinking. I think the time has come for designers to junk such very old concepts – they only mystify the subject, instead of demystifying it. If you want to understand how to think – then you should read this book. It is about management, but, the underlying concepts are applicable in the design field.

There is another great advantage of this book – you will acquire the necessary terminology to describe your work more successfully to your managers and clients. They understand very well the management terminology of this book. And, if they understand what you do better, you can get better commissions.

Another great book on Systems Thinking is Gerald Weinberg’s General Systems Thinking. This is a must read for any problem solver.

*******

This is a rather long article. There are still another three posts in this series. In the next posts, I shall write about General Systems Thinking, Associative Thinking and try and define the differences between creativity, originality and innovation. I hope to complete it by this weekend.

******

In the meanwhile, here is some food for thought. This is one of the system’s laws (my own discovery):

The more complex the product is, the more the probability of the success of its design.

It may sound contradictory, but it is true. The really simple things are very hard to design. A stethoscope kind of invention takes place probably once a century. But, X-ray machines, better X-ray machines, CT-Scan machines, MRI machines, Positron-Emission Tomography machines etc – they happen every year.

Fountain Pens were used for some hundreds of years before a ball point pen was discovered. Can you think of the next shift in the writing instruments? Can you invent another writing instrument that can fundamentally change the way we write? These are inventions that happen once a century.

There are some inventions that happen only once a millennium – like the invention of Zero. The Indian Sage who gave the world Zero – basically invented “nothing”, or the concept of nothing and how to make use of it. It changed the destiny of humanity for ever. The only other mathematical concept that comes close to Zero is perhaps “e” – the natural logarithm. But, these two inventions had a gap of some thousands of years.

If you are an accomplished designer – you may have one “jackpot” in your entire life. The rest is basically improvisation on the existing themes.