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- [00:01]
Phil Agnew
In 2019, three researchers from the University of California released a critical paper on creativity. Researchers Gable, Hopper and Skula recruited hundreds of physicists and professional writers. The physicists and writers were told to record the best idea they came up with for 14 days in a row. The researchers chose these groups because they led very different creative lives. They hypothesized that any similarities in how physicists and writers would discover ideas they should apply more broadly to all of us in other domains. So at the end of every day during this test, those participants recorded their best idea, what they did when it arrived, and whether it resolved a sticking point or contributed to an ongoing project. Gable, Hopper, and Skula are hardly the first psychologists to research creativity. Hundreds of others have studied it. And broadly speaking, there are two well documented ways of generating good ideas. One is to work hard, to focus deeply and push on consistently until you find a solution. The second is to hope inspiration strikes when the mind wanders, perhaps procrastinate or do another activity like walking or meditating, and hope the creative solution comes to you while your mind wanders. The researchers expected about a 5050 split between those two, with some of the best ideas coming from hard work and some of the best ideas coming from mind wandering. But that's not what they found. They found that 90% of the best ideas came from just one of those approaches. This finding has changed my view on creativity and changed how I approach my work. And today on Nudge, I'll share what those researchers found and why my assumptions about creativity were wrong. All of that coming up. The OPS Authority, hosted by Natalie Gingrich, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Professionals Every week on the OPS Authority, you'll hear transformational stories of powerhouse business owners who value business operations. You can't ignore the back end pieces that have to work together and flow smoothly to build a brand, grow a community, or disrupt an industry. If the operations side of your business is a mess, putting out fires will always take priority, leaving no room for the behavioral science improvements that I think every business needs to make. So listen to the OPS Authority wherever you get your podcasts. To help me understand the scientific truth behind creativity, I spoke to a world leading creativity expert.
- [02:42]
Adam Alter
Finally tonight, Adam Alter Adam Alter.
- [02:45]
Phil Agnew
Adam Alter Please welcome Adam Alter. Adam is a Professor of Marketing at New York's University Stern School of Business and a New York Times best selling author of three books. His third book covers the science behind creativity.
- [03:00]
Adam Alter
My latest book is called Anatomy of a Breakthrough and it's basically about the fact that when we're stuck, which tends to happen pretty often in different parts of our lives, it feels like this very personal, very confronting experience. But actually it's a kind of default mode for humans that much of the time, we're stuck. And actually, if you approach any human on the street and say, is there a respect that's important to you in your life where you feel stuck right now? They'll say almost always, yes. And they can tell you about it pretty articulately, but it feels confronting. It's a real challenge for humans. It's sort of part of what it is to be human, that we don't really know how to get unstuck. There's no good manual for doing it, despite the fact that it happens all the time. So Anatomy of a breakthrough is essentially an attempt to figure out how humans can get unstuck systematically using science. And it's an attempt to sort of provide a roadmap for people when they feel stuck, a process they can go through that's more systematic than just throwing things at the wall and hoping some of them stick.
- [03:55]
Phil Agnew
Before we discuss the scientifically proven ways to improve your creativity, Adam first wanted to explain what to do if you're stuck. If you are struggling with a problem and unable to find a solution, Adam says, you must first do this.
- [04:10]
Adam Alter
I think one of the first things you can do when you're trying to get unstuck is to perform what I call a friction audit. And a friction audit essentially is designed to find points of friction, to figure out where the stuckness actually is. And so you can run this sort of process of interrogating yourself with respect to the domain where you feel stuck and just asking where might the sticking points be? And there are a few ways to do this. You know, one thing is to say, when I think about doing this task, what is the part that makes me feel either the most anxious or the least engaged, the most demotivated? And that's useful to know what that is, because you can either weed that out or you can throw money at the problem. If you have some to throw at the problem, you could say, that's the area where I'm going to outsource that. I'm going to rely on friends to help me with that, or whatever you might do, and then you intervene on that friction point. So you decide that you're going to use a particular strategy to get unstuck with respect to that friction point. You either sand it down or you weed it out completely, and then this is the really important part, and this is the part that I think behavioral science speaks to, is you then have to make sure that you've done a good job. So you've got to measure over time that this thing is getting better. And it could be a subjective thing, like I feel better about this task that I'd be doing, or it could be something very objective. You know, I was writing 50 words a day, which was not enough, and Now I'm writing 500 words a day. So I know things are going well, but if things aren't improving with that intervention on that friction point, you got to try something different. So I think a friction audit is a great sort of domain general approach to getting unstuck and defining breakthroughs.
- [05:44]
Phil Agnew
One strangely important thing about the friction audit is that you do the audit. Our brains are far more likely to change if the suggestion comes from us and not others. A 2019 study tested this. A team of psychologists created a virtual environment where participants could switch between inhabiting an avatar of their own bodies, which looked eerily like them, and an avatar of Sigmund Freud. I know, a bit of a weird study, right? Well, one group of participants inhabited their own bodies and spoke to Freud. Freud's avatar delivered generic advice and encouraged them to expand on their issues and think about their problems from a new perspective. This is classic advice that a trained psychologist might give. It's good advice. However, the researchers asked the other participants in the study to do something rather strange. They switched between inhabiting their own avatars and Freud's avatar. They communicated with themselves, sharing their own problems, and then embodied Freud and imagined what he'd say and then say it. The tech made this effortless, even altering their voices when they played the role of Freud. And it turns out those in that switching condition who switched between themselves who were receiving the advice, and then also Freud who gave themselves their own advice, well, those people were considerably more affected by the conversations. They were three times more likely to report behaving differently following the session, four times as likely to report feeling their own problems were at least partially solved, and twice as likely to say they were more focused on solving the issue. We take advice more easily when it comes from us, even if we're pretending to be Sigmund Freud. And that's why Adam's self reported friction audit can be so effective. That audit can help us get unstuck. But to become more creative, we must first look at where creativity comes from.
- [07:38]
Adam Alter
When you speak to people in creative industries, they have one of two basic theories about where creativity comes from. They either talk about this idea that creativity is about insight. Good ideas sometimes land on you from above. Some people are better at catching those ideas. They generate more good ideas. They're just known for being ideas people. Then there are other people who talk about a production lens where they say actually creativity is hard work. That the more ideas you have, the better they'll get. The better they'll be, the more fluent you'll become at this process of coming up with creative ideas. So you just have to work hard. And I think the second idea is nice because it means you don't have to have some special God given talent. But it's also true, I think that's true, that the variance within a human, within a single human is much greater than the variance across people. On my worst day I'm a two on creativity. And in my best moments I'm a nine. And so a lot of creativity is, I think, strategy and time and effort and diligence. And so here's an example of that. A number of musicians were asked in the early 2000s who was the. The most creative and original and unique Western musician of the 20th century. And a lot of people pointed to Bob Dylan. They talked about him as truly original. There was no one quite like Dylan. His voice, his approach to writing music, his style. And, you know, that came up consistently. But the truth is that Dylan wasn't original in a genuinely novel way. He had combined other artistic styles that came before. He had evolved those styles in ways that were interesting and obviously appealed to people. But even in his own telling, some of the songs that he was best known for, he had essentially not quite ripped off. But he had borrowed bits from other people. Sometimes with attribution, but often not with attribution.
- [09:21]
Phil Agnew
You can hear this in Dylan's music. Here's one of his first big hits, Blowing in the Wind.
- [09:29]
Adam Alter
How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
- [09:39]
Phil Agnew
This track sounds an awful like another song. A song released two years earlier by a musician Dylan had reportedly fallen in love with. It's Odetta's no More Auction Block for Me. No more, no more. There's the same melody, the same structure, and both Dylan and Odetta knew it. Odetta discussed it in a New York Times interview cited in Adam's book. She says, we don't call this stealing or appropriation. We call it passing on the folk tradition.
- [10:23]
Adam Alter
What people see as originality is actually more aptly described as recombination. Take two old things and combine them in a new way and you have what seems like an original product. But the nice thing about that active recombination is that it's algorithmic. You can say if you collect good ideas. For 20 years I've been doing this in a document I have. It's now hundreds of ideas long. You take any of those two ideas that have never been combined, think about how to combine them, and you have what is essentially an original product. And so I think this idea that you can take what seems ethereal and hard to pin down and make it algorithmic, give it a process, is liberating for people. Very encouraging. And I think it means that as long as you tweak how you live your life and the way you record ideas, you can be creative too.
- [11:09]
Phil Agnew
The best creative ideas can come from combining original ideas. Rather than endlessly aiming for perfection, combining two mediocre ideas can actually be superior. It's the case with musicians and with organizations. As an example of this, in Adam's book, he writes about Motorola's 1990s satellite phone, Iridium. The promise behind Iridium was spectacular. It was a global phone network that offered perfect reception from anywhere on the planet. Even the most sophisticated smartphones today can't compete with Iridium's decades old technology. It was perfect. But the perfection made the phones expensive. At $3,000, they were thousands of pounds more than the competitive phones at the time. And this perfection was a problem. Phone users didn't need perfect reception anywhere on the planet. They were happy with a small number of dropped calls if it meant the phone was significantly cheaper. Ultimately, Iridium failed. It cost the company millions and never delivered a return on the investment. Iridium failed because Motorola aimed for perfection above all else. Instead, Motorola should have accepted failure and pivoted because this ability to accept failure and pivot is another vital component of creativity.
- [12:27]
Adam Alter
Pivoting is essentially failing. Well, you know, we fail all the time. We fail. And by failure I mean not reaching a particular benchmark that's important to you in any domain. Failing well is where you, you say to yourself, which bits did I do best there? Where did I come closest? So did anything work here? Was there anything that if I tried this again, I would want to do again? Replicate. So I think that's, that's essentially what pivoting is. It's saying about the bits that worked. Based on that, here's a small shift I could make. And there are a lot of famous examples. One of the famous examples in business is Pfizer. In the 80s was looking for a particular drug for the heart condition angina. And they were working with a whole lot of Welsh foresting workers, lumberjacks. And they had them in this big room and it was the last ditch attempt. They tried multiple formulations for this drug. It wasn't seeming to work. The chemist who is in charge was interviewing them in this kind of focus group setting, and they all reported that it didn't help their angina. They still had the same kind of heart pain that they had before, and it didn't feel like the drug was efficacious. And this chemist, David Brown, became a bit dejected. You know, he said, this is just not working. There's nothing that's working here. But as they were packing up and leaving this room where they were all having this conversation, one of, one of the workers reported that this drug, for whatever reason, every time he took the drug, he seemed to have a persistent erection and he was confused about it. And he said, I don't know what the deal is with that. And all the other guys are listening to this. It's obviously a sort of catchy thing to hear someone say it so it catches your attention. And they all said the same thing. They were all like, that's true for me as well. Now, Brown could have said, that's bizarre. That's obviously not what we're looking for. But what he said was, he asked them, is that, is that a bad thing? Is that a good thing? And some of them said, well, actually, it's not a bad thing. That's okay. And so he, he decided that this drug, he wasn't looking for something that dealt with this particular issue, but he figured out that this erectile dysfunction drug, which became Viagra and ended up earning $40 billion for Pfizer over the next 20 years, that this was something worth pursuing. And he managed to get funding for it. And it ended up becoming this, this incredibly brilliant business pivot from a chemist. He wasn't a businessman. But to see that, you know, I think if, if David Brown had been replaced by 99 other chemists, they would have called that a failure and an embarrassing one. But he didn't see that. He said, well, what's the best thing that can come from this particular outcome? And the best thing is we make $40 billion over 20 years. Because this is also a problem that people care about. That instinct to always say, this didn't go exactly as planned, but was there anything I can take away from it? That's something that you can learn and when you do, it ends up being very, very Fruitful. And that's where good pivots come from.
- [15:17]
Phil Agnew
Pivoting isn't just restricted to the pharmaceutical industry. A century before Pfizer's pivot, William Wrigley Jr. Began selling soap. The soap business was incredibly competitive back then because soap was so easy to make. And with only $32 in his bank account, Wrigley didn't have the capital to advertise to get ahead. So to differentiate himself, Wrigley combined two ideas and made a small pivot. He included a small pack of baking powder with each soap bar that he sold. In Anatomy of A Breakthrough, Adam writes that baking powder was an intelligent choice. Baking became a popular pastime in the early 1900s. Soon, customers were asking more questions about the baking powder than the soap. And just like David Brown at Pfizer, Wrigley was sensitive to these cues. So the Wrigley Soap Company became the Wrigley Baking Powder Company. Wrigley continued to offer bonuses with each sale later, including two packs of chewing gum. With each large package of baking powder, he included sticks of chewing gum which were licorice flavoured and then tootie fruity flavoured. Wrigley decided that the product's combination of novelty and cheapness would make it the perfect add on. But the gum was soon more popular than the baking powder and Wrigley pivoted a second time. He was no longer selling soap or baking powder, but rather spearmint and juicy fruity chewing gum. Wrigley followed Dillon and Brown in combining two good ideas and pivoting. This approach helped Wrigley become the largest manufacturer and marketer of chewing gum in the world. But there's more to creativity later on. Adam shares the importance of crowds, why you should limit your choices. And we'll reveal the results of the study I shared at the start of this show. Whether creativity comes from hard work or a wandering mind, once on holiday, a local asked me to explain what marketing actually is, and I struggled. How do you even begin to describe marketing? You have to generate leads, you have to score leads, you have to contact leads, you have to create content, you have to gather data. And the next day you'll need to do it all again. And you wonder if it's even working. It's clear that marketers are spread far too thin, trying to do so many different things. But HubSpot really can help. With the help of Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools and features like Content Remix can really help. With Content Remix, you can turn one piece of content into a suite of assets with HubSpot, you can also pinpoint the best prospects with a predictive lead scoring system. And you can level up your campaign's KPIs with with a new analytics suite so your day to day becomes less busy work and more driving revenue through the roof. Even if all of that won't actually help me explain what marketing is, visit HubSpot.com marketers to learn more. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far Adam has shared how friction audits can help you become unstuck, why combining ideas beats perfection, and that pivoting is often needed to find success. But Adam has more. Next up, he told me how important it is to surround yourself with the right crowd.
- [18:30]
Adam Alter
The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not a new one. The idea that asking, assuming that we're all sort of making random errors in all sorts of different directions, those errors will cancel out if you ask enough people to weigh in on a problem. Now often those are quantitative problems like guess how many jelly beans are in the jar. Some people underestimate, some overestimate and they cancel each other out. And actually the crowd does pretty well. For more complex problems though, the question starts to become first of all, should I have a crowd involved? And if I do have a crowd, what should that crowd look like? Are there certain people I should try to bring into my my brain trust and certain people who are perhaps less useful? And that's, that's what this research on diversity and crowdsourcing that I talk about is focused on. And the basic conclusion is that there are three kinds of people you want weighing in on complex problems. The first kind of person is sort of obvious that you want people who are experts in the domain and who are a little bit like you in, in important intellectual respects. Maybe you're all trained in the same domain. You're experts, you're specialists, you get along really well, you might be friends, you may have grown up together, it doesn't really matter what it is. But there's simpatico there intellectually and perhaps socially as well. That that doesn't surprise anyone. It's good to have other people around that you like and that see things the way you do. The other two kinds of people are really important though. One of them is non redundant actors, which is a long way of saying people who are different from you. And I see this a lot when, when big good companies come to recruit at nyu, they don't come to us and say we are a branding or marketing Agency and we want to find the best 10 marketing students. They come to us and they say, who are the two best marketing students, who are the two best finance students, who are the two best filmmaking students, who are the two best Russian literature students, the two best chemical engineers and so on. And the reason for that is that everyone comes with a different tradition. It's the opposite of the first kind of group where you just assemble like minded people. But if you bring these different traditions together and you can train people in the bits that are a little bit more technical, having those lenses is very valuable. It brings different perspectives in and often for problem solving and getting unstuck, you want difference, difference is very valuable. And then the third kind is the black sheep. The best example of this is Pixar. The way they make their films is often they will bring a team together of people who are like minded, maybe some people who are non redundant, but then they'll bring in someone who is, who's chosen to be the black sheep. And an example of this is you might have a whole lot of people who focus on animation, which was Pixar's early competitive advantage. They make hair look like hair and they make water look like water and it's this great skill. But you're never going to make a great movie because you have really just good images. You need more than that, you need narrative. And so they'll bring someone in who basically thinks that animation is secondary. They're a black sheep, they can be polite about it, but they basically say, look, until you've got the narrative down, until you write the first five minutes of the movie up, that moves everyone emotionally and intellectually. You don't have a film. No one's going to want to watch the film that's beautiful but isn't well written. So if we're going to spend our budget, we've got to spend a lot more money on narrative and a lot less money on animation. The animation can be 90% as good as long as the narrative is there. And so you essentially end up having a team where you have a lot of people who think the same way, who are experts, a few people who are non redundant, who bring in a different flavor, a different perspective. And then some people who actively militate against the group think that might emerge the way this group is naturally constructed, those black sheep. And that is the brain trust. You want something like that, that mixture of those three.
- [22:05]
Phil Agnew
Surround yourself with three types of experts like you, non redundant actors and black sheep. Most of us opt for just people in that first, group the experts like us. We ask for feedback from people we like. We employ people like us. But that approach is doomed to fail. To be more creative, we need to be challenged by those who are different to us. It's hard to do, but surprising effective, a bit like Adam's next tip. It's another hard, counterintuitive suggestion that Adam says is incredibly powerful. Adam says you should limit your choices.
- [22:43]
Adam Alter
Here's why artificially constraining yourself is incredibly valuable as a. As a general approach. There are a few reasons for that. I mean, the best example is I'm colorblind, and I don't do it as much as I used to. But I used to paint. And for a very long time, I would spend all of my creative energy trying to figure out how to make the colors look the way they should. I read about a French artist, Pierre Soulage, who he. At various points in his career, he had a very long career. He painted with colors like I did. And at one point he said, I don't want to be focusing on color and form and subject matter and all these things. I just want to become the very best at a particular thing. And what he did was he said, I'm going to abandon one of those elements and really pour all my energy into the thing that's most important. And right now, I don't want to focus on color. And he became an artist who only worked with black. Everything he did was black. That was liberating to me, and it meant that I could spend more time and energy on other aspects. And so I started using charcoal and pastels that were only black, white, and gray. And if you look at the form, what I was actually producing, the substance of it, I became much better at the other parts of the art that weren't about color because I was no longer so preoccupied with this bit that was just this extra thing hanging on the side and taking up all those resources. And there's a lot to be learned from that. That people always think that when you're stuck, the worst thing you can do is get even more stuck by. By limiting yourself even more. But actually, there's some paradoxical relief in finding that you've forced yourself into a smaller corner. And so there's not as much for you to do. You don't have as many options. Your menu is restricted. And there are some really interesting examples of people who do a particular thing. You know, I've always been colorblind, but there are artists that. There's an artist, Phil Hansen, who developed a tremor and he a neurological tremor, so his hand would shake, which was a problem because the kind of art he was doing was pointillism, where he was applying thousands of small dots to the canvas. And he noticed over time that those dots became much more kind of tadpole shaped. He could no longer do pointillist art. He had to find something new. And with that limitation that he could no longer use his hands the way he wanted to, he developed all sorts of new techniques that he then applied elsewhere. He'd say things like, I'm going to do an artwork that costs no more than a dollar, or I'm going to do an artwork where the only material I use is cardboard or whatever. He would come up with all of these artificial methods and they sound gimmicky, but he would report that there was, he was creatively liberated by the constraints that he'd applied. And I think there's something to that. When you feel stuck, that limiting yourself is paradoxically a relief.
- [25:22]
Phil Agnew
One well known example of this comes from Warren Buffett's investment strategy. Buffett's right hand man, Charlie Munger, revealed Buffett's strategy in a speech almost 30 years ago. He said, you can instantly improve your financial welfare by imagining a ticket with only 20 slots. Those 20 slots represent all the investments that you can make in a lifetime. Once you've punched through the card 20 times, you can't make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you'd think very carefully about what you did and you'd be forced to load up on what you really thought would work. And he says, you would do much better. Limiting choices works because it forces all of us, from investment bankers to artists, to focus on what matters. So limit your choices, build a crowd of differing opinions, prepare to pivot and combine different ideas. These strategies, they will make you more creative, but maybe you can't be bothered, maybe you don't want to do all of that. So I asked Adam if he could only give one bit of advice to all of you to improve your creativity, what would it be?
- [26:28]
Adam Alter
One particular habit, one action based approach that I find very useful. You know, getting unstuck, no matter how much you think about it and strategize, you ultimately have to act, otherwise you won't get unstuck. So the final chapter I titled Action above all, because that's really what matters more than anything. You know, we can, we can navel, gaze and we can think about strategy, but we have to act. The problem with acting is that in many domains over time we get tired, we lose Motivation. We have good days, we have bad days. As I was writing the book and I've written a few books now, I've experienced this, where there will inevitably be days where you feel you should write a thousand words and you can write only 20 words, or you can write no words at all. You undo, unpick everything you've done. Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the band Wilco, he's, he's a musical artist. He writes books as well. He's a bit of a Renaissance man, and he has been very articulate about his process over time. And what he describes is that he, he's very Type A. He wants good ideas to emerge. He, he only takes, you know, the very best of his ideas and turns them into actual songs or actual written material. But one thing that he does is in the morning when he wakes up, he gauges his level of intrinsic motivation. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. But he spends every day doing what he describes as pouring out the bad. And pouring out the bad is essentially saying, you know, I'm sitting down at the computer, I want to write for the next four hours. I'm going to give myself 15 minutes to do that really badly. I'm going to lower my normally very stringent threshold down to the ground. And if you're writing music, that means writing music that's trite and boring and bad and not really criticizing it. And if you're writing a, you know, chapter of a book, it means just writing something that's, that's patently bad, that you would never hope anyone else would ever read. And that has two effects, that 10 to 15 minute period. One thing is you're actually doing, you're, you're starting to get into the motions of doing that thing, which then paves the way for better versions of that later on. But the other thing that's really fascinating is by lowering his threshold. He says, sometimes those ideas are so different from the ideas that come when you're being really strict that they turn out to be pretty good. They're a little bit liberated in certain ways that you wouldn't expect, or they diverge from what you normally do. In certain respects that makes them interesting to you, and they end up becoming the kernel of good ideas that follow later on. And so he's used this technique for decades, and I now use it as well. If my motivation is low, I give myself the liberty to do a bad job for 10 minutes. And then it turns out it's much easier after those 10 minutes to do a good job.
- [29:07]
Phil Agnew
Let's revisit that study I shared right at the start. Researchers asked hundreds of physicists and writers to document their best ideas for 14 days in a row. What was the result? Did the best ideas come from hard work or a wandering mind? Was it a 5050 split between the two? No. Researchers Gable, Hopper and Schooler found that only 10% of good ideas came from mind wandering. The other 90% of good ideas emerged from active task engagement. In other wor deep work on a specific challenge. If you want to write a better book, paint a better picture, design a better website, or deliver a better speech, your most significant gains will come from consistent hard work on that problem. It's this deep work that leads to creative breakthroughs. It doesn't have to be perfect, it could be pouring out the bad. But it's where creativity comes from, whether you're a physicist or a poet. Turns out the old adage is true. Nothing will work unless you do. Firstly, a big thank you to Adam Alter for joining me on today's episode of Nudge. He is fantastic. If you liked him and this episode, then you will really love his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough. It really is fantastic and it goes into much more detail than we could here. So if you want to pick up a copy of that, just click the link in the show notes. Also, if you want to hit hear more from Adam, do go and listen back to the first episode we did that was also about creativity. It's called the Creativity tactic that made Messi. We cover Messi's notorious creativity tip and much, much more. Finally, thank you for tuning into Nudge today. Over the past year, the show has grown tremendously, becoming one of the top business podcasts in the uk. So massive. Thank you for sharing the podcast online with your colleagues, with your friends. All of that has really helped me, as always. I'm your host Phil Agnew and I'll be back next week for another episode of Nudge. And thank you very much for listening. I'll see you next Monday. Cheers.
- [31:08]
Adam Alter
Bye.