Defying the Crowd

Simple Solutions to the Most Common Relationship Problems

Robert J. Sternberg, Todd I. Lubart

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780743236478
• eBook ISBN: 9781439105948
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

World renowned psychologist Robert Sternberg presents a fresh and compelling picture of the creative process from the inception of an idea to its ultimate success. With illuminating examples, Sternberg reveals the paths we all can take to become more creative and shows how institutions can learn to foster creativity. "What is creative is new and often brings about positive change. But what is new is also strange, and what is strange can be scary, even threatening—which is why 'they' don't want to hear it. But they are unwise not to listen, for the creative person with original ideas is the one who, with support, will advance and improve the milieu to the benefit of all." —from Defying the Crowd

The Role of Intelligence in Creativity

Intelligence is a wide-ranging and complex construct. Our discussion of the relevance of intelligence to creativity will be guided by the triarchic theory (Sternberg, 1985a, 1988e). According to this theory intelligence has three basic parts—a synthetic, an analytic, and a practical part—each of which is involved in creativity. Readers interested in learning more about this or other theories of intelligence might consult any of several sources, such as Metaphors of Mind (Sternberg, 1990a), The Triarchic Mind (Sternberg, 1988e), Frames of Mind (Gardner, 1983), or The Handbook of Human Intelligence (Sternberg, 1982a).

The Synthetic Part of Intelligence: Generating Ideas

Redefining Problems

A high-level executive in one of the Big Three automobile firms in the United States was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand he loved his job and the money he made doing it. After all, high-level executives in Detroit are well paid, whether or not their cars are selling. On the other hand he absolutely detested his boss. He had put up with this would-be ogre for a number of years and now found that he just couldn’t stand it anymore. After carefully considering his options, he decided to visit a headhunter—a specialist in finding high-level executives new jobs. So the executive made an appointment, not knowing exactly what to expect. Fortunately the headhunter indicated that there would be no problem in placing him somewhere else.

The executive told his wife how the appointment had gone and that he was confident he would find another job. After he described his day, his wife described hers. At the time she happened to be teaching Intelligence Applied (Sternberg, 1986b), a program for teaching thinking skills to high school and college students. She described the particular technique she had gone over that day—redefining a problem. The basic idea is that you take a problem you are facing and turn it on its head. In other words you look at the problem in a totally new way—one that is different not only from how you have seen it in the past, but that is also different from how other people would be likely to see it. As she described her lesson, the executive felt an idea sprouting within him. He saw how he could use the technique his wife was teaching in her class to his own personal advantage.

The next day he returned to the headhunter and gave him his boss’s name. He asked the headhunter to look for another job—not for himself this time but for his boss. The headhunter agreed and, before long, found something. The boss received a phone call offering him another job, not realizing, of course, that the offer was the result of the teamwork of his subordinate and the headhunter. As it happened, the boss was tiring of his current job and in short order accepted the new position.

The icing on the cake was that, as a result of the boss’s accepting the new job, his old job became vacant. Our high-level executive applied for it and ended up with his boss’s job.

This true story—told to one of us by the wife of the executive—illustrates the importance for creativity of redefining problems.* Other examples of the importance of redefining problems are shown in box 5.1, along with comments by various theorists of creativity on the importance of this skill. In the foregoing example the executive had originally defined the problem as one of finding himself a new job. But after talking with his wife, he realized that the technique she was teaching in the classroom was relevant outside the classroom as well. He solved his problem by turning the problem on its head—that is, by finding his boss rather than himself a new job!

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BOX 5.1
Problem Redefinition

“A problem well put is half solved.”

—John Dewey

A group working on automobile safety at Tennessee Technological University realized that the problem of protecting people from injury during a crash had always been taken as the need to keep people in their seats—to stop the passengers from moving around and hitting the car. The Tennessee group was able to generate a creative approach to automobile safety by redefining the problem. They shifted the focus from the person to the car and worked on making the interior of the car less likely to hurt a person if a crash occurred (Stein, 1989).

“To regard old questions from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks a real advance in science.”

—Einstein and Infeld (1938, p. 92)

“We had discovered … that a complex of sugar with iron is very important for iron to get into human beings. I tried to work on this problem and got nowhere…. In brooding about this, I said we ought to look at the data not as if it were an inorganic problem but as if it were a protein chemical problem. And we just developed a whole new approach. It was a matter of three or four weeks, and we had sort of broken a whole new field of chemistry wide open.”

—Robert Saltman, molecular chemist (quoted in Rosner & Abt, 1970, pp. 117-18)

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Some of the most creative solutions have come about as a result of people redefining problems and, in certain cases, doing exactly the opposite of what they are expected or supposed to do. Such instances provide particularly good examples of how important it is to “buy low” if one wishes to be creative. One needs to look for ideas exactly where no one else is looking or even dares look. If you stay with a problem definition that everyone else has bought into, then you have already limited the range of possible solutions you might consider.

One of us came across an example of problem redefinition that helped a halfway house to open its doors and serve the community. A home for mentally ill adults was being set up by a community group. A building had been acquired and renovations completed. Unfortunately almost all the funds for the project had been spent on renovations, and there wasn’t enough left to furnish the place. At a committee meeting, however, someone suggested a creative solution. Instead of trying to buy furniture with insufficient money, the committee could use the money to publicize a contest and provide prizes.

The halfway house ran a “painted furniture” contest. People from the community were invited to take old furniture and decorate or paint it in some way. All entries became the property of the halfway house and quickly solved the furniture problem. In fact, instead of acquiring drab, institutional furniture, the house now boasted a unique, vibrant set of tables, chairs, lamps, beds, and dressers.

A jury selected the contest winners—submissions that were the most fun, most contemporary, or most unusual, for example. And, to top it all off, since the entries not only fulfilled but exceeded the house’s needs, the excess furniture was auctioned to raise even more funds.

Redefining problems is something anyone can do, even in the most mundane situations that one confronts in everyday life. In fact, as one of us was literally writing these words, another example of problem redefinition emerged.

This chapter was written in a small hotel room in Paris on a small rectangular metal table that was never meant to serve as a desk. The problem was that the table had shelves at two levels: The higher shelf easily accommodated a portable computer, but the lower shelf effectively left the author nowhere to put his legs. In other words it was damned uncomfortable to write at that table.

The author was complaining to his wife about how uncomfortable he was when using the computer. She took one look at him and turned the computer so that the front of it was flush with the narrow rather than the wide side of the table. Now there was plenty of room for the author to spread his legs along the floor space by the two longer sides of the table. Here we have an personal example of how some people write about a thing and others do it.

You don’t have to write books on creativity or anything else to confront the need to redefine a problem. Take one last example that illustrates the need for problem redefinition in everyday life.

A couple of years ago one of us faced an annoying problem—every morning he would wake up and discover garbage strewn all along his driveway. The opened, overturned garbage can provided what seemed to be the obvious clue: A raccoon had knocked the can over so as to eat the remains of the author’s dinner. The problem was to trap and remove the raccoon.

The solution seemed obvious. The author went to the local Ace Hardware Store and bought a trap designed not to hurt the raccoon. The idea of the trap is that you put the bait (such as the contents of a can of sardines) in the center, open the side doors, place the trap near the garbage cans, and then wait for the raccoon to enter.

As soon as the raccoon enters, the doors slam shut and cannot be opened from the inside. The raccoon is trapped. You then place the trap, with the raccoon securely in it, inside your car. Next you drive to the house of a neighbor you don’t particularly like, open the doors of the trap, and dump the raccoon in the neighbor’s yard. Evening drives are generally recommended, when it’s dark and not obvious that you’re dumping the raccoon on your neighbor’s property. Note that the problem is now the neighbor’s and not yours.

The author followed the prescribed steps and assumed he had washed his hands of his raccoon problem. However, his garbage cans continued to be overturned each day. The good news was that the doors to the trap had closed and the bait had been eaten. The bad news was that there was no raccoon in the trap. The question arose: How could the animal eat the bait and not get caught in the trap, given that the spring mechanism ensured that the doors would close as soon as the animal stepped on the release mechanism on entering the trap? At this point it appeared that the darn raccoon was cleverer than the person who designed the trap!

The author decided to redefine the problem. He asked himself why he had ever thought that it was his role in life to trap a troublesome raccoon. His problem was really quite simple: to find a professional animal trapper to do the job. He called one, who came to the house with a bunch of traps that looked curiously like those the author had used; but what the hell—now it was the animal trapper’s problem! The trapper placed the traps, with bait inside them, all along the area occupied by the garbage cans. And sure enough they trapped animals—several squirrels, a cat, and other assorted backyard fauna. The one thing they didn’t trap was a single raccoon. It was $210 later, and the author had yet to see a trapped raccoon.

Further information about the problem became evident one morning around 3 A.M., when the author was awakened by a loud clanging noise emanating from the area of the garbage cans. There was an enormous dog reaching inside the trap. The doors had closed, all right, but not completely—the dog was so large that it did not even fit inside the trap. Thus the dog was able to pull out the bait, with the doors sealing shut only after the dog had departed. Basically the raccoon had not been caught because there never was a raccoon—only an enormous dog that didn’t fit inside the trap.

The author called the trapper, who assured him that he had traps to catch dogs as well as raccoons, but that sometimes the neighbors were not so happy when their dogs were trapped. Wishing neither to offend his neighbors nor to invite their retaliation, the author decided to redefine the problem once more.

This time he went to the hardware store and bought $10 garbage cans with handles that ensured seal-tight lids. Instead of defining the problem as one of trapping the animal, he now defined it as one of keeping the animal out of the garbage. Indeed, the dog was unable to get through the handles, and the problem was solved—for a while.

But several months later the new garbage cans were attacked by the real thing—hungry, clever raccoons. The raccoons, unlike the dog, had no trouble prying open the seal-tight lids of the garbage cans and thereby extracting the choice morsels of garbage.

The author—not one to be beaten in a test of wits by raccoons—bought himself a few bungee cords and connected them to the handles of the garbage cans by crossing them over the top of each can. After several days, however, the raccoons had figured out how to get through the cords. Eventually the author solved the problem by redefining it one last time. He built an enclosure with locking doors that completely surrounded the garbage cans—this the raccoons could not enter. And from that day to this, no one but he and the trash collector has gotten to the garbage cans.

This example illustrates not only how mundane can be the uses of problem redefinition, but also another important point about real-life creative problem solving. We have a notion—false, as it turns out—that problem solving is a linear process. There is a problem, we solve it, and the problem is over. Problems thus have a clear beginning, middle, and end. In life this image of an arrow pointing from one direction to another is almost never correct. Rather, the solutions to today’s problems soon become tomorrow’s problems. In other words the seeds of the next problem are planted in the solution to the last.

If you don’t like your job, your solution may ultimately be to find another. But the next job won’t be free of problems either. Thus your solution to the last problem plants the seeds for the next set of problems. Let’s take another example. You and your spouse no longer get along. Finally you decide in despair to seek a divorce. Your divorce now brings you the problems of living alone. Perhaps you eventually remarry. You quickly discover that the new marriage has its problems too. Our point is not that no problem in life is ever solved. Rather, it is that the solution eventually becomes the next problem. The next problem may be better, or it may be worse. We tend to think that life should be problem-free, and that problems are a disequilibrium we need to correct in order to bring us back to the normal, problem-free state of living. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The normal state of life is to have one problem, which leads to another, which leads to another. Thus problem solving is not like a straight line pointing from one direction to another, but more like a spiral, with new problems emerging from old ones. The need for creative problem solving—for redefining problems—never ends. We need constantly to be on the lookout for new ways of defining problems in order to keep up with the demands life keeps placing on us. People who buy low and sell high don’t just do it once. It’s a habit with them—a way of living. They are always on the lookout for creative solutions, even to mundane problems.

Measuring People’s Ability to Redefine Problems

With all the anecdotes above, we may seem more like storytellers than scientists. In fact, were we to be so labeled we would not be ashamed, because we believe that much of creative science lies in telling stories. The trick is to know the right story to tell. For any given scientific phenomenon there are many stories, some of which help elucidate the phenomenon, while others serve to obfuscate it. Good stories help make concrete the various phenomena we are studying.

But as scientists we are also interested in measuring the phenomena we illustrate through our stories. So the question arises, Can we measure the ability to redefine problems? In other words, Can we predict who will be adept at redefining problems and who will not be?

We mention here two of the types of measures we have used to assess the ability to cope with novelty by defining problems in unconventional ways. Both of them use a multiple-choice format, and both are timed, meaning that we record both speed and accuracy as people solve the problems.

The first kind of problem is called a concep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Nature of Creativity
• What Is Creativity and Who Needs It
• An Investment Perspective on Creativity
• Some Implications of the Investment View
• The Role of Intelligence in Creativity
• The Role of Knowledge in Creativity
• The Role of Thinking Styles in Creativity
• The Role of Personality in Creativity
• The Relation of Motivation to Creativity
• The Relation Between the Environment and Creativity
• Putting It All Together The Creative Spirit
• Epilogue
• Index