[MUSIC] If the creative process is about changing perspective, then it would help to know what a perspective is. Right and often we hear a lot about people generating ideas too right but we kind of take for granted what is an idea. [LAUGH] It sounds sort of philosophical, right? Yeah. What is an idea? But although it's philosophical could be useful to actually know what these things are, right? So let's dive in, let's do it, let's talk about what a perspective is and what ideas are. So, here's a picture of a dog, it's a specific dog in the world, actually, my family's dog, his name is Romeo. There is also our concept of dogs that we used to understand this specific creature Romeo. We hardly have any information about this particular dog or at least you do because but because you have a dog concept, you probably know that he eats, he probably likes playing with that ball. He definitely can't fly, right? So we can think about that creature as a dog, we can think about it as a pet, we can think about it as an eater, as a fetcher of balls as our creature that does not come when called that is we can use different concepts for thinking about the very same thing. Some of those concepts seems really central and enduring and some seem pretty circumstantial, none however, are the dog itself, right? It's none of those are Romeo himself, they're all concepts about Romeo and they help us think about Romeo but only capture some of the ways that we might think about him. So it's important to separate a concept of something from the thing itself, we don't actually think with actual dogs, instead we think with concepts of dogs. Furthermore, we don't think with just one concept, but rather with many concepts put together to represent all the different elements of a story, right? That's what we call the perspective, the concepts that we're using to comprise our stories. One of my favorite examples of perspectives comes from Norton Juster in his wonderful book for Children, The Phantom Toll Booth. For instance, from here, that looks like a bucket of water, he said, pointing to a bucket of water, but from an ant's point of view, it's a vast ocean from an elephants, just a cool drink and to a fish. Of course it's home, so you see the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from. What I love about that quote, of course, is that it separates the thing itself from the interpretation of perspective on the thing. We don't think with actual dogs and actual buckets of water, we think with concepts of dogs and concepts of buckets of water. Furthermore, we don't think just with just one concept, but rather we use many concepts put together to represent all the different elements of a story. And we call that collection of concepts and the interpretation collectively, that it generates a perspective. A perspective is the collection of concepts to make sense of a story in Norton adjusters example, one perspective is that we are ants, that's our self concept and we see a vast ocean. That's the part when we're talking about creativity and we say that we have had a an idea. What we mean is that we have realized that we could change our perspective somehow by changing some of the concepts we were using previously to think about our story, a different perspective. For example, in Norton adjusters case is that we are elephants and we see a cool drink. The switch from one perspective to another by changing the concepts we use to represent some of our stories in this simple case from oceans to drinks is the center of the creative process. So to understand what is happening in any situation that we're in withdrawing concepts we already know and then we put them together. So for example, if I tell you about an orange helicopter in Sweden that flew to rescue a lost girl in a puffy coat, you could put all those concepts together and start imagining that story. If we were making a movie of that story, we would have to cast actors to play the roles and get a costume designer and a set designer and so on. Well, we can think of our minds as casting concepts into roles to represent all the elements of a story. For example, there's a story that Jackie Torrance the brilliant American storyteller actually so well known that she was called simply the story lady used to tell. It's a story about casting elements into rolls to make a larger reality. And I shall tell you the story of the human being. It was a time many years ago when the great creator had a garden and in that garden he grew fingers And toes and elbows and arms and necks and ears and tongues And backs and eyes and lips and noses and the great creator thought them to be the most beautiful things he had ever seen. And he gave them this garden and he said take care and they did and they lived together happily except for one thing. And that was something that stayed far back in the garden in the dark, it was called Billy every day you could hear belly say ground, but the great creator knew that this was the nature of that creation. So he never bothered it, one day something happened, fingers started to point tongues began to wag. I started to roll here, started to listen, feet started to walk to the left, it was horrible backs turned knows this turned up and the great creator came down and he said what is this? Why do you not live happily together? Can you not tell me fingers? And the finger said we just pointed a little and the ear said, we heard it, we heard it, we heard it and the tongue said well we said it, we said it, we said it and back said we avoided it and no said we smelled it. Do he said this is horrible, can you not live together in peace? I shall make you live together in peace, I shall form something that will keep you together. So the great creator put together a marvelous creation from 10 fingers. He placed on the ground on top of the 10 fingers he placed 10 eyes and on top of the eyes he placed 10 ears and on top of the ears he placed 10 elbows and on top of 10 elbows he placed 10 necks and on top of 10. Next he placed 10 knees and he looked back and he said [LAUGH] This will never do. [LAUGH] So he started all over again He gathered together 10 toes. Behind the toes, he placed the foot on top of the foot, he put ankles and on top of the ankles he placed the leg and on top of the leg, he put a knee. And on top of the knee he put a thigh and on top of the thigh he put a hip and on top of the hip he placed the body and on and on and on and then he placed ahead on top of all of that and in that head he placed two eyes a nose and placed two ears. Then he hung two arms from the side and fingers and was it nice? But in the middle there was a great big hole and he said yeah yeah this will never do and then he heard brow. [LAUGH] Mmh, he said he went back into the garden, picked up belly and put it in the middle of that whole and then he said you shall now live together to keep belly happy. [LAUGH] Whether it's a helicopter rescuing a girl in Sweden or a fanciful tale about whether we're riven by hunger no matter what the story is that we are telling as we go about solving a problem or making a decision or otherwise thinking and acting in the world. We regularly draw in concepts to play five rolls, the first role that we cast our concepts into is the role of Parts. What are the specific objects, people, places that are involved in our story? The second role is actions, what are the operations the behaviors the transformations that we can make to advance our stories? The third role is goals, what are the objectives, the motivations? The purposes we are striving towards in our stories. The fourth role is the event, what kind of situation are we in? What is the larger story we are telling all about? The fifth role is the self concept, who are we? The storytellers together, these form an acronym, pages, parts actions, goals, event, self concept. These are the five main roles are concepts, play as we build stories for our experiences. If creativity is about changing our perspectives, then our first task is to understand what our perspectives are right now. The concepts we use for the five roles for the pages comprise our perspectives to change our perspectives and so to be creative, then our task is to rewrite what's on our pages. So we have a perspective and we can break that perspective down into pages. Which means that we can actually change our perspectives deliberately and intentionally and develop our skills at doing that systematically. Yeah, what I really like about your model Jeff is that it really breaks the process down into pieces that we can understand and then deliberately attempt to become creative. And it may be something that these highly creative people that we've been talking about do intuitively but you really broken it down and made it easier for all of us to to engage in the process. When it's implicit, you feel like well is lightning's going to strike today? [LAUGH] Whereas if I if we say okay it's about changing the perspective, what's a perspective? Well it's these five things then I can say okay, what am I currently thinking about these five things and can I tweak or adjust any of them? And where does that take me? So I know what to do, yeah, exactly, so let's maybe practice pages, let's do it, let's take a few problems and break them down. Let's see how we do.
