How can we free our minds to cultivate curiosity, innovation, and creativity in our daily lives? In this age of AI, where creative tasks are increasingly being performed for us, what is intelligence? And what is the future of education?
Duncan Wardle was Vice President of Innovation and Creativity at Disney and has helped organizations like Apple, the NBA, Coca-Cola, and Spotify to innovate. The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation is a toolkit with easy-to-use recipes to make innovation and creativity accessible and fun.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think that part of being a fully successful creative is also about listening and learning. It's about understanding that people experience the world in different ways. We all have this creative capacity, and I think that it's helpful to think about what you call the four stages of creative problem-solving. In your experience, how can we bring about those creative states?
DUNCAN WARDLE
I think for most of us, time to think is the biggest barrier to innovation. I would argue it's our own river of thinking. Well, what's a river of thinking? I think it's our own expertise and our own experience. The more we have, the faster, wider, and deeper our river is, allowing us to make quick and informed decisions.
But we don't get to think the way we've always thought. In the last four years, we've had global pandemics. We've had global climate change. We've got Generation Z entering the workforce, and now we have AI. So basically, the tools of the toolkit, which are brought to you by Nova, are actually designed to stop you from thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Before we had smartphones there was more time for daydreaming. Now, people are having trouble finding time to think and finding it difficult to pay attention. There is so much distraction, and then with the acceleration of AI that tap into one's consciousness, but they appear fully formed. We still need that space, that stillness. To get that vision, you kind of need to turn off the lights, right? You know, the magic happens in the dream space of our head. So how do you find that? And do you find it's been affected by phones and technologh? How do you stimulate it with your imagination, and how do you also de-stimulate it to develop a vision?
WARDLE
Because we go past the same stimulus and do the same mundane things every single day, our brain physically shuts down. It shuts down, but it didn't wake up until you got home. So how do you get to that brain state? With no fresh stimulus in, no new ideas out. Different companies do it in different ways. To get back to your point about time, Microsoft has ThinkWeek, Google has 20 percent time for their engineers. No, it's not an urban myth.
I'm working with them. Pixar has unplanned collaborations, specifically designed to bring two people together who were not supposed to meet to have a conversation they weren't supposed to have to spark a new idea. I call it a freshness meeting. We do it once a month, and perhaps people could try it.
You can't ask your boss, "Could I have Fridays off? I need time to think." But what if you took one hour a month, from 9 to 10 a.m. on the first Friday of every month, and asked your teams to come in individually or virtually? Ask them to talk about something they've seen in their life in the last 30 days, either in their business life or, ideally, their personal life that they thought was innovative or creative. You'll be amazed at the amount of new ideas and energy you drive back into the organization.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You talk about diversity of perspectives and random connections, and so since I know that you've given workshops in different countries, where they have different cultures of creativity, and they're creative in different ways. Some might have more collective cultures, but then you have to tap into it. Culturally, there might be events or rituals or dancing to get them to free up. So how, how do you find your way in those diverse situations? Whether in different business cultures, different actual physical cultures and countries.
WARDLE
I was tasked, gosh, five or six years ago now, to go to the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. There are about a million people living in an area about the size of eight Disney theme parks. To a certain extent, you would think "squalor," and to a certain extent, you'd be right. However, the level of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creativity taking place in that slum would far outstrip any of us.
I was sitting in a cafe outside of the slum, which did have electricity, with a couple of kids from the slum. We were just playing and being curious like children. We noticed that when we held a plastic bottle with our water in it, when the light hit it, it refracted the light around the bottle onto the tablecloth, creating a little ring of light.
Then, I thought, what if I put the water closer to the light source? So I stood on a chair at about a height of 12 feet. I could get that ring of light out about three and a half feet. It wasn't particularly strong light, so the chap who went out there with me said, "Put some chlorine in it; you'll magnify the light." He walked out into a hut next door, stuffed the bottle through the hole in the ceiling, and lit the hut during daylight hours.
Six weeks later, we lit one million huts with no electricity and no money by being curious like a child. This is where we're all born imaginative. We play with the box, not the toy, during our holidays. We used to ask "why?" again and again. But unfortunately, Western education is killing it because we are being told to color in between the lines or to stop asking why.
So, why do I believe that India will be the largest world superpower by 2070? Nobody is killing their imagination, creativity, curiosity, or empathy. There are 1.4 billion entrepreneurs against the Western education system. I'll take that bet.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I know you do give these lectures at Yale and other schools, and you know, that's, as much as AI is shaking that up, we are having to rethink what is intelligence? The present situation is people have to get more and more qualifications to not even have a guaranteed job, and AI is even taking jobs away from coders. How do we change education? How do we educate people for the future in a way that they can have a bit of security? I think everyone's creative, but not everyone has that entrepreneurial instinct, and there aren't guaranteed jobs for life anymore.
WARDLE
I think that's very fair. I think education is broken. I think it's been broken for a long time. AI has now smashed education to the ground. I don't believe these big universities will be here by 2040. I think the future of education is gaming. Why do I think it's gaming? Because it's creative problem solving 101.
You get to choose your own avatar, your own costume, your own challenge, your own adventure, and your own team. People ask me if I think gaming is killing creativity. No, it's not. It is creative problem solving 101. Today, the traditional lecture involves going into a lecture hall where the professor talks, and I fall asleep. In virtual reality and gaming, I can now walk into the Senate in Rome, debate with the senators, and tell Julius, "Look behind you."
The reason I think this is based on a couple of experiences. My son came down to breakfast at the age of 14 and said, "Do you know the Doge's Palace was built in Venice in 1438?" He went into enormous detail. I was like, "Wow, did you learn that at school?" He replied, "No, no, no, Assassin's Creed." It's like, "Wow." I think gaming is the future of education, and I think it's a disgrace that your children today are learning the same things I did because I went to school a very, very, very long time ago.
