Interview with Creativity Author Michael Michalko

By Molly Anderson-Childers

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Q: How can artists and writers benefit from your Abstraction technique?

A: Creative geniuses perceive essences, functions, and patterns that enable them to make abstract connections and conceptualize original ideas. We have been educated not to do this. Over time, we have cultivated the habit of putting the major emphasis on separating subjects into particulars and focusing on the particulars.

A rainbow seems to be an object made up of colored arcs. If you assumed that the rainbow was an object and walked toward it, it would not be found. Instead, you would find raindrops falling and sunlight. If you studied the raindrops and sunlight as separate events, you’d never understand the rainbow. However, if you study the interrelationship between light and raindrops, you will discover the essence of the rainbow, which is the blending of falling rain and light refracting off the rain. It’s a process, not an object.

Martin Skalski, professor at Pratt Institute, believes that working with “essences” and “abstractions” lead to more innovation than the more typical approach of basing new products on specific existing objects. Students designing automobiles, for example, might be asked to draw abstract compositions of “things in motion.” Later, they will use the drawings to stimulate their imaginations while designing automobiles. As one of his students related, “When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water...you want just the flash of its spirit.”

Former students of Skalski worked on streamlining the airplane. Instead of working to improve existing designs, they explored how “things reduce drag.” The simple golf ball led to their breakthrough idea. They discovered that the dimpled pattern of a golf ball reduces drag efficiently, so the surfaces of airplanes will soon have rough surfaces.

Many ideas seem obvious to us in retrospect, once we see the connection between dissimilar things. George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, was asked to make a better zipper. George did not think of zippers. Instead, he thought about the essence of “fastening” — e.g., how do windows fasten, how does a bird fasten its nest to a branch, how do wasps fasten their hives, how do mountain climbers fasten themselves to a mountain, how are tops fastened on bottles, and so on. One day, he took his dog for a nature hike. They both returned covered with burrs. He made the analogy between the burr and the zipper when he examined the small hooks that enabled the seed-bearing burr to cling so viciously to the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. This inspired him to invent a two-sided fastener similar to a zipper- one side with stiff hooks like the burrs, and the other side with soft loops like the fabric of his pants. He called his invention “Velcro,” which is itself a combination of the word velour and crochet.

The creative thinking George de Mestral demonstrated when he made abstract connections between burrs and zippers is an ability we all have. We are all born with this ability to determine the essence of something, to recognize patterns between dissimilar subjects, and to make the make the metaphorical-analogical connection

Q: Can you discuss the Lotus Blossom Brainstorming Technique, as it applies to writing and art?

A: Lotus Blossom is a technique that organizes creative thinking around core themes. It was developed byYasuo Matsumura of Clover Management Research in Chiba City, Japan. It is a creative-thinking technique that diagrammatically mimics the strategy T. S. Elliot used creating his poem The Waste Land, which is arguably one of the most famous and influential poems in history.

Elliot started with the central theme of “the decline of self and civilization” and branched out into sub-themes. Each of the stanzas is pregnant with meaning, and could launch a separate poem on a separate topic. This strategy not only conveyed to the reader a universe of poetry, but provided several different universes.

In Lotus Blossom, the petals around the core of the blossom are figuratively "peeled back" one at a time, revealing a key component or sub-theme. This approach is pursued in ever-widening circles until the subject is comprehensively explored. The cluster of themes and sub-themes which are developed provide several different possibilities.

Ideas evolve into other ideas and applications. Because the components of the technique are dynamic, the ideas seem to flow outward with a conceptual momentum all their own. Reality is made up of circles, but we’re biased to see a straight line cause-effect view of the world. Geniuses look for the circles and tend to operate more in terms of “loops of interaction” or “mutual interaction” than linear or mechanical cause-and-effect. This thinking strategy typically allows them to track whole systems of interacting elements.

Freud, for instance, viewed mental processes as “merely isolated acts and parts of the whole psychic entity,” and claimed that the “meaning” of a symptom could only be found in its relation to the larger system. Einstein rejected the mechanical statistical approaches to physics because he thought they ignored the deeper dynamics of the system and focused too much on the results and not enough on the processes. Freud and Einstein both believed that unless you look at the whole system and all of its components, you may miss the key relationships and how they interact.

Consider nature’s creations. Nature doesn’t just make leaves; it makes branches and trees and roots to go with them; it makes whole systems of interacting elements. Similarly, Edison just didn’t invent an electric light bulb — other people had invented electrified lamps — he invented a whole practical system for electric lighting, including dynamos, conduits, and a means for dividing up current that could illuminate a large number of bulbs.

Q: For our readers who are unfamiliar with the term “thought experiments,” I’d like to ask for an example and a brief definition here. What are thought experiments? How do they enhance creative thinking and problem-solving skills? Could you give us an example readers can try at home to boost their creativity?

A: A thought experiment is an experiment that you do in your head — an experiment that you cannot, or do not intend to, carry out. Its purpose is to help you understand some aspect of the Universe that you live in. Einstein's classic thought experiment, which helped him develop the Theory of Relativity, came about when he imagined what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. This was something that he could never do in reality, but imagining it stimulated his creative thinking, and opened his mind to insights and understandings of how light and time functioned. From those imaginings came his world-famous theories in quantum physics.

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