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Poster: Wie organisiert man seine Kreativität? [German]

English Note: This posting is about a poster I did submit to the MinD-Akademie 2011, showing on one (very large) page how one can organize one’s creativity. It was accepted and well received. The poster is in German, but I will do a translation soon. [Update: Translation is finished and available in this posting here.]

MinD-Akademie 2011 Poster

Das Poster zeigt die verschiedenen Punkte die wichtig sind, um Kreativität zu organisieren. Während der Prozess von oben nach unten läuft, ist jeder Punkt auch eine Beschäftigung mit dem Thema (gelbe Pfeile nach oben) und führt entsprechend zu weiteren Ideen (mittige Pfeile nach unten). Auf das Poster oder hier klicken, um das Poster als PDF in DIN-A0 zu sehen (die Bilder selbst sind runterskaliert, so dass die Datei “nur” ca. 7 MB groß ist). Die Datei ist in der Dateigröße reduziert, die Bilder sollten aber trotzdem in druckbarer Qualität sein. Das Poster, das ich ausgestellt hatte, habe ich in Hannover gelassen (vielleicht hat es ja ein nettes Heim gefunden, sonst wurde es halt entsorgt). Ich musste los, habe mein Poster nicht gesehen (oder ich war grad blind) und ich habe mich auch von einigen Leuten nicht (bzw. nicht richtig) verabschieden können (war auch was k.o., auch wenn’s/weil’s riesigen Spaß gemacht hat). Ich hoffe, ich sehe ein paar Personen bald wieder, auch gerne mal zu Besuch in Tübingen, auch wenn ich die Namen grad nicht verfügbar habe (ich denke, ich habe den Networking-Workshop wirklich gebraucht — war gut und eine gute Erinnerung).  Ich wünschte halt, ich hätte mir die Namen notiert, von den Personen, mit denen ich interessante Unterhaltungen geführt hatte (hmm, in der Badewanne eben gab’s eine nette Idee für eine App bzw. die Fortführung einer älteren Idee dazu  … ;-) ).

So you want to get a PhD in …

“Don’t make fun of grad students. They just made bad life choices.”
Marge Simpson to Bart after he made fun of a “30 year old grad student who made $600 last year.” [quote found at birdie77's profile at http://www.phinished.org]

A comment lead to me a series of videos on YouTube with the title “So you want to get a PhD in [psychology | humanities | etc]“. The sound — well, it’s computer voices, and the dialogue is somewhat redundant, but the content is … sometimes surprisingly to the point.

Leadership in Academia

I stumbled over two great articles regarding leadership — or the lack thereof — in academia. Unfortunately, both are in German, but they key points were (translating and paraphrasing the authors):

  • Using the classification of leadership in laissez-faire, autocratic and cooperating leadership behavior works. It must not be seen as either-or, but as present to varying degrees.
  • Leadership behavior is not a matter of personal preference, but has consequences on multiple measures, e.g., affective commitment, achievement motivation, fluctuation, quality of the work relationship, and total work performance of the department. Leadership behavior that is high in cooperative, low in autocratic and low in laissez-faire style leads to the best results.
  • There are many good examples of great leadership, of professors who support their staff and help them to become good or even great scientists by opening doors, giving advice and encouragement.
  • However, many academics do not see themselves as leaders and do not think that they should show leadership behavior. Often the reason is the (false) argument that academic freedom and training independent scientists precludes leadership, thus resulting in no (i.e., laissez-faire) leadership behavior. However, mentorship — giving advice and feedback — allows the advancement of skills and work and keeps the independence and self-directed work of the young academics.
  • Bad leadership behavior is usually not the tyrant who plays god in his department, but the lack of systematic (i.e., targeted, deliberate, reflective) leadership behavior. For example,
    • giving critic without constructive recommendations for change and encouragement,
    • making optimistic estimations regarding whether something can be implemented without giving the necessary support and impulses of how to transform an optimistic estimation to a measurable success,
    • pressing for the implementation of their own visions without gaining commitment by their staff first, and
    • academic thesis advisers who are usually not available.
  • Bad leadership wastes potential, because it is a main reason that doctoral students quit their dissertation and leave academia.
  • Great leadership combines support/advice with promoting values which are consistent and lived in the everyday work and can be experiences by the staff, e.g., promoting ethical values like respect, transparency, fairness and setting a good example.
  • Training of leadership behavior in academia was neglected but — apparently — this is going to change.

I think the articles are highly relevant for anyone working or planning to work in academia, as post-doc or professor. The climate of a department can make or break great science and leaders strongly contribute to it. And as Kurt Lewin, who started research in leadership behaviors, said: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” and the texts are great to make sense of leadership behavior in academia.

Highly recommended.

Sources

Schmidt, B., & Richter, A. (2008). Unterstützender Mentor oder abwesender Aufgabenverteiler? – Eine qualitative Interviewstudie zum Führungshandeln von Professorinnen und Professoren aus der Sicht von Promovierenden. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 30(4), 34-58.

Schmidt, B., & Richter, A. (2009). Zwischen Laissez-Faire, Autokratie und Kooperation: Führungsstile von Professorinnen und Professoren. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 31(4), 8-35.

Questionnaire for Organizing Creativity 2

It’s been a few years since I wrote “Organizing Creativity” and in the meantime I have learned a lot. I am also critical of the style of the book — I wanted to write everything I knew, I did and it shows. It contains a lot of information, but it is not exactly easy to read.

So, I am currently working on a new version, more concise and more useful for practical application. For this version I would like to ask you for your input. How do you organize your creativity? What skills and tools did help you? What gave you a boost in working. The questions are very broad and no matter how trivial or supposedly widely known it is, I really like to hear about it.

Which skills help you to be creative?

Which tools help you to be creative?

Is there anything else you think is important for creativity or its organization? If so, what is it?

In which areas are you creative?

If you want to, you can also give your name and eMail, but you don't need to. I promise not to abuse this information.

Your Name

Your eMail

Thank you in advance :-)

Daniel Wessel

What are you doing?


Cut from “The West Wing”

The cut above reminds me of something we often lose: Take a breath for a second, step back and ask yourself: What are you doing? Are you really doing what you want to do? What is important for your? What makes your heart beat faster? What motivates you to get out of bed with a smile?

Don’t get me wrong, no job, no matter which, will always be fun, always be great, nor will you always succeed in it. But there are two things that should characterize any worthwhile job, and I include creative work in the past time to this:

  • Over a medium time-frame (let’s say up to six months), the balance of the job in terms of enjoyment vs. dissatisfaction should be positive.
  • The job should have consequences that go beyond the work itself — be it people inspired, making the world a little less hostile or complicated, etc. pp.

If you are doing something that is not worthwhile, creating something each and every day that does not move your heart, then perhaps it’s time to stop and think — and find an alternative solution.

How to ruin your app

It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.
B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992

In many cases you can create something exceedingly new and useful, i.e., a creative work, but still screw it up completely by going that little extra mile … in the wrong direction.

In drawing, for example, pupils often make the mistake of not stopping soon enough. Their works reaches its peak and then they keep buggering on and the quality falls off again.
In Apps it’s often additional features that crowd the interface and are not useful for the majority of customers and actually prevent them from using the app effectively. Or it’s an additional “feature” that isn’t really there to help the user but the company who sells the products.

The worst example of the last kind of screw up I’ve seen was in a really nice and useful Yoga app. I’m not saying which one, because I do not want to reward them for this. In this app you get Alert Views infrequently and unpredictably when you start the app, wanting you to download their iPad version, to become their fan, to download ‘free’ products they also offer.

I can understand the reasoning behind advertisements — if you do not spread the word about your products, it is unlikely that people will buy them. And in the short run these Alert Views will have a positive effect: some people will get these ‘incredible offers’ and follow the company and get vulnerable to more ads, or download another ‘free’ app. I guess that some marketing ‘professionals’ reason with the mere exposure effect — the more I hear about a product, the more I like it, and in this way these Alert View Ads make sense. Oooops, sorry, not that simple. The mere exposure effect works, but only if the first impression was positive. If you start by nagging your customer and he dislikes the interruption, doing it again and again will very quickly make your customer hate your product. Sorry, it’s not that simple, despite what people say who make their money with it.

And doing advertisements this way is nagging and distasteful and in the long run hurtful to the company as well in a lot of ways:

  • While it is not an utility app like Stocks where I need that information now, it still deviates from my path. I start the app to do a Yoga workout, not to get “incredible offers”. The app is effectively undermining its primary objective: helping people to do regular Yoga exercises (if this was the objective and not ‘find an outlet for our advertisements’).
  • I use it in the morning (might apply only for part of the users) and you don’t want to offer me anything in the morning except perhaps coffee, Red Bull or sex. How likely is it that I am willing to buy something when I am hardly awake (granted, for some people the answer might be ‘very likely’, but I simply shut down). A simple “get the local time and if it’s early in the morning don’t give any ads”.
  • It misuses alerts. Alerts usually offer critical information (like appointments, failed mails, etc.) and they draw attention. While this might be good from a marketing point of view, it quickly backfires if the ‘information’ is an ad that has no practical value for you in that situation. And it isn’t the kind of ad (increased personalization wouldn’t help), but that it is an ad. Additionally an alert is often something negative (coming from an app, not an SMS from another person), so your ad has a hard time getting out of this frame.
  • The Alert View is ugly which doesn’t make sense given the otherwise very high production values of the app. They could have made another view controller with some products (users would probably press it once) where they could play out their offer with images and high-class design. Instead there’s only some ugly text. Not the best way to convey an ad.
  • It’s ads in a paid app. If they would have used the iAds design, customers would probably have protested. But they use Alert Views to interrupt with advertisement in an app people paid for and screw them this way.
  • There is no way to disable them (unfortunately, iOS doesn’t allow you to disable Alert Views for specific apps). A simple setting (you can set a few things otherwise, including the language of the sound files) would have been sufficient. But they don’t offer them.
  • To make matters worse, it’s integrated in the app. As far as I can see the app doesn’t communicate to any external server, and given that the ads repeat there is no hope that the ads stop — ever. So I look in the future and ask myself — do I really want to be nagged infrequently and unpredictably in the morning with ads? And the app suddenly loses its value.
  • They are trying to wear you down with the same ads over and over again until — I guess this is their hope — you become their ‘friend’, buy another app, etc. — but why would you want to be ‘friends’ with a company that — basically — uses extortion? In the end it makes me question the company and distance myself from it by quitting using its products.

In short, this company created a really good product with very high production values, great videos, excellent voice commands for you to follow, something that I used every morning for the past 6 months (with a handful of exceptions) — and they completely ruined their masterpiece by using Alert View Ads, or rather any kind of ad. They are beneficial for the company in the short run and I guess they have made a lot of money from these ads, but they destroy their user base. Personally, I wouldn’t buy any of the recommended apps and I will avoid the company in the future. I guess a marketing professional (at least from that company) would argue that the Alert View ads were simply too frequent. If they were more infrequent, I wouldn’t have stopped for a moment and questioned the use(fulness) of the app. Sure, that is one interpretation, but more than once in the lifetime of an app is too frequent (and this included updates, given that they are frequent in iOS).

And, as usual, there is a simple solution to continue with my morning exercise and avoid the ads: Given that I only need the voice commands, I’ll record them via an audio cable, create an mp3 out of it and put it in the iPod app. Same instructions and pacing to follow but without the ads. Morning frustration gone.

So, no matter how successful your company is, no matter how good their products are, if you focus only on your agenda and thereby destroy the product experience for the customer, they will leave.

Why? Because they can.

Wishful Thinking

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives … by make-believe.
“The Summing Up” by W. Somerset Maugham, 1938

I think there is a fundamental difference between creativity and imagination. Creativity needs imagination, but it is defined as creating something that is both new and useful. Imagination without evaluating the product on its newness and usefulness often only gives the illusion of having something new and useful.

For example, it is easy to assume that some treatment works. After all, if someone has done treatment X and experienced a relieve, it must work, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, no, because the symptoms of many illnesses come in waves and vanish spontaneously (after all, the body tries to heal itself). It might just be that a decline in symptoms has coincided with doing treatment X. The fallacy “post hoc ergo propter hoc” points to this. Just because I did something doesn’t mean that it is responsible for something that happens afterwards.

What is easy to understand when it comes to ridiculous claims (“a sack of rice fell down in China, that’s why I stumbled while walking in New York City”), it’s more difficult with plausible claims. If someone can imagine a way that doing a treatment has any effect on an illness, it’s very hard to convince this person otherwise. They aren’t stupid, they’ve just made the experience that doing treatment X works.

Problem is that they can become very loud proponents of treatment X even if it doesn’t work. Just imagine that in 2 of 100 cases symptoms of an illness will reduce in the next hour. Now 100 people take treatment X and afterwards 2 experience a relieve. It will be very hard for these two to discount that X had a positive effect, especially if the other 98% say nothing or part of those only think that it might have helped them.

This isn’t limited to medical pseudo-treatments like homeopathy. In a lot of cases we have a hard time finding out whether something really works or is just wishful thinking. Human beings seek causes and often do not accept that a system is so complex that the system with its causal nets (rarely chains in the sense that X does Y, usually there are a lot of other factors involved) cannot be understood without systematic scientific research, which requires extensive training and special tools.

For example, to determine whether a treatment really works it would be necessary to gather a large number of similar cases, randomly assign them to two groups, give both groups something that looks, tastes and smells similar, while only one group really gets the active ingredient and the other group gets a placebo. Of course, the person who gives out the treatment must not know which participants get a treatment or the placebo, neither must the participants know what they get, because this knowledge alone can produce an effect (aren’t humans interesting ;-) ).

Instead, in many cases “evidence” consists of anecdotes, confession story like reports of people who believe that a treatment has helped them. One of the worst examples of marketing for pseudo-treatments was an advertisement where a person claimed to have found an advertisement in another magazine which convinced him to try out this ‘new’ treatment. He stressed his skepticism and reported that it helped him and that he now recommends it. Given that an advertisement reports a person reading another advertisement should make the alarm bells ringing storm. But, written intimately and persuasively, it’s — unfortunately — effective.

If you want to go beyond wishful thinking, if you really want to make a real effect on other people’s lives (via their health, in this case), and not only lighten their purses, make sure that you be very critical in evaluating the real effect of your work.

It’s easy to fall into wishful thinking.

Negative Creativity — Creativity is Value-Neutral

“What’s the Devil?”
William shrugged his shoulders. “Some invention of Christianity, best I can figure.”
“Witch Hunt” by Devin O’Branagan

One frequent search term is “disadvantages of creativity”. I have written a little bit about some of these disadvantages. I think my position can be best summed up by a quote about science by Richard Dawkins:

Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world’s problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.
Richard Dawkins

Creativity is like that — which is no wonder, given that it is part of the scientific progress (or rather: any progress). There is nothing that limits creativity (e.g., generating ideas) to “good” causes, and — well, in most cases, even the most destructive acts are good for someone, albeit not a very nice someone.

There is also no shortage in identifying ‘creative works’ which are negative by the standards of the majority of people. The worst example I have ever heard about isn’t using planes as human-guided rockets by noticing that they are essentially metal objects containing an explosive playload, nor mining an image in a house in a soon-to-be-occupied village by putting the frame slightly askew and triggering it when it is aligned horizontally (in the knowledge that usually better educated, higher ranking officers of enemy troops have a problem with an image on the wall that is askew), and even using the example of Fukushima in Japan and producing something like this deliberately (e.g., by detonating a retaining dam) wouldn’t faze me, it’s just an analogy to Heracles’s Fifth Labor, cleaning the Augean stables. No, the worst example I’ve read about, was done by a group of teenage girls. They invented a pop band they ostensibly listened to and talked about how great the music was. Why? To exclude another girl and to see whether she would lie about knowing this band and their music. Well, little angels my ass.

Personally I have decided a long time ago never to use creative works to hurt another person intentionally. Not that I wouldn’t have more than enough ideas and enough information about the world around me to know where a hit really sinks deep and cuts the threads that hold the person together. But I’m not willing to soil my creativity for that purpose.

And of course, creativity and an understanding of how it works, combined with knowledge about the world and skill, is often a good approach to prevent or reduce damage from negative creativity. Or to quote Griswold about censorship: “The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.” The damage negative creativity inflicts sets a tough challenge that needs knowledge and skill combined with a good idea to solve the situation, which can mean to catch someone who was hurt or to reduce the damage that was caused.

Because creativity can’t help if it’s being misused.

Peer-reviews in Psychology

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

I just noticed that I apparently haven’t recommended a paper by Trafimow and Rice (2009) yet. Published in “Perspectives on Psychological Science” the authors ask the question “What If Social Scientists Had Reviewed Great Scientific Works of the Past?” and the answer isn’t all that … “big on dignity” (to quote Dr. Who) for social scientists: If psychologists had reviewed the great works of science in the past, many of the great discoveries wouldn’t have made it into the “established journals”.

The reasons they give for this are well-worth reading — packed in a great deal of humor you start laughing (to read “Dear Albert”‘s (Einstein) Major Revision review or “Dear Isaac”‘s (Newton) Rejection review), until you cry, not necessarily because it’s funny. They pose some uncomfortable questions and challenge assumptions, for example:

“Few people would be willing to assert that progress in the behavioral sciences has been as impressive as the progress made in other sciences. Usually, when people discuss these matters, they present reasons to justify the differences: the other sciences have existed for longer; the behavioral sciences are more difficult because the mind is less tangible than the body, the world, or the universe; there is more funding for other sciences than for the behavioral sciences; and so on. Although some of these justifications may have some merit, there is another possibility that behavioral scientists rarely consider: perhaps they are not as effective in their scientific reasoning and in the way they evaluate scientific research.”
Trafimow & Rice (2009)

The authors discuss whether reviews in Psychology are overly strict and while they agree that we need a gatekeeper to make sure scientific work follows standards, reviewers in the social sciences often go to far:

Clearly, to some extent, this ["Gatekeeper" process] is appropriate, but as we have seen, it can be taken too far. An example of this is when reviewers note every case where an author breaks some sort of ‘‘rule,’’ duly notes it in his or her review, and then uses the violations as the reason for recommending rejection.
Trafimow & Rice (2009)

What really makes this article worthwhile reading is that it challenges your assumptions about peer-review, asks the right (albeit uncomfortable) questions, gives hints what to focus on, to make a differentiated judgment and give good reviews that improve science.

Highly recommended.

Trafimow, D., & Rice, S. (2009). What If Social Scientists Had Reviewed Great Scientific Works of the Past? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(1), 65-78. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01107.x

If you ask students to be critical …

learning-to-criticize

Getting students to think for themselves is the hardest task I have faced so far when giving courses. Unfortunately, many students choose the easy way when presenting articles by other authors in the course — they go through the article step-by-step (sometimes even using the exact words of the authors!), without thinking of a better way to present the research, without adapting it to the research question that is in focus in that session, and — very often — without criticizing the work of the author.

I’m currently trying out a few things to “get” them to become more critical — starting by asking them to evaluate each others presentations, an idea I got from Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”. Last semester it was a very quantitative evaluation form that each student (should) fill out for the presenters, this year it’s more qualitative — and it looks like the qualitative form is much, much more useful.

And, it seems, that they seem to catch on that constructive critique is not only something that they should do, but that they see the need themselves (see photo).

I wonder what’s so hard about it — did they never learn it in school? Did they make bad experiences in their first semesters at the university? Are they just cognitive misers? Do they not see the need? Have to few other teachers the goal to “get” them to think critically, because, if they think critically, they will also criticize the teacher (again, see photo)?

If you have made good practical experiences with “getting” students to think for themselves, I’d be happy about a comment.