For those not in the know, Adult Swim is not that time period down at your local Y when everyone younger than 18 is cleared from the pool. Instead, Adult Swim is a channel that replaces the Cartoon Network at night. What’s remarkable about this channel (no, not it’s juvenile humor) is that while viewership among 18-34-year-olds has declined this past year, Adult Swim, with its cartoon-laden lineup, ranks number one with this age group and has for the past ten years with this “toons for millennials” formula.

Why such success? According to an article in our favorite newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, Adult Swim has mastered the process of “How To Run a Creative Hothouse” (13 March 2015). “The creative freedom it offers is also attracting talent it couldn’t otherwise afford” (D1). In contrast to over-controlling and layered network hierarchies, Adult Swim employs fewer executives, discovers creative people, then backs off and allows them to exhibit their creativity.

In essence, Mike Lazzo, creative chief at Adult Swim, allows his creators to enter the pool, and it’s sink or Adult Swim. His mentor at TBS, Ted Turner, Lazzo recalls, used a different metaphor to respond to employee proposals: “here’s your rope (enough to hang you or get your idea off the ground)(D2). To develop the creative hothouse that is Adult Swim, Lazzo also developed six guidelines for successful creative thinking:

• “Don’t swing for the fence.” According to Lazzo, the financial pressure to succeed degrades creative thinking into its most conservative ideas. He wishes to encourage risk, believing “If we purely by luck stumble into something good, we’ll feed it” (D2).
• “Do be humble.” When working in collaboration, Lazzo believes egos have to be diffused. One of his favorite methods is humor.
• “Don’t pretend you like something when you don’t.” While brainstorming necessitates letting ideas, even bad ones, live for a while, Lazzo knows that eventually an honest assessment is needed, even if it’s blunt. Furthermore, creative minds don’t need to be constantly told how good they are.
• “Don’t get hung up on hierarchy and protocol.” Ideas can come from anyone. Assess the idea, not the creator. Ideas from the bottom can be just as valuable as those from the top.
• “Do trust creators who are super passionate about an idea, even if you have misgivings about it.” As we point out in Achieving Excellence in Teaching (2014), passion remains the disposition most needed by a teacher, and, according to Lazzo, the same seems true for creators. Passion is intimately associated with believability and trust.
• “Do shield creators from other suits.” Creators, Lazzo finds, don’t need to know exactly what others in power think of their creations. All creators function well in sandboxes.

As we note in Lazzo’s fifth guideline, Lazzo’s advice can be effectively applied to other fields, especially teaching. In fact, his comments and guidelines fit into creative pedagogy quite well:

• Encourage risk. Allow students to explore unchartered waters without immediately providing advice. Reward baby steps.
• Model ego removal. Sometimes in discussions students arrive at remarkable insights and even idea glimmers that the instructors may not have thought about. Show students how to combine your idea with theirs without ownership tags attached to the ideas.
• Tell the truth. After developing an environment that allows for novel ideas to come out, when it comes time for the useful or assessment phase, the instructor should offer candid comments. Encourage idea generation, but discourage less than truthful evaluations of those ideas.
• Be passionate. Passion not only sells ideas, but the entire person as well as the creative process and product. If instructors aren’t passionate about what they profess, how can they avoid a roomful of Negative Nells and Debbie Downers?

In short, creative instructors and instructors of creative thinking can take “swimming” lessons from a variety of sources.

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

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According to popular lore, the devil is in the details. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe believes “God is in the details.” As for us, creativity is in the details, and by details, we mean paying attention to and utilizing little things.

In earlier posts, for instance, we’ve pointed out how mere walking can aid creative thinking (the opening paragraph to this post was written in Charlie’s head while he was ambling home for lunch). In our Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking (2012) and Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013) we’ve noted how the color blue, a 72-degree temperature inside, and even placing a problem in your head just before you fall asleep can all contribute to enhanced creative moments.

Other researchers into creative thinking have discovered that the little details in how you think can have an effect. Barsalou (2008) found that when you are seated, arm flexion (vs. arm extension) can increase insights and idea generation. Interestingly, as many people think creatively when they are about to fall asleep, Hao, Yuan, Hu, and Grabner (2014) demonstrated that “arm flexion and arm extension in the lying body position exerted effects on AUT [Alternative Uses Task] performance in a converse pattern compared to that in a seated body position.” Ding, Tang, Tang, and Posner (2014) posit that “creative performance on the divergent thinking task and emotion were better following IBMT [Integrative Body Mind Training] than RT [Relaxation Training].” These researchers suggest that this improvement in creative thinking can be accomplished with three hours of IBMT training (seven 30-minute sessions), and, yes, we did the mat–and the time doesn’t quite add up (we pay attention to details).

Knight and Baer (2014) figured out that brainstorming groups that stood (vs. sitting in chairs) produced more creativity and were less apt to simply defend their own turf. In terms of our nifty nine applied creative thinking strategies, these collaborators displayed facility with perception shift. In Teaching Applied Creative Thinking, we also stressed the need for the thinker’s motion.  Maybe Rodin’s famous thinker (“Le Penseur”) would have displayed more creative thinking had he been pacing (“Le Promenader”?), or maybe Ionesco’s seemingly unfathomable The Chairs was actually a Theater of the Absurd metaphor for the dangers of prolonged sitting.  In any case, Knight and Baer’s research seems consistent with Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014) that the motion of walking boosts ideation at the moment and immediately after.

Can all these details somehow be synthesized?  At least one thing becomes more obvious—the traditional classroom arrangement is probably not the best way to boost creativity in students. Two, the body-mind connection needs greater exploration.

By the way, were you sitting still the whole time you read this post?

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

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It is better to write a bad short story than to have a good idea for a short story that you never write.

Most of our posts tell a story, give a quote, or start with a hook to interest readers, but this time we’re doing something different. This time the one-sentence first paragraph contains the fundamental and powerful truth we want to talk about. Actually, to refine the point, we’re focused on the relationship between creativity and doing.

In fact, look at some of our recent titles for New Forums—Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking (2012) and Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013). Both titles stress Bloom’s higher-order skill of application—i.e., doing something. Even the subtitle of our recent Options (2014)—Constructing Your House of Fiction—emphasizes the need for action; fiction, like knowledge, is built through the application of many concepts.

The three of us have recently been reading Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation, a book Rusty is using as his main text this semester in his CRE 201 Creativity and Innovation course. Innovation, a common term in business, is distinguished from creativity because the former demands some stage of product. In fact, as Kelley affirms, “All good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action” (6). Rusty will guide his students through the various stages of innovation, but in the end he will demand they develop a product.

One of our favorite stories from over forty years of teaching creative writing involves a student we will always refer to as Gentle Ben. Ben was a master of story concepts. Each week he would stop by the office or catch us before or after class to tell us about this great idea he had for his next story. Unfortunately, in the context of the course, Ben’s next story would have been his first. As great as he was coming up with concepts, he was as bad setting them down on paper.

If we could get his permission, we would put Ben’s picture on a poster with the caption “It is better to write a bad short story than to have a good idea for a short story you never write.”

Even a bad short story is a product you can do something with. Getting the concept out of your head and getting it on paper gives the writer a perspective. The getting it down process is much like penciling in a guess on a crossword puzzle. You can’t tell what words you will be able to see as viable crosses until you pencil in a possible answer. Once you have your story idea at least partially living on paper, you are able to critique it. Just as import often, somebody else can critique it. All those years ago we could tell Ben we liked his ideas, but we could never truly judge the idea as story until it was in print.

In The Ten Faces of Innovation, Kelley discusses the idea of prototyping, of making even a crude model for your innovative product. Kelley even provides the example of a colleague who prototyped a new surgical tool with a whiteboard marker, a film canister, a clothes pin and some tape, and executives of a surgical company were told to “squint”—“to ignore the surface detail and just look at the overall shape of then idea” (47). However, you can only squint when you have something to squint at—squinting at an idea is difficult at best.

So, whether your innovative idea is a creative business product or creative writing, prototype it. Right now Hal and Charlie are part of a writing group trying tom produce a 400-page collabo-novel, but how did that product begin? Each of the five writers created one scene involving one character trying to obtain a goal in one place, Clement County, Kentucky. The novel quickly got past five chapter ones because we had something to build on. Interestingly none of them original chapter ones is still chapter one—we had to write two prequels to our openings that now serve as Chapter I and Chapter II.

But we couldn’t have done it without our crude prototypes of Chapter I. Wicked Design may turn out to be a bad book, but it wouldn’t have become a book at all without a foundation of words in the form of five chapters.

Go forth and do.

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