Creativity – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Why do we protect ourselves from unknown unknowns?

January 12, 2023February 11, 2020

By Bem Le Hunte

author-bem-le-hunte — Bem Le Hunte (biography)

Why do very few people enjoy sitting comfortably with their unknown unknowns? Why is there an uncomfortable liminality ‘betwixt and between’ the known and unknown worlds?

How can we explore unknowns in a more speculative, playful, creative capacity, through our imaginations? How can we use lack of knowledge to learn about ourselves and let it teach us how to be comfortable and curious in the midst of unknowing?

The power and allure of unknown unknowns have long been recognised by creative practitioners as a holy grail for inspiration. Borges wrote in The Library of Babel about a fictitious library where all books ever written existed together, but this library turns to a dystopia as the reader discovers that “the certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.”

Creative writing as a journey into the unknown unknown

August 20, 2024October 22, 2019

By Lelia Green

Author - Lelia Green — Lelia Green (biography)

Do you use writing as a means of accessing your unconscious knowledge and understanding? The electric experience of things falling into place is a well-recorded outcome of ‘writing to find out what you want to say.’ E. L. Doctorow is credited with saying that writing a novel is “like driving at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (no formal reference identifiable, but see Quotation Celebration). There is a sense of allowing the unfolding journey to deliver you to your destination, and experiencing the energy rush when you arrive. It’s a matter of relinquishing control and being open to the unexpected.

Australian novelist Helen Milton Bastow described an equivalent revelation. A fiction writer, Bastow had avoided researching Indigenous stories about the places of her childhood in case they overly influenced her own story telling. One day, however, she was on an eco-trail in the Coorong, South Australia, when she happened upon an information display about the local Indigenous dreamtime:

Collaboration: From groan zone to growth zone

September 11, 2024May 28, 2019

By Carrie Kappel

What is the groan zone in collaboration? What can you do when you reach that point?

As researchers and practitioners engaged in transdisciplinary problem-solving, we know the value of diverse perspectives. We also know how common it is for groups to run into challenges when trying to learn from diverse ideas and come to consensus on creative solutions.

This challenging, often uncomfortable space, is called the groan zone. The term comes from Sam Kaner’s diamond model of participation shown in the figure below. After an initial period of divergent thinking, where diverse ideas are introduced, groups have to organize that information, focus on what’s most important, and make decisions in order to move forward into the phase of convergent thinking.

Navigating that transition between divergent and convergent thinking is the realm in which creativity and innovation emerge, if we let them.

Idea tree: A tool for brainstorming ideas in cross-disciplinary teams

September 11, 2024March 12, 2019

By Dan Stokols, Maritza Salazar, Gary M. Olson, and Judith S. Olson

authors_dan-stokols_maritza-salazar-campo_gary-olson_judith-olson — 1. Dan Stokols (biography)
2. Maritza Salazar (biography)
3. Gary M. Olson (biography)
4. Judith S. Olson (biography)

How can cross-disciplinary research teams increase their capacity for generating and integrating novel research ideas and conceptual frameworks?

A key challenge faced by research teams is harnessing the intellectual synergy that can occur when individuals from different disciplines join together to create novel ideas and conceptual frameworks. Studies of creativity suggest that atypical (and often serendipitous) combinations of dissimilar perspectives can spur novel insights and advances in knowledge. Yet, many cross-disciplinary teams fail to achieve intellectual synergy because they allot insufficient effort to generating new ideas. Here we describe a brainstorming tool that can be used to generate new ideas in cross-disciplinary teams.

The idea tree exercise

What can interdisciplinary collaborations learn from the science of team science?

April 9, 2026June 19, 2018

By Suzi Spitzer

How can we improve interdisciplinary collaborations? There are many lessons to be learned from the Science of Team Science. The following ten lessons summarize many of the ideas that were shared at the International Science of Team Science Conference in Galveston, Texas, in May 2018 [Moderator update – In April 2026, an embedded link to the Galveston 2018 conference in this sentence was no longer available and so the link structure has been left in place but the active link deleted: scienceofteamscience.org/2018-scits-conference/].

1. Team up with the right people
On the most basic level, scientists working on teams should be willing to integrate their thoughts with their teammates’ ideas. Participants should also possess a variety of social skills, such as negotiation and social perceptiveness. The most successful teams also encompass a moderate degree of deep-level diversity (values, perspectives, cognitive styles) and include women in leadership roles.

Using the arts and design to build student creative collaboration capacity

September 12, 2024May 15, 2018

By Edgar Cardenas

How can undergraduate and graduate students be helped to build their interdisciplinary collaboration capacity? In particular, how do they build capacity between the arts and other disciplines?

In 2018, I co-facilitated the annual, 3-day Emerging Creatives Student Summit, an event for approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students from 26 universities organized by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities. Students’ majors ranged from the sciences, engineering, music, arts, and design.

Synthesis centers as critical research infrastructure

May 4, 2020August 22, 2017

By Andrew Campbell

When we think of research infrastructure, it is easy to associate astronomers with telescopes, oceanographers with research vessels and physicists with particle accelerators.

But what sort of research infrastructure (if any) do we need in order to do more effective multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on big, complex, ‘wicked’ challenges like climate change or food security?

Some eminent colleagues and I argue in a new paper (Baron et al., 2017) that the answers include:

Transkillery! What skills are needed to be a boundary crosser?

January 29, 2025March 14, 2017

By Dena Fam, Tanzi Smith and Dana Cordell

authors_dena-fam_tanzi-smith_dana-cordell — 1. Dena Fam (biography)
2. Tanzi Smith (biography)
3. Dana Cordell (biography)

What skills and dispositions are required by researchers and practitioners in transdisciplinary research and practice in crossing boundaries, sectors and paradigms?

The insights here come from interviews with 14 internationally recognized transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners, chosen from a diverse range of research and practice-based perspectives.

Here we focus on:

1) skills for specific tasks such as facilitation of a meeting, crafting a well-written report, and communicating effectively across disciplines; and,

2) dispositions, attitudes, orientations and temperaments of an effective researcher/practitioner, i.e., as a way of being.

Critical Back-Casting

August 24, 2022February 9, 2017

By Gerald Midgley

How can we design new services or strategies when the participation of marginalized stakeholders is vital to ethicality? How can we liberate people’s creativity so we can move from incremental improvements to more fundamental change?

To answer these questions, I have brought together insights from Russ Ackoff and Werner Ulrich to develop a new method that I call Critical Back-Casting.

Russ Ackoff, writing in the 1980s, is critical of organizations that focus on incremental improvements without ever asking whether they are doing the right thing in the first place. Thus, they are at risk of continually ‘improving’ the wrong thing, when they would be better off going for a more radical redesign. Ackoff makes two far-reaching prescriptions to tackle this problem.

Research team performance

December 11, 2024January 17, 2017

By Jennifer E. Cross and Hannah Love

authors_jennifer-cross_hannah-love — 1. Jennifer E. Cross (biography)
2. Hannah Love (biography)

How can we improve the creativity and performance of research teams?

Recent studies on team performance have pointed out that the performance and creativity of teams has more to do with the social processes of interaction on teams, than on individual personality traits. Research on creativity and innovation in teams has found that there are three key predictors of team success:

group membership,
rules of engagement, and
patterns of interaction.

Each of these three predictors can be influenced in order to improve the performance of teams, as the following examples show.

Four things everyone should know about ignorance

April 13, 2021November 1, 2016

By Michael Smithson

“Ignorance” is a topic that sprawls across a grand variety of disciplines, professions and problem domains. Many of these domains have their own perspective on the unknown, but these are generally fragmentary and often unconnected from one another. The topic lacks a home. Until fairly recently, it was a neglected topic in the humanities and human sciences.

I first started writing about it in the 1980’s (e.g., my book-length treatment, Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms), but it wasn’t until 2015 that the properly compiled interdisciplinary Routledge International Handbook on Ignorance Studies (Gross and McGoey 2015) finally appeared.

Harnessing analogies for creativity and problem solving

November 2, 2023September 13, 2016

By Christian Schunn

What is an analogy? How can analogies be used to work productively across disciplines in teams?

We know from the pioneering work of Kevin Dunbar (1995), in studying molecular biology labs, that analogies were a key factor in why multidisciplinary labs were much more successful than labs composed of many researchers from the same backgrounds. What is it about analogies that assists multi- and interdisciplinary work?

The advice that follows comes from a decade of research involving intensive analyses of hundreds of hours of interdisciplinary science and engineering teams, following the minute-by-minute processes of the teams, and using advanced statistical techniques to look for robust patterns in behavior over time and across teams. In general, our research has shown that creative teams generate twice as many ideas per unit time when they use analogies than when they do not.

So, what is an analogy?