Let me start by saying the title of this post is not a dig at business leaders or decision-makers whose responsibility it is to make more money. I respect anyone who runs a business of any size. It is a much harder job than many people think it is. I wish I was better at it. I enjoy consulting and speaking to groups, but that is a mostly an individual endeavor.
Everyone has a boss, even the boss. Boards of directors, shareholders, customers, the public, Everyone, including your boss, makes the best decision they can with the information they have. The Creativity Algorithm’s purpose is to provide information about increasing value by encouraging leaders and employees to have good ideas more often.
When I give keynote speeches at different events or when I do smaller workshops for organizations, a company is investing in me. I take that seriously, not only for the surface-level idea that I want to protect my professional reputation but also for the deeper ethical level.
Time and energy are finite, precious resources. If people and companies are going to invest time and effort into the idea that regularly going into an alpha state to engage in low-stakes cognitive exercises in order to have good ideas more often, then I want them to have good ideas more often. Few things are more frustrating than the feeling of having one’s resources wasted. Quite simply, I care about people, even more so when they place their trust in me.
So when event planners and I or when business leaders and I engage in negotiations to have me give a speech or lead a training, they want to know what they will get. They want numbers. They think a version of “how many good ideas per dollar spent can we expect?”
That is a fair question. I’m careful with my money. When I spend something, I want to know what I will get. Incidentally, this is why so many folks are hesitant to give to desperate people on the street asking for a dollar. It’s not because most people are mean or uncaring. There’s more to it than that. Aside from the obvious ingroup/outgroup bias of that panhandler is not one of “my group’s” members, people are afraid to give a dollar because they don’t want their resources wasted. (Thompson, 2011)
Let’s talk advertising and marketing. Of course, they are different things, but to simplify for this post/episode, we’re going to lump them together. Bosses, CEOs, and decision makers must ask or try to quantify how many new customers and new sources of revenue they will get if they spend their organization’s resources on marketing or advertising. Those are good questions. B I But, I have yet to see an advertising salesperson guarantee a certain number of new customers or guarantee a certain increase in revenue. Advertising is an attempt to change minds.
And that brings us to The Creativity Algorithm. We are here to change minds on many levels. Changing the conscious mind is difficult enough. Ask a marketing or advertising expert about that. There are plenty of semi-substantiated rumors that it takes an average person to see a message seven times before something changes. Just typing that made me wince a bit as a psychologist who appreciates the precision of specific research findings. But, I googled it and found quite a few sites that support the ‘rule of seven’ so it must be true.
So how many sophisms must a person ponder before they get their next good idea? And, would the good idea have happened without pondering sophisms? Finding a cause in psychology is nearly impossible. I’ve said it before, if psychology were easy, we’d call it chemistry. Chemistry has a nice, organized table where everything is in its place. An oxygen molecule is the same as every other oxygen molecule. But in psychology, there are simply too many variables between people and within people for us to predict that any one independent variable will cause a change in the dependent variable.
Let me fall back on a metaphor. Focusing only on the next quarter’s profit as a guide for increasing value is like trying to get a pesky dog to be quiet by distracting it with a treat. It will be quiet for a short time, but the root cause has not been addressed. And, to make things worse you are rewarding pesky behavior which will lead to its increase. It is not a perfect metaphor, but I have a German Short-haired pointer who is doing anything he can to get my attention as a type this.
Working with The Creativity Algorithm is an investment of time. Not only for the business leader personally but for her company. One would hope the aforementioned leader would engage in the activities for herself and not just hire a speaker or consultant to train her employees. Maybe I should put an addendum on my next consultant contract. The CEO or owner must agree to provide evidence that she routinely images in the exercises as well as encouraging her employees.
A common metaphor for explaining how a small increase in a benefit will become an increasingly big benefit is the snowball effect. I prefer but am hesitant to use the idea of compounding interest. The snowball effect is vague and leaves wiggle room. Compounding interest raises the question of what is the rate of increase.
Let’s consider a very mundane, barely creative convergent solution to a problem that has affected only one employee. A cord that stretched from her desk to the receptacle on the wall next to her kept getting caught in the wheels of her desk chair. Convergent solutions are ones that use a common sense, straight-line answer rather than an out-of-the-box elaborate idea. She can’t control where the receptacle is or what type of chair she has. But she might be able to move her desk or move the cord so that the cord does not have to run along where her chair wheels are. That small, good idea has allowed her to remove a source of stress and stress is an effective blocker of good ideas.
What might her mind think of next now that she feels a bit more relaxed and a bit more control over its situation? Might she then think of a way to re-think how she processes emails so that she can catch out-of-date information being forwarded to another department? By not having to deal with the calls from the department that received the out-of-date information, what might her more relaxed unconscious put together when her conscious mind needs a break and wanders off?
Imagine this scenario playing out throughout a whole organization. It is that kind of ever-increasing improvement that compounding good ideas can cause. What I’ve described sounds great, so great in fact that CEO’s often want the benefits right away. As we said before everyone has a boss and oftentimes bosses only measure progress against the next quarter, not in long-term value.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the unconscious may or may not have a sense of time, but if it does, it probably does not align with corporate schedules. To the business leaders who are reading or listening to this, ask your personal financial planner to speed up the results of your personal investments. See what they say. It will be much more eloquent than what your unconscious will say when you demand a good idea right now. Both your unconscious and your financial planner will not hurry things up for you, but at least your financial planner will answer future calls. Your unconscious might not be so eager to hear from you after you place your short term demands.
This post/episode has a different tone than what I usually write. So let’s lighten it up a bit. Let me leave you with this. When you eat a sandwich, of course, your thumbs are holding the bottom of the sandwich. Let me ask you: when you pick it up from the plate, do you slide your fingers under the bottom of it or your thumbs? Do you do fingers down and then a flip or do you pick the sandwich up with your thumbs? Of course, your thumbs end up on the bottom of the sandwich, but do they start in that position? If you pause for a second to think about that, ask yourself what else you have never noticed.
Take Away: First things first: relax. For many, that is difficult. But let’s hope you can sit down and do some breathing exercises. Ideally three times per week. After you feel an alpha state start to develop, then reflect on whether unexpected surprises and good luck are better than expected and planned for rewards. As you do that, realize that an unexpected good idea in the future might be better than a forced one right now.
Spreading the Thoughts: Ask your coworkers, family, and friends how they pick up a sandwich. If they pause for a second and think about it, ask them what else they haven’t noticed and point them in the direction of The Creativity Algorithm.
Next Post/Episode: Bad Perfume
For more information on how to help yourself and people in your organization learn how to access solutions more regularly, please go to:
Website: joeswope-publicspeaker.com
Youtube: youtube.com/@joeswope-publicspeaker
Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/joe-swope
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/joe-swope-speaker
References
Richards, R. (2010). Everyday Creativity. In The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (pp. 189-215). Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, D. (2011, March 22). Should You Give Money to Homeless People? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/should-you-give-money-to-homeless-people/72820/
The Creativity Algorithm 
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