 Welcome to The Creative Life, brought to you by the American Creativity Association in collaboration with Big Tech, Hawaii. I'm Darlene Boyd, your host for today's show, Modernized Creative Problem Solving. Today's guest joining us from Buffalo, New York is Dr. Gerard Puccio. Dr. Puccio is a renowned author, accomplished speaker and consultant. His work is with major corporations, universities and school districts throughout the United States and more than 20 countries. He is recognized as a prominent expert, expert is in many aspects of creativity and creative problem-solving. Dr. Puccio is most definitely a creative producer living the creative life. Our intended takeaways for today's viewers are clear understanding of why creativity is considered to be a 21st century success skill, as well as practical steps to improve our personal and professional creativity. Welcome, Dr. Gerard Puccio to The Creative Life. Well, thank you, Darlene. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited about the topic of creativity and what a perfect name for the show, The Creative Life. Ah, I agree. I suppose a good place for us to start Gerard is at the beginning. Might you give us a quick sketch of the history of creativity, study models in general, and specifically why the creative problem-solving birthing at Buffalo State? Great question. The beginning. Well, that can be answered in a couple of different ways. Let me go back to our study of creativity and when we began to really delve into it as an academic subject, which I know you've been directly involved with. So 1950, so the middle of the previous century is sort of used as the demarcation point for the formal study of creativity. J.P. Guilford, a well-known psychologist, very much interested in intelligence and measuring intelligence, argued that intelligence measures were missing a great deal of human intellect. And in particular, what he was arguing for was that intelligence measures really didn't do much to assess creativity and creative thinking and specifically divergent thinking. So when he became president of the American Psychological Association back in 1949, 1950, he gave a speech, one word title called Creativity and he argued that psychologists who are supposed to be really trying to understand the human experience were missing a fundamental aspect of the human experience, creative thinking or creativity. So that, and not just J.P. Guilford's speech, but other things that were happening in the environment at the time, the race with the Soviet Union, the space race and the launch of Sputnik and concerns about driving creativity in the sciences and keeping up with the Soviet Union ended up spawning a great deal of interest in creativity and trying to develop it in order to advance our society and remain relevant. So that's, to your question, when did the study of creativity begin? But I would go back, since this is about the creative life, that creativity is the story of human evolution, that humans have been creative since the dawn of time. And when you look at the human condition, when you look at our frailty, when you look at the fact that we're not the strongest animal on the planet, we're not the fastest, we can't fly away from danger, we can't breathe underwater, how is it that we have survived and in fact thrived and spread all over the globe? And many anthropologists, many creativity scholars now would argue that the competitive advantage for humans is our ability to think creatively, to be able to creatively solve problems. That's a fundamental survival skill. So, yeah, 1950 from an academic perspective to use a convenient date, but I would argue creativity has always been part of the human experience since the dawn of humanity. How about the efforts at Buffalo State? Because we seem to ascribe the beginning of the creative problem-solving model to Alex Osborne and Sidney Parnes. Feel free to put it on that. Yeah, great question. So the whole reason why I'm in Buffalo and just to shatter the misconception about Buffalo that it snows all the time as I was sharing with you before we went live, I just went for a walk and it's 85 degrees outside and I broke a sweat. So for anyone out there picturing me in snowy Buffalo, take that out of your mind. So why Buffalo? Great question. So, and you mentioned his name, Alex Osborne. He was the visionary who led to the founding of our department. Really interesting story. Here, Alex Osborne was a businessman and he was a founding partner of an ad agency. If you've ever seen, it's been a while now, but it was a TV series, Mad Men. That was based on BBDO, which was his advertising agency. So if the listeners out there know that. Yeah, there you go. There's the fun fact for today's show. Mad Men was based on Alex Osborne's agency, BBDO. So the agency, Baton, Barton, Durstein and Osborne, of course, Osborne was one of the founders of BBDO. And he realized that for their agency to be successful, they needed to tap into the creativity of their employees and also to assist their clients to be successful and competitive as organizations. They needed to help clients tap into their creativity. So Osborne always had a fascination with creativity because he realized that it helped him to be successful. He had this adage that he would have one new idea every day from the time he was a journalist in Buffalo. He wrote for a local newspaper. And that was his quest was to personally challenge himself to be more creative and he developed some methodologies. He practiced these methodologies in his ad agency. I mean, it was his ad agency, so it was his laboratory. And one of the things that he created that has gone all around the world is brainstorming. Who hasn't heard of brainstorming? Well, brainstorming was invented by someone as a strategy to move, if you will, creativity from a random occurrence to something that's more predictable. So can you engage in a cognitive strategy? Can you engage in a repeatable methodology that increases the likelihood of producing an original idea? Well, Osborne developed this methodology and some principles to go along with it. And as a result, his agency was hugely successful and he dedicated his life to creative education because he recognized as a businessman, which is really fascinating to me, that as a businessman, he recognized that education. And Darlene, I know you've done a lot of work in this area around education and creativity, that education often, you know, K to 12, kindergarten to 12th grade experiences, does much to undermine creative thinking rather than to promote it. And Osborne realized that if we're gonna be competitive as a society, individually as organizations, as society, if we're gonna help the world and culture to continue to evolve, we have to do more to promote creative thinking than to undermine it. And so, you know, he developed these methodologies like brainstorming, he developed an entire process called creative problem solving. These were the strategies and tactics that he developed, but his vision was to really impact education and the change education so that more was done to preserve creative thinking than to undermine it. So when he retired in the early fifties, he started a foundation called the Creative Education Foundation. Now, you asked me about why Buffalo? Well, Osborne lived in Buffalo and he commuted to New York City. And when he retired, he started his foundation in Buffalo. He was a trustee at the University of Buffalo. So he had a lot of influence within the university system. Eventually our program moved from the University of Buffalo to Buffalo State in 1967. It was hard to get this pioneering program really embedded in the university. And kind of like the Baltimore Colts moving to Indianapolis in the middle of the night, our program moved from the University of Buffalo to Buffalo State across town because Buffalo State and the president then really recognized, it was very much very famous for being a teacher's preparation, college Buffalo State. And so there was a great focus on education and therefore Osborne's vision of transforming education really resonated with the culture at Buffalo State. And so the program moved from University of Buffalo to Buffalo State in 1967 and an experimental program where they studied through a quasi-experimental design comparing undergraduate students who took courses in creativity and the methods that Osborne had developed versus students control group who didn't take courses. So they really looked at, does it make a difference on students, this creativity training? And at the end of this two year research study, the results were so overwhelmingly positive Buffalo State made our program a permanent program in 1974, the master's degree program was established we still deliver that master's degree program today our undergraduate minor program was created. So, so Buffalo to answer your question was really the first was the pioneering educational program within a university or college setting that set out to deliberately train people, students in creative thinking. So that's why Buffalo, we can blame Alex Osborne. Okay, and then he partnered with Sidney Parnes and am I correct? Was he an engineer? You, your sense of history is right on the mark. So Sid- I didn't know about Mad Men, so. So Sid Parnes was actually at the University of Pittsburgh. He came to the Credit Education Foundation's annual conference, which still goes on today. There was 1955 was the first creator problems on the Institute. So this was Osborne trying to advance the field and he created this week long conference experience. Sid Parnes, who was a professor at University of Pittsburgh came to the conference fell in love with what Alex Osborne was doing. Osborne being the smart businessman that he was recognized if he was going to establish creativity as an area of legitimate academic study, he need to partner with an academic. He was a businessman. He had tested his ideas in the applied world for decades and found great success, but he needed to prove their efficacy. And that's where Sid Parnes became a really important colleague of his. And in fact, when the program moved from the University of Buffalo to Buffalo State, Sid became the chair of our department. And he and, well, Alex called Sid his right arm. So they had a great collaboration. They were McCartney and Lennon. So not to dwell necessarily on the history, but the history tells us a lot even in the small sketch that you shared with us that the magic of this model seems to be the blending from its birthing, as I mentioned, to present day that blending of education and business coming together makes it really suitable across many disciplines. For sure. And I'll just jump on that quickly. I would say the other thing that makes it our educational program and creative problem solving, which is a deliberate creative process that we teach our students and we go out and train individuals and organizations. One of the reasons that makes it really work is going back to what I referred to earlier. All humans are innately creative. It's natural. We engage in creative thinking. We're able to use our imaginations to picture something in the future, an opportunity to seize or a solution to a problem to solve. What creative problem solving does, the way that we teach it, is it taps into that natural creative problem solving that all humans have. And it gives you strategies that you can follow to take what's natural and to draw it out and make it more repeatable and more profound and to allow you to really direct what's already inside of you. So in most cases, as we go through a creative problem solving model, certainly we could do something by ourselves and take a portion of the CPS model and have a piece of paper and say in what ways might I. But most definitely, don't you think the most of the productivity comes from the magic of whatever group you're working with. And if you have the luck of the draw and have a good group, your ideas are going to flow. Am I correct or? Yeah, for sure. I would say it's a yes and what we find, and we just did a large scale study looking at 117 groups of five individuals in a group, individuals who are not trained versus groups that had gone through training. And on average, we gave them a real issue to work on. It's a transportation issue in Buffalo, many large cities face the same problem. How do you get people in the suburbs to use public transportation? And so we posed this problem to groups those that were trained, those that had no prior experience with creativity. And we found that those that had training doubled the output of those that had no training. So there's a magic that happens, of course, when you're in a group, but when the magic really takes off is when you all share the same principles, the same mindset, you have the same training, right? It's the New York Yankees versus my high schools baseball team. They're all playing the same sport, but some have greater training and more experience. So we like to say it's a yes and you need to master creative problem solving individually because life throws you problems. To live is to have problems and to solve problems creatively leads to creative growth. So what we say to students is, and this is the process we take them through in our graduate program, the first course is learning to master creative problem solving individually, right? Because life is going to give you challenges that you won't have immediate easy answers for. And whenever you need to search and invent and create solutions, it can be really fueled by your training and creative problem solving. And then you're right, when you bring people together who have training, that's when the magic really takes off because you get stimulated by others. Someone shares an idea and this is the magic of group creativity. Something dawns on you, it's a catalyst for your thinking, you're stimulated by others and their thoughts. And that's really the power of group creativity is that you get surprised by what other people say and you build associations with and piggyback off of what other people say, but it's clearly improved when people have training. Regarding that training, there are those that say, we have this dialectical tension in the field and we know we have those that argue with us can creativity be taught or nurtured? And often, at least in my experience in working if there was an opportunity or if it was placed in a situation with someone with a philosophy background, for example, analytic philosophers, would say and argue that you can't teach creativity because you can't just turn to someone and say, I want you to demonstrate creativity. You can certainly set that there are others that say you could set the stage for that by teaching skills. And so what are your thoughts? Great question. So let's back up a little bit and let's first focus on what do we mean by creativity? Thank you. Because we have to start with, well, what is it we're trying to do and creativity, there's a creativity for those who haven't been exposed to the field of creativity, like you and I have, Darlene, it's natural for people associated with the arts and that is creative expression. And that's often what we first think of, but of course, creativity is much more than that. It's transdisciplinary. You've already alluded to this, that it can be applied in any field. Fundamentally, creativity is a thought process that we apply to open-ended problems. Again, problems, complex problems, problems that don't have easy answers, like creating a piece of art or creating music, but it's also, it's building a bridge that's gonna stand the test of time. It's developing new theories. It's, well, as a parent, I've had to solve a lot of problems that my two boys have created for me. So it's an everyday experience because it's being able to use our imagination to create new and valuable solutions to open-ended problems, which applies to any field. So it's sciences, it's art. Anytime you're creating new knowledge, you're using your creativity. So what we know, it's a thought process that leads you to a novel and valuable outcome. And isn't the purpose of education to train students to think? Yes. Yeah, so, and creativity is a form of thinking. And if you look at Bloom's taxonomy, what's interesting about creativity, Bloom, Benjamin Bloom being the famous educator who organized thinking from lower-order thinking skills to higher-order thinking skills, said the highest level of human thought is to create because you're producing something that didn't exist before. Next level down, next highest is critical thinking because you're reacting to something that exists. So fundamentally, when you're asking you teach creativity, you can go back to an even more basic question, can we teach thinking? And I was a philosophy minor and you were talking about philosophers might argue against the statement that you can teach creativity. But one of the most powerful courses I took as a philosophy minor at Buffalo State was a course on critical thinking and logic. And of course, in that class on logic, I was taught strategies like Venn diagrams and this strategy and that strategy. And so was I taught to be a more logical thinker? Sure I was because I was exposed to strategies, cognitive strategies that I could repeat. So the same thing is true about creative thinking that you can learn strategies that help you to take something that you already do, but generally we're pretty sloppy thinking, thinkers are pretty sloppy, unless we're following a process or a procedure, then we can be much more effective. And if you look at fundamentally what's creative thinking, there are four basic things that have to happen. You have to clarify what's the problem because in order to be successful, finding an interesting problem to solve or framing a problem in an interesting way is the beginning of the creative process. Then you play with ideas. So you go from problem identification to idea generation, that's where brainstorming rests to then solution development, finding the solutions that look most workable. And this is where the real hard work of creativity happens. These are the artists who paint over and over and over their canvas or the composer who continues to tweak the composition, the writer who continues to refine like Hemingway, their words or an inventor who keeps tinkering in the laboratory, that's that developing process. And then finally have to bring it into reality and you have to implement it. So the creative process essentially involves fundamentally, universally, four stages, problem clarification, idea generation, solution development and implementation. And there are strategies that can be taught in each of those areas to make us more effective. And one thing I like about the creative problem solving model that you advocate for and work with, with the companies that you work with is that I see that your model, it's calling it your model as you deliver it, it's going constantly from the creative to the critical. And I think that's a good thing. You're generating ideas, but yet you're coming back as a group and you're criticizing and prioritizing those ideas as you move along. You have something else that's rather magical, a label you gave, and we don't have time to go through all of the parts of this magnificent seven, as you call it. What's magnificent to me about it is that many models just deal with the cognitive and this is just an example of something in the affective area, it brings in feelings. And as I said, maybe another time we should have you back to talk about the seven amplify, but could you just highlight those, the concept of the magnificent seven for a certain aspect of that? Yeah, there are in the creative process, there are a couple of key polarities, things that seem to be in opposition, but in reality work together. And you talked about one that's absolutely critical and that's creative thinking and critical thinking. It's being able to diverge and generate many options and then to evaluate. So there's this interplay between exploring and then evaluating. And that's a critical dialectic within the creative process. One of the things that we get wrong, we're not terribly systematic thinkers and for some, I think natural reason in terms of what society might do for us because we get kind of defensive, when we tend to think of an idea, the next thing that pops into our mind often is a criticism, right? And that's kind of like slamming on the brakes. It stops our brain from being able to mind wander. So one of the critical cognitive strategies that we teach our students and employees and organizations, those learn to separate, first you generate, first you diverge, build the menu of options, then you select and evaluate. And this is what often goes wrong in groups. You figure the classic meeting, someone generates an idea, the next thing that someone says is a criticism, boom, all the oxygen in the room gets sucked out, right? No one's ready to continue to generate and play with possibility. So one of the keys that we teach people, this is separate divergence from convergence. The other thing that we teach and you were touching on is thinking and feeling. Creative creativity is not just about thinking. I know I've really focused on that, but our feelings and emotions serve to create a ceiling for our thinking. When the neuroscience shows us this, when we're in fear, we tend to literally develop tunnel thinking, right? We stop scanning, we stop mind wandering. And so one of the things that we really work on and we won't go into detail in terms of all of, when we talk about the magnificent seven for every step in the creative problem solving process, the expert model, which has seven steps in it, we have a main cognitive skill, but then we have a partner affective skill because we know the two work together. So for example, with ideational thinking, which is one of the cognitive skills when we go to generate ideas, need to be able to develop a spirit and a motion of playfulness, being willing to try and fail and play like when you're a child like wonder. And so that's an example of how thinking and feeling go together. If you can't be playful, it's hard to ideate. It's hard to engage in ideational thinking. So yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. We're just about ready to wrap up, but I recognize that creativity is up close and personal for you. And so personal that you wrote a book about it, you've written several books in fact. And I just wonder if you could tell our viewers a little bit about, if I'm correct, it's organizational creativity and innovation, personal journey. Yeah, organizational creativity, a personal journey. That's a book by Sage. So what that book is all about is looking at bringing creativity in organizations, but the individual becoming the vessel for creativity. So if you're gonna bring organizations aren't creative, organizational creativity is a misnomer. Organizations are only creative when the individuals in the organization are creative. So this is a book, it's a personal journey for entrepreneurs and innovators, people who wanna work on their own creativity and to bring that into organizations, either their own startup or into an existing organization. And that's the reason why the subtitle of the book is a personal journey for innovators and entrepreneurs. But I'm glad we were able to mention that and I would also tell our viewers that just a simple search on you will come up with a number of videos, especially on the Magnificent Seven, there's a complete video that they can watch on YouTube too, if they are interested. And with that, Gerard, I thank you for joining me. I'm Darlene Boyd, your host for today's Think Tech Hawaii show, The Creative Life and our guest Buffalo State University distinguished professor and chair, Dr. Gerard Puccio has been with us and we ask you to join us again in two weeks for the next show of The Creative Life, Aloha.