 Good afternoon and welcome to Lekable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. Before we jump into this, I just want to do my little plug for SACNAS, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. SACNAS is having a 2019 conference here in Honolulu right around Halloween and a couple of days thereafter. I want to urge all science and STEM fans to take a good look at that conference and think about attending. There's going to be a lot of great sessions that are really trying to bring the native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations more into SACNAS now and make them a big vital part of this amazing group. Anyhow, today on Lekable Science, we have a really amazing guest, Costa Michalitas. Welcome, Costa. He's coming to us from New York City. Hey, Ethan. How's it going? Going good. Nice to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Absolutely. Costa works for a group called No Innovation, which is KNOW Innovation. They know innovation and they create innovation, actually, and he is, I guess, goes with the title of an innovation facilitator. Before we get too deep into No Innovation, sounds like an unusual business to get into. How did you migrate to this line of work? Well, I guess accidentally, for the most part, I was organizing TEDx events. So if you've heard of TED Talks, I was organizing a small TEDx event in New York City. And the founder of No Innovation spoke at that event, and he liked our event production and he invited me to come on board and do some event production for No Innovation. Event production led to facilitation, and so now I'm an innovation facilitator with No Innovation. Excellent. Excellent. That's great. No Innovation is an unusual group in that it's not a standard company in terms of producing some set product of any sort. You really, basically, you guys are fostering creativity and trying to generate good interdisciplinary ideas. Right? Yeah. Our expertise is basically the psychology of human creativity. We work primarily with large groups, between 25 and, I guess, up to about 200. And we work primarily with academic scientists, with people doing scientific research. And so what we do is we organize these events where groups of scientists come in. We design and facilitate a set of activities over the course of three or five days, depending on the event, the goal of which is to produce interdisciplinary, innovative research ideas. Right. So I actually met host at one of these things. I was invited in as part of a group to look at. This was coastlines and people, I think, right, was the group, and how the science, or sciences and engineering disciplines around coastlines and the sociology and psychology of people all were mushed together, and where to find those, how to build effective learning programs and programs that will create effective solutions to the problems and the great challenges facing that area, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So how long has no innovation been around? So no innovation did the first Ideas Lab in 2004, I believe, in the UK with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Ministry, the EPSRC. And then we've been doing work with the National Science Foundation, with NASA, National Institutes of Health, and with various universities across the US, and really across the world since then. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. It sounds like a truly fascinating kind of work. And so, I mean, this must be challenging on a lot of levels, because one, you're having to pull this team together of people, a few of whom may be quasi-local. You said you have staff all around the world, but you're also doing work all around the world. So then you've got to bring other people on in, set up some sort of a space, figure out an agenda, sort of a syllabus, as it were, to foster creativity. And you're doing this typically with scientists, you say, who are notoriously hard sort of heard, right? They just tend to be independent thinkers. So how do you manage all this? Yeah, it is a bit like herding cats, that's true. You mentioned the team. We are a virtual team. So there's about 25 of us. There's four in the UK, two in Barcelona, one in Ireland, a few sort of spread out across the US. So we do come together for our projects when they happen. And if you're thinking about multidisciplinary scientific innovation, one of the concerns that you start out with is, well, what's the research goal? What is the target? Like what kinds of ideas are we trying to generate? And so if you have a scientific objective, so let's say data-inspired chemistry was a project that we did a while back, which was about how do we leverage recent advances in data science to propel scientific progress in chemistry? That's quite a simple one. It's two disciplines. Other events are dealing with things like building synthetic cells. That was another one we did recently. In that situation, you're talking about eight or nine or 12 or multiple sort of scientific disciplines all coming together. So a big part of it is making sure the right people are in the room. And a component of that is the scientific discipline. And another component is really you want people who are open to collaboration, open to thinking creatively together, listening to one another. Those sort of collaborative personalities are really a tremendous asset in the room. Yeah. I mean, there is this whole idea of collective intelligence, right, that if you get a bunch of bright people, particularly if they are not all sort of right out of the same school and the same discipline, but are sort of have some different backgrounds and all, and get them focused in on a set of problems, even if they're very complex problems, this group will actually come up with better solutions than any individual in the group or has a higher IQ than any IQ of any of its members, right? Yes, absolutely. Getting intelligent people in the room has never really been a problem. It's, you know, if you go to PhDs and you go to scientists, you inherently get very intelligent individuals. What really helps them sort of make progress in terms of creative thinking are a couple of things. One is that you're looking for the space in between their disciplines. So if you're doing something like the microbiome plus cancer, that was an event that I ran recently, you're looking at the space between two fields of expertise. And so there's the field is just ripe for novel ideas once you crisscross disciplines that way. That's one thing that helps tremendously. And the other one is you want to create an environment that they're in for a week that is stimulative toward creativity. So it's nice to be away from everything. So if you can do a retreat somewhere in a sort of log cabin type of venue and buffalo in the, in the case of the microbiome and cancer or somewhere tropical or whatever it is, if you can sort of get people to escape from the normal environment, that's a big deal. And then there are things like the psychological climate. If you get the level of humor up, that increases people's willingness to reduce judgment and consider crazy ideas. And that's just humor. There's idea time, idea support. There's a variety of sort of psychological factors that we look at and we try and tweak while we're in the room. So we create an environment that maximally sort of stimulates people's creativity. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I was reading recently about this collective intelligence idea and they talk about the key thing is the, not really the IQs of the individuals involved, it's the social sensitivity. How, how tuned in they are to others. Are they willing to play the social conventions of Bern Haking versus trying to dominate a conversation? Do they see when another person in the group is uncomfortable and react appropriately? Do they, they tell when they've hurt somebody's feelings and apologize appropriately? And the higher the social sensitivity score is basically of the individuals, apparently the group intelligence goes up faster too. Yes, certainly. As a practitioner, I've observed things like that. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense. I'm not up to date on the latest research in terms of social sensitivity. But certainly I know that interpersonal conflict, for example, hinders creativity. And so as practitioners, we do things like make sure everyone has an opportunity to get to know everyone else. We make sure we, we create an even playing field. That if there are dominant voices in the room, you sort of either spread them out for certain kinds of activities. And then other times you lump them all together. Like when you really want to hear from introverts, you take all the dominating person, I was, you put them in one group over there. And that tends to solve the problem for a little while. So there are things we do as practitioners to account for that. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's, that's, you know, a really wonderful kind of process. And it does a lot of good, it gets people, it brings out best ideas. And so National Science Foundation, for instance, in that COPE project, maybe you can tell us a little bit about, about sort of why, how they, how do they call you up and what do they tell you to do? Yeah, so they do call us up, which is, we're incredibly grateful for, you know, it was a wonderful surprise to our team that, you know, people in the upper ranks at, at some of these funding agencies found the work we do incredibly valuable. And we honor that and we're grateful for it. So we do occasionally get a phone call about helping organize a group of about 120 scientists to generate research ideas. So that's how it happens. I missed the other part of the question. You want to know a little bit about COPE? Well, yeah, yeah, that's why I was just going to, going to use that as an example, right? Yeah, so it's, COPE is about learning from the scientific community what the core issues are around coastlines and people. So as the climate changes and as other kinds of threats and situations and conditions on the coastlines become more, either become more severe or we can observe them better. So we're learning to observe things better. So as those conditions change, what do we need to be thinking about in terms of life on the coast? From an infrastructure standpoint, from a social standpoint, from a political standpoint, economics, things, even things like certain weather predictions around the tides for rivers will tell people who move products on barges how much they can squeeze under certain bridges. So it's a tiny point or small towns understanding flood dynamics and how they're changing. And the point of all this was if you listen to scientists from multiple disciplines and you look at it from the largest scale, you can identify some issues you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Yeah, that's what struck me at that gathering was we really had a lot of people who would not normally have been, as you say, in the same room. How do you, how do you, I mean, you point out you need good minds? Who does the selection of the people and how does that process go? I mean, that seems like that's got to be critical to this whole business, right? Yeah, we read tea leaves. We're not really involved in, as creativity facilitators, we're not really involved in the selection process. We try to ask good questions about which disciplines should be in the room and things like that. And then you want to think about, well, what career levels? Because sometimes if you have sort of Nobel laureates and people at the top of their field, that's different than working with sort of early stage researchers, people who are doing their postdocs or who are early in their research careers. So there are things about composition, but there's nothing special about selecting individuals. We're not sort of looking for the most creative people. We're just looking for the scientists who are interested in collaborating and who bring expertise to the table that's relevant to the challenge. Oh, that's very cool. That's very, very neat. It's quite a unique art form that I won't say perfecting, but that you're using and practicing, certainly. And it's a great system to bring creativity in and foster creative thinking about very important issues, right? It's a lot of fun, and it's for everybody, too. I hope we get to touch on that a bit if you're up for it. Yeah, yeah. We are going to touch on that, and we're going to explore some further areas of this when we come back. Right now, we're going to have to head off to a little bit of a break here. Host Mikalidis from No Innovation is with me from New York City. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Likeable Science. I'll be back in Hawaii, and we'll be back in one minute. Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech Hawaii. Konnichiwa Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show, and is streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Aloha. I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests, like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii, who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday. Aloha. And welcome back to Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Thanks for coming back and joining us again. Joining me today from New York City is Costa Mikalidis. Welcome again, Costa. And Costa is with a group called No Innovation, who fosters creativity basically and generates good interdisciplinary thinking among large groups of talented people. We're talking before the break a little bit about some of the work he's done for the National Science Foundation. That's where I met him at one of those gatherings. And you mentioned another British group earlier, but you also have non-science. You have sort of non-academic groups come to you sometimes, right? Tell us a little bit about who else might support your work and for what kind of processes. Yeah, absolutely. So over the years, our team has created just other brands outside of No Innovation. So it created Innovation Bound, which does some corporate training and inclusive innovation, which works in the developing world. And basically, we've observed that these principles that we're using to facilitate creative thinking can be extremely relevant in lots of domains, not just in the sort of bleeding edges of scientific research. So in the corporate space, we do some training programs. We teach people how to use their creativity to solve business problems, to build innovative business cases. And in the developing world, we're doing some really exciting work with development banks, with entrepreneurs in the developing world on leadership development programs. And we're doing that across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia. And that's also been a ton of fun. So we've begun to sort of take creativity and learn about where else we can apply it to help people solve meaningful problems. Wow, that sounds great. And you find a lot of similarity in how the processes work with these very different kinds of groups. So a lot of these sound like they might be very different people than groups of scientists. Yeah, it's amazing how separate sometimes the creative process can be from the actual content that we're working on. So we've had facilitators run a workshop in France, where the activities, the instructions for the activities we had were delivered in English, but all of the small group activities, all of the work was done in French. So literally in a different language. We have a facilitator in Greece right now working on a training program that'll be in half Greek, half English. So even the language barrier sometimes isn't even an impediment. Human creativity, of course, I say, of course, but I suppose it's not that obvious. Human creativity is quite similar across all domains. The process of sort of using your imagination to think about multiple possibilities, that's definitely the same across all of these domains. Super, no, that sounds great. There must be a lot of fun then to see how these different groups, very different people working on very different problems, actually all sort of behave the same way, right, if you facilitate them properly. Yeah, it is. I mean, the most rewarding part of the process for me is when you actually see a moment where someone is surprised by their own creativity. It's that moment, I think, is what recharges me, which reaffirms me that this is sort of my personal mission and something I want to continue to do, just helping people be surprised by their own creativity. Yeah, yeah. And when people create something that they didn't believe they could create or had no concept of creating it, that always gives them a real thrill. I've seen a little bit of that. I used to help my wife run kaleidoscope workshops and everyone from little preschool kids up to Smithsonian patrons and are making kaleidoscope. And the reaction was surprisingly similar across all those groups. They'd finish it up, they'd look at this kaleidoscope and they'd say, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it sort of didn't matter who they were. Same kind of thing in a way, right? Yeah, people are always very... Yeah, that sort of... That moment that you go, I did that or we did that, if it's a team effort, it's a really incredible moment. And people do it across domains, like in the corporate space, it's people who do the same routine thing day in, day out. And you give them a little bit of creativity and it becomes a gift in terms of the work they get to do. Excellent, excellent. That's exciting. So there's got to be a balance, because I recall from the Hope meeting that I was at, there's a certain amount of chaos in the room. And I guess some of that chaos is really good, right? But how do you sort of know when it's good chaos or if it's too much chaos and it's all breaking apart? Yes, it's a good question. So as a facilitator, if I'm observing a room and there's sort of chaos going on, I can at this point tell the difference of if it's sort of managed chaos, moving in a positive direction, or if we've lost people and they're sort of off meandering. Wow, how do I do that? That's a good question. I don't know that I could pin down the indicators that I use explicitly. It feels very implicit to me. Certainly, you can check in with people if you see excitement around the level of ideas. There's one thing I notice, which is a good indicator that we're going the wrong direction, which is if everyone's being very polite and when I move in to sort of let people know that we're at the end of an activity, they sort of everyone politely ends their conversations and goes, okay, what's next? That's a negative sign. That means there's an elephant in the room that nobody's talking about. So that's one example of something I'll notice. Whereas if we get to the end of an activity and I'm trying to sort of get people to move to the next thing, you know, we're finished or please complete your conversation and no one's stopping, it means that they're very vested in what they're talking about, that this is valuable time for them. And sometimes you might even give them an extra four or five minutes to complete their conversations. Yeah, I mean, that's actually, funny you mentioned that because I recall that from that Cope conference. We get in these conversations and it's like, you just didn't want to stop because it was like, there are great ideas flowing back and forth. You know, if somebody was giving you a great aha moment and stuff you were saying, it's obviously resonating with the other people at your table. And yeah, you'd be trying, like, why should we listen to him? We're having a good time here. We're really thinking. We're doing what we should be doing here. Yeah. That's that's one strong indicator. Another one that's coming to mind is you can look at the output. So we use a lot of post-it notes to record ideas if you can sort of notice some of these behind me. So if you do an activity and there are just tons of notes coming out of it, tons of output, that was a valuable activity for people. If you do one and no one's really written anything down, they don't think anything was worth writing down. That's an indicator that maybe that activity wasn't as successful. So there's some explicit things like that. Yeah. But I imagine there must be a very, it's almost a subtle reading of body language of the whole group telling you whether they're with you or not with you, whether the energy is up in a good way or just chaotically weird. Yeah. Reading the body language of a group. Absolutely. I've never phrased it that way. That's helpful because that is what we do. Yeah. I mean, it is funny. I recall reading some while ago about a great study where a series of concerts were performed and they were also videotaped. And this was in some sort of competition. So they were all judged by experts. And then they took people, both musicians and non-musicians, and some of them saw and heard the videotape. Some of them only saw it. Some of them only heard it and didn't see it. And surprisingly, a group who was judgments as the quality best matched the judges was the group who saw it but did not hear the concert. Swallowed the concert but did not hear it. And their judgments were the most accurate in terms of matching those of the judges. They must have been the same kind of thing of watching some body language of the group, of the audience in this case, right? And the musicians, I suppose. That's possible. I'd love to see if the study's been repeated. Sometimes you end up with strange results just because you have strange results. But I'd love to see if it's repeated. And then if it is, I'm willing to bet you're right, that it's about body language and facial expression and things like that that communicate quite a bit more than the actual data itself. When they shared that result with the musicians who gave exactly the same thing. And the musicians did exactly the same. The musicians refused to believe it, apparently. They absolutely refused to believe this. I'll try to look it up somewhere and give you a reference to it. Because it was pretty intriguing piece of work. Anyhow, so let's talk a little bit about the future. So this seems like a great kind of work you're doing. Are you training others to do the same kind of work? Or are other groups sort of like no innovation around the world trying to stimulate creativity and foster it? Where is this all going? The field is quite large. The creativity field has people everywhere in the world. There are multiple sort of international conferences that happen every year. CREA happens in Italy every year. SIPC happens in Florida or Buffalo. One of those two. There's a series of different conferences. I don't know how many professionals exist across the field. I guess in the thousands, maybe more. But there are creativity facilitators. You'll hear the words design thinking. Which has become quite popular. So it is a large field. We also have to be responsive to where people are asking for it. So in the scientific domain specifically where we work, it's being asked for more and more. The National Institutes of Health I think are a little bit newer in terms of being clients of ours. So they're asking for it more. The National Science Foundation is wanting to do ideas labs more and more. So we're growing in response to that. So our team size is growing. We're doing more of these. So it's growing. I'd love to see it in education. I'd love to see more of this kind of work, more professionals with this background. In the public education space. Yeah, that's a very good point you make. It's much needed. Education needs more creativity within it. In education, we tend to think of arts and music as the creativity part of your academic training, your education. And it's great training. I mean, music and dance particularly because it's kinesthetic. And you don't get kinesthetic elsewhere in academia for the most part. So it's great. But this deliberate creative thinking in order to solve complex problems, it's become more and more important in the work world. And so it needs to be more and more represented in the educational space. Yeah, yeah. It was interesting actually, about a year ago, I had the assistant dean of engineering from the College of Engineering at UH here on. And I asked him, I said, what one word would you use to describe engineers? And without missing a beat, he said creative. And I don't think I hadn't until that point thought of engineering as a creative field, but he's quite right. It sort of is. It's one of the most relevant places for creativity. It's just sort of engineering affects everything. It's our drinking water, our transportation. Everything around us is so affected by engineering. The more creative our engineers are, the more they can do. Right, exactly. And I'm getting it seems more creative all the time. As we're seeing all this interdisciplinary field it's emerging with very interesting solutions to all kinds of interesting problems, right? Yeah, absolutely. Is it Elon Musk who's trying to dig tunnels way under LA to change traffic patterns? Yeah. This is a curious one. So New York City has a challenge with transportation. So New York City grows its population in three dimensions. They built skyscrapers. So we're going length width and height, mostly height now. But for transportation, the subway system is flat. It only really has a couple of levels and you can only add so much to it. So how do you grow the transportation infrastructure in three dimensions? It's a really fascinating engineering urban development challenge that we don't have an answer to. That's interesting indeed. This is great. I'm sure we could go on here for hours and hours and hours but I see our time is almost up. Costa McAlevis from No Innovation. I really want to thank you for being with me here today. This has really been an exciting and enlightening show for me and I feel like I've learned a lot. I wish you the best of luck and continued success in your field there. Thank you, Ethan. Thanks very much. I just want to encourage people out there to give their creativity a little bit of gratitude and support. Just be creative in your life. It's good for you and it's good for the work that you get to do. Absolutely. Sound advice. Thank you very much. That was a great note to end on. Thank you, Costa. And I hope you'll join us next week for another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Until then.