Design Thinking: Creativity CAN Be Taught

One of the most exciting things about design thinking is the conviction that creativity is something that belongs to everyone and not just the province of a lone few “creative types.” Stanford’s Bill Burnett told our class, “I may not be able to make you more intelligent. I may not be able to make you taller…but I can make you more creative.”

Design thinkers are confident all of us can become more creative because of what they know about the brain. Like Dan Ariely, design thinkers take seriously how our embodied brains shape our perception of the world around us. While the laptop I’m using to write this functions on 85 watts, your incredibly sophisticated brain only requires about 40 watts to read and process this. (Assuming you’re paying attention…SQUIRREL!) Our brains are capable of this amazing efficiency, because they use heuristics, cognitive processes that look for familiar patterns, also known as schemas. (If you’re interested in a little more about this: http://irrationaljesus.com/video_listing/two-minds/.) These schemas, while great for quickly processing information, can also trap us into ruts. Once locked into a schema, for instance, it’s hard to see the world in any other way.

In the design class I took we did something called the thirty circles problem. We were given a sheet of paper with thirty circles and were told to come up with something unique and creative for these circles in a three minute time period. We were given an example: a big smiley face drawn in one of the circles. Then, for three minutes we were subjected to frenetic music while the professor shouted at us now and again to be creative and not to just sit there. Sound like fun? It…wasn’t.

In the debrief the professor acknowledged that he was being a jerk on purpose. He was trying to simulate the environments that most people endure at work. Most of us are given vague problems, told to be creative without any actual help in how to be creative, and then are hurried up with the occasional manager barking about deadlines. The least helpful thing he did was drawing the smiley face. Remember schemas? The smiley face anchored us on an “in the circle” schema. Without even realizing it, as soon our brains saw the solution as drawing stuff inside the circles, it’s all but impossible to imagine solving them in any other way. People drew different types of faces or turned the circles into balls or other round objects. But there are only so many round things most people can think of in three minutes.

The biggest teachable difference between uncreative and creative thinking? Rather than leaping into extending schemas with which we’re comfortable and familiar, creative people first spend time questioning the schemas themselves trying to generate other ways to solve the problem.

As a group we then spent time dreaming up other schemas and soon discovered an “out of the circle” schema using the circle to create a flower with petals around it or a sun with the rays shooting away from it. Others found a “two circle” schema, connecting circles to make a pair of sunglasses to fend off the rays of that sun. Building on that, others saw a “multiple circle” schema and created things like a caterpillar or a giant, sideways ice cream cone falling apart. You get the idea.

The key to creativity is questioning the schemas we’re initially given and THEN brainstorming different solutions based on those different ways of thinking. People working together questioning schemas can uniquely utilize not just thirty circles but a hundred circles in three minutes.

Breaking schemas? We know something about this in the church. Parabolic thinking is thinking that looks at ordinary relationships through another schema. In the parable of the workers Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like some guys working all day, some guys working half a day, and some guys only working for an hour all getting paid the same wage. In the schema of merit this story makes no sense. It’s offensive. Why should the folks who show up at the end get paid the same as the ones who worked in the hot sun all day long? But using the schema of generosity, Jesus points out the landowner pays the folks who worked all day a fair wage…he just chooses to pay everyone else more. Jesus’ point: God isn’t bound by our human schemas of merit. God’s kingdom operates by other schemas.

The early church knew how to organize around other schemas. While church leaders first utilized the homes of members, after Christianity spread in the Roman empire that schema wasn’t adequate. Originally, Roman basilicas were used to house government courts and other administrative functions. Romans initially oriented basilicas along the horizontal axis, entering in the middle of this long, imposing structure. When the church took over these buildings to use for worship, however, leaders flipped these long buildings along the vertical axis, entering through a narthex opening into a long nave with an apse at the far end. Church leaders, in other words, weren’t deterred by the horizontal axis schema utilized by Roman architects, but shaped these buildings to create a different kind of use.

In this time of deep, profound cultural shifting it’s time for church leaders to be as creative as possible. And thank goodness: we CAN be taught! While the church as “worship on Sunday morning in a large building” schema is still working for a lot of folks (myself included), true creativity means we all need to be coming up with as many other schemas, ways of doing church, as we can imagine.

When I started ministry as a new church developer, we were supposed to start in this winery on Lake Travis just outside of Austin, TX. We imagined communion with a cabernet station and a pinot noir station. But when the fire marshal and architects became involved we wound up losing the winery and meeting in an elementary school instead. Believe me, that called for a schema switch. Not only aesthetically, but now we were having to think about an impermanent worship setting we would have to set up and break down every week. With the help of some local congregations we purchased a trailer from Portable Church Industries, and I learned that congregations exist with 1,000 weekly attendants and use from four to six of these trailers every week. That was a schema I NEVER imagined in seminary.  

A friend of mine, Aric Clark, is currently working on a project where church might look like a mobile Laundromat. He and others discovered that people where he is living have a need for a Laundromat. Discovering an Australian company that makes these eco-friendly mobile Laundromat things, Aric put two and two together and discovered another possible schema for doing church. People need to do laundry, and have a lot of down time while they wait. Will it work? Who knows? It’s early days. But it’s a great idea and one of the most interesting schemas for church I’ve seen.

Remember that two circle schema, where people combined circles together to make something new? Imagining new schemas doesn’t mean throwing away models that are still vital. Leaders don’t have to look down on Sunday morning schema churches like I serve to get excited about other possibilities. Indeed, my guess is whatever is emerging is going to call on everything we’ve got.

What new schemas are you seeing? What can you imagine?