The Groove Issue 113 - How to Enhance Your Creativity by Avoiding Cognitive Bias
HOW TO ENHANCE YOUR CREATIVITY BY AVOIDING COGNITIVE BIAS
Sometimes people get stuck professionally and creatively because they believe their environment isn’t stimulating enough to empower a big breakthrough.
While it is true that living in an invigorating city, traveling all the time to different places, or being around a group of innovators is very conducive to creativity, the everyday things and normal people that surround you can fuel grand ideas too, no matter where you are or what you do.
The Perils of Functional Fixedness
Claes Oldenburg in his New York studio in 1961.
When someone has gotten used to thinking in a particular way because they can’t find anything exciting around them, they may be at risk of developing cognitive bias, also known as “functional fixedness”, which limits a person to use an object only in the way it’s traditionally intended.
This bias usually also expands to other areas since it constrains people’s ability to see different options and to problem-solve creatively.
Claes Oldenburg was the opposite of someone with functional fixedness. After spending a few years designing costumes and props for performances and interactive events in New York in the early 1960s, he decided to make mushy sculptures with no fixed or permanent form. With this unassuming act, he changed the very definition of what sculpture is.
Top: Oldenburg’s first large-scale sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, on the campus of Yale University. Bottom: Spoonbridge and Cherry, a sculptural fountain designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen which lives at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
After the commercial and critical success of the soft sculptures, Oldenburg embarked on a project that would forever change his life.
In the late 1960s, moved by his fascination with public monuments as a child (like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris) he began to sketch and design colossal sculptures for famous public gathering places that he never dreamed would be executed. He called the project “Proposed Colossal Monuments”.
But in 1969, students from Yale University (Oldenburg’s alma mater) became acquainted with his drawings of a tank-like sculpture with a gigantic tube of lipstick erecting from it, and Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was fabricated and paid for by the university as part of their protest against the Vietnam War.
Lipstick had opened the door to prove to Oldenburg that his ideas could be realized as large public sculptures as well.
“I simply try to locate myself in the present, in the sense of what's hitting me. I try to be honest to myself-that's the only way I know how to make something happen in art.” Once again, he had defied cognitive bias by deciding that monuments don’t have to be bronze statues of men in horses or giant structures that divert the traffic in the middle of a large metropolis.
Starting in 1981, Oldenburg made his sculptures of everyday objects bigger and more architectural, and he co-signed all of them with his second wife, the Dutch art historian Coosje van Bruggen. This assertive and humorous approach was at odds with the then-consensus that art had to deal with complex expressions or deep ideas.
Things like giant clothespins, buttons, toothbrushes, and baseball bats, sometimes as tall as 100 feet, would eventually materialize and adorn several dozens of museum courtyards, parks and public buildings in the United States and around the world.
Besides his historic artistic legacy, what Oldenburg taught us is twofold: be firmly connected to your surroundings and look at the things around you with curiosity and a desire to defy their normal function.
Want to challenge your cognitive bias? Think about 20 different uses for a paper clip. What about 50? And can you envision a solution to a problem that bugs you based on Oldenburg’s dual approach?
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.