Art, Imagery, and Structured Creative Problem Solving

The Use of Visual Facilitation to Invent Solutions for Complex Tasks

By Kevin Miller
Artist and Facilitator, Innovation Focus Inc.

We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no-man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us…
To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize.

Rollo May, The Courage to Create, Bantam Books, N.Y., 1975.

Information Transfer by Pictorial Trinity

“Picture it!” we say, as we are about to describe something to a group of friends, and they are off and running with mental imagery.

Everyone the world over agrees that “A picture is worth a thousand words” for getting an idea across quickly.

“Seeing is believing!” adds the skeptic, giving us hope that even the cynics and pessimists among us can be convinced by a compelling image.

1. “Picture it.”
2. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
3. “Seeing is believing.”

Here is a pictorial trinity of cultural phrases that exposes our profound belief in the power of images to transfer information.  We say “Picture it” when we are about to paint a mentally visualized image as a (1.) catalyst for transfer of information.  “A picture is worth a thousand words” describes our use of images to (2.) quickly reflect and sort ideas.  And we know that “Seeing is believing” defines the power of images to (3.) convince even a doubting Thomas that an idea has become real and to explain and record the information held in that idea.

So images perform three basic functions in communicating information over the course of the life of a developing idea:

1. Catalyzing information transfer
2. Reflecting and sorting ideas
3. Convincing, explaining, and recording concepts

Indigenous cultures have always believed in the magical power of images to catalyze events whether success in the hunt, victory in battle or a good harvest.  Most cultures have employed images during the unfolding of those events to reflect and sort out what’s happening.  (Certainly our modern culture does—just look at the Internet, TV and newsstand.) Afterward, human beings cannot resist trying to convince others of the rightness of their actions and ideas by pictorially recording and explaining what happened.  Some of the earliest known cave paintings attest to this impulse.  In modern experience, we create elaborate videos, animated computer displays, illustrated books and reports to record and explain our ideas and to convince the world to pay attention to them and us.

Let’s Sketch in the Broad Outlines of the Big Picture before We Paint in the Details

The pictorial trinity corresponds nicely to the basic process of creative problem solving for the task force and invention team.

1. Information transfer and task definition to catalyze ideas
2. Brainstorming, selecting and developing concepts
3. Selecting solutions and developing action plans for implementation

Technology and trends posters or task definition posters: The first step is information transfer and task definition to catalyze ideas.  In training programs, it’s important to “tell them what they’re going to do.” In the pictorial trinity, information transfer, task definition, and beginnings of idea catalyzing are achieved by developing technology and trends posters or task definition posters to impart a shared body of knowledge to all team members.

Rapid image logos or symbols: In the second step of the invention or training process, scores or even hundreds of ideas are being synthesized and expressed.  The pictorial trinity seeks a way to help reflect, sort and select among these ideas quickly.  A simple logo or symbol for each idea is a very functional way of helping participants to absorb and sort many concepts at once and “tell them what they’re doing.” In addition, if the symbols are conceived and drawn very quickly by a rapid image artist while the participants look on and listen to a succinct description of the idea, they are sure to have an easier time of remembering and sorting when it becomes necessary to select the best ideas for further development toward action.

Concept boards or art boards: The third step is selecting solutions and developing implementation plans for the inventors and creative problem solvers.  The pictorial trinity offers recording, explaining, and convincing functions at this stage through more detailed concept boards or art boards to help everyone to remember, understand and sell the concepts.  Detailed art boards help to “tell them what they did,” and convince others of its efficacy.

“Picture It”…Nanotechnology…The Future

Using the complex field of nanotechnology as an example, we could decide to “develop products based on the capabilities of nanotechnology.” This becomes our task definition.  Before starting rapid creative brainstorming of ideas to solve the task, there are essential nuggets of information about related technologies and trends in the market and demographics that the team must communicate, as well as specific problems and opportunities related to the task.  This information transfer will impart the knowledge to be drawn upon while inventing solutions.
Perhaps there are ten basic technological principles of nanofabrication that we want each team member to hold in common, regardless of their expertise or naiveté.  Similarly, there may be ten important societal trends that will have some bearing on what we choose to invent, and we want the whole team to be aware of these.  The quickest way to transfer 20 technology and trends concepts as well as task definition specifics, is pictorially.  A poster as analogy or symbol or even “anticon” (image overlaid by a circle with a diagonal line through it) for each principle will help transfer a body of knowledge quickly to all participants.
“Picture It…Nanotechnology Explodes the Inner Limits of Time!” A headline like this and a drawing of an exploding wristwatch followed by 45 seconds of discussion will communicate an essential principle of nanotechnology to the entire team.  Make some of the images whimsical or ironic and you will achieve two purposes:

1. Humor is brain glue.  If you can make participants smile or laugh in connection with a concept, they will never forget that idea.
2. A playful climate for an invention team is the basic stuff of creative synthesis.

No one achieves the blinding flash of the obvious without a willingness to attempt the absurd.  As Einstein said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

Make the pictures colorful and fun and keep them around.  The continuing presence of the technology, trends and task definition images will help to catalyze abstract synthesizing of diverse or even divergent concepts into new realities.  We have found that many invention teams receive the benefits of ongoing information exchange and idea catalyzing from their technology and trends posters by displaying them in the work environment even after a given task is completed. Raw data does not have to be dry, dull information understood only by a few specialists.  It can be fun and thought provoking material for creative problem solving, if we “picture it” in the right light.

“A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”…Rapid Imaging Saves Time

During the second phase of an invention process, thousands of approaches and ideas may be considered in search of the most efficacious solutions to a given task.  The invention team can only hold a few abstract concepts in their minds at one time unless each idea is given a visual symbol.  The symbol acts as a sponge for the information contained in the concept even if it appears to be only tangentially or whimsically related to the idea.  In fact, adding humor to many of the symbols helps the invention team to keep hundreds of ideas distinctly defined in their minds at one time.  A quick and simple drawing of an alien holding up a split hand and saying “Nano, Nano” could easily come to represent a plan for public education about nanofabrication.  Draw the picture right in front of the group in 45 seconds while the inventor of the concept is giving a brief explanation, and the team will have a hard time forgetting what “Nano, Nano” means.  Two hundred such logos on a wall reflecting all the concepts dreamed up by the invention team will help them to consider and sort all the ideas at once so that they can evaluate the concepts and select the ones they want to develop for action.

“Seeing is Believing”…Making the Dream Come True

Whichever role the image is playing at a given stage of information transfer or idea development, the icon is not the idea itself.  It is not the thing; it is a picture of the thing—a symbol that represents the idea or the object.  The image may picture an analogy for the concept.  Information about the new idea, object, or concept may even be transferred by picturing its opposite inside a circle with a diagonal bar crossing it out – the anticon.  But none of these pictures is the concept itself.  The image is just a way of talking about the concept.

This distinction may seem self-evident, but in fact, history is studded with examples of people confusing the thing and the image. Pictures of God representing profoundly abstract metaphysics are produced and whole cultures end up worshipping an idol – the image – for thousands of years, as if the picture were God.  One has to wonder if reality has turned upside down when a Cézanne landscape – a picture imitating reality – is auctioned at Christie’s for $24 million.  Of course, the purchaser is buying a unique aesthetic reality synthesized by the artist, but it is interesting to note that he or she could buy the actual land Cézanne admired and hire actors to play roles on it for the interest on $24 million.  Where is the reality – in the landscape or the land?  Images become very real to us.  As a child I thought that the people on TV could see me if I walked across the room in my underwear, and as an adult, I’ll bet I’m not the only gullible guy who has a hard time remembering that the movie I’m watching has not become my “new reality”.

Rene Magritte, the early 20th Century surrealist painter, tried to clear up our confusion about the distinction between reality and image, and in the process created one of the most famous images of the century – his painting of a pipe subtitled, “Ce n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe.) Of course it’s not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe!  The painting is a profoundly true, yet absurdly contradictory statement.  No one would have rejected the opposite subtitle, “C’est une pipe.” How deliciously ironic it is that one of the more recognizable images of modern times is a picture about the use of image in transferring information, and our very human tendency to believe that the image is the thing.

So powerful is the use of symbols in the process of making a thing real, that most people tend to believe that an idea has become manifest in the world when a picture of the concept is drawn.  “Seeing is believing.”

Just try telling a task force that you’re going to draw a detailed picture of a project they don’t like and see what kind of reaction you’ll get.  By the same token, the image can convince a hardened skeptic that an idea is real and can be accomplished.  A very skeptical new project manager came into the middle of a team invention process that I was working on years ago and wanted to scrap the whole effort.  Jumping in with no warning or warm-up as he did, the creative process we were using must have seemed strange, frightening and risky to him.  His natural reaction was to kill it before it multiplied.  I stayed up most of that night with the team developing a wall of concept posters describing the invention process and its results in images.  When the new manager walked in to find the graphic display in the morning he simply said, “Well then, there’s no problem.” Seeing is believing.  The image makes a thing real to us. It records and explains what we have done and it has the power to convince others of the efficacy of an idea.

Detailed concept images or storyboards are therefore very useful information transfer tools for the inventor who wishes to “sell” a concept to a skeptical or frightened organization and build buy-in and consensus for action.  If people can be reassured that an idea has substance in reality, they are more likely to fund and support it at the implementation planning stage.  Pictures make things real.

Seeing the Forest Behind the Trees…The Mental Machinery Behind the Scenes

Why do pictures facilitate information transfer?  How can it be that even obscure symbols possess the power to inform us about technologies and other complex topics?  Scientists, philosophers, and aestheticians will be chewing on these questions for some time to come, but for now we will look at two clarifying factors:

1. All sleeping humans involuntarily practice pictorial problem solving.
2. At least 25% of us receive and process information pictorially during waking hours as well.

Creative problem solving can be defined as the process of synthesizing diverse or divergent concepts and information into a new reality for the purpose of solving problems.  Everyone’s mind does this form of creative problem solving every night in the process of dreaming.  Our unconscious mind melds diverse and divergent images into a new reality – the dream – as a way of working toward solutions for unresolved problems or conflicts in our lives.  Take away this natural nocturnal imaging process of creative problem solving for even a few days, and most of us will begin to exhibit symptoms of psychosis.

With all five and a half billion of us making creative problem solving movies every night, it’s no wonder that at least a quarter of us think primarily in images during the daytime as well, and once in a while a “blinding flash of the obvious” is bound to bubble up from the absurd ferment of the unconscious to the conscious mind.

Carl Jung gave cogent examples of unconscious imaging as creative problem solving in his book Man and His Symbols.  The 19th Century German chemist, F.A. Kekule von Stradonitz, dreamt of a circular snake with its tail caught in its mouth and woke up to a spontaneous understanding of the benzene ring.  Jung contends that “in everyday life…dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious.” He continues,

We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself.  For example, the French mathematician Poincaré and chemist Kekule owed important scientific discoveries (as they themselves admit) to sudden pictorial ‘revelations’ from the unconscious.  The so-called ‘mystical’ experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a similar sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash ‘the order of all sciences’.  The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his ‘strong sense of man’s double being,’ when the plot of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was suddenly revealed to him in a dream.

Pictures come every night and every day to all of us.  Magic images full of meaning bubble up everywhere within and without.  Our job is to make the pictures conscious and use our brains to synthesize new realities.  Whether these involuntary images come from the great “collective unconscious” and are part of some massive tidal wave of thought “synchronicity” throughout the sentient population as Jung suggested, or whether the images are simply the logical results of the creative synthesizing labors of our own unconscious minds, they do appear.  They often seem to have compelling purpose and they can prove to be very powerful raw material for helping us to invent the future.  It hardly matters where they come from.  These visions of tantalizing new realities lie about our perceptual landscape like diamonds waiting to be discovered among the rocks, and we are fools when we refuse to mine their riches for fear of being blinded by too much luminescence.

Artists have recorded their blinding flashes of the obvious throughout the ages, from Leonardo’s sketchbook plans for the helicopter and hang glider to Gene Rodenberry’s TV dramas for “Star Trek”.  There are hundreds of examples of the artist as scientific and societal prophet throughout history.  Surviving pictorial images are proof of their efforts to convince the world of their visions of coming changes in the status quo.  Were they the catalysts for these revolutions or were they simply recording changes that many minds were sensitive enough to smell already blowing in the wind?  Perhaps both, but certainly sensitive perception of change rather than resistance to it, is the operative functionality for any prophet who would inform the world and invent the future—artist or otherwise.

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

People often make the mistake of thinking that artists are the only creative prophets in society, because they are the ones who make the pictures.  Not so.  We’re all artists as children, anyway, until someone convinces us that we don’t know how to draw.  But in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards has chronicled research that proves that everyone can draw well when encouraged to access their natural creative circuitry.  And for those creative people who prefer not to invest the time and effort in learning how to draw, technology offers an ever-increasing array of imaging devices to help with pictorial information transfer.

What if there are actually legions of creative prophets among us, capable of exploding the status quo and revolutionizing the future, just looking for effective ways of getting their ideas heard and seen?  What if millions of concepts that could help save the world evaporate into thin air every year for lack of creative information transfer methods?

Rollo May, in his book The Courage to Create, has brilliantly described the societal role for an army of diverse creatives: “creative courage…is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.  Every profession can and does require some creative courage.  In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these professions and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change.  The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing…”

“Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world.  This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.  We can then say, with [James] Joyce, ‘Welcome, O Life!  We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race.’”

So…Take a Picture – It’ll Last Longer!

What sets human beings apart from other animals is that we are consciously aware.  One thing we do with our consciousness is called “creative problem solving”.  People think and solve problems pictorially in dream states, and at least 25% of us understand the world primarily through imagery in our waking state as well.  Therefore, pictures offer a rich opportunity for information transfer about technologies and other complex topics through symbol, pictorial analogy, or anticon.

Art can be used in at least three ways to explore complex topics for creative problem solving:

1. Technology and societal trends and task definition posters effectively and quickly transfer a body of knowledge to an invention team to help them define their task and begin to catalyze ideas for solutions.
2. Rapid Image logos or symbols produced while a group is brainstorming visually reflect what is contained in a large quantity of concepts.  Such symbols also help a group to mentally retain and sort hundreds of concepts.
3. Detailed concept art or art boards record and explain the ideas selected as the best task solutions for action.  Convincing artwork at the start of the implementation stage can make the ideas manifestly real and help to “sell” the action concepts to a larger audience.

So, if you want to solve problems in the world, if you want to quickly transfer information about complex tasks, technologies and trends to a lot of people, if you want to catalyze creative idea brainstorming, if you want to facilitate remembering, sorting and selecting among ideas, if you want to record and explain what you did and convince others that your ideas are valuable… in short, if you want to awaken the creative prophet within…“take a picture – it’ll last longer!”

Bibliography

Edwards, Betty, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, The Putnam Publishing Group, New York, 1989.
Jung, Carl, Man and His Symbols, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, 1964.
May, Rollo, The Courage to Create, Bantam Books, New York, 1975.
Miller, Christopher, The Focused Innovation Technique, Innovation Focus Inc., Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1992.
Roukes, Nicholas, Art Synectics, Davis Publications, Inc., Worcester, Massachusetts, 1984.
Revised and Edited © Kevin L. Miller, 2009.