TALK: Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Creativity

So going back to kids and trying to explain what happens, this is my nephew. He's now six, but he used to be three when this picture was taken. And the story behind it is that he asked my sister for an espresso. She said, mom, I want to drink an espresso. It loves coffee, the coffee smell. And she said, no, you can't. You're just a child. Children cannot have coffee. You're not going to have an espresso. He went back to his room. He picked up the umbrella and the hat. He came back walking real slowly and said, I'm an old man and old men deserve to have what they want. I want an espresso. That's his reaction. The fun thing about it is that kids, they keep up on the expensive mode for a while. They keep up growing on that and they become more and more expensive until something happens to their lives. They go to school. That's when we start being reductive. And this is a great example of that. Do you know these emails that we receive with fun answers to tests at school? So I love this one where the teacher asked, expand the equation. The answer to that, the kid gave an answer that's brilliant. She expanded the equation. Isn't it cool? And I love how she put et cetera when she ran out of paper. I love it. But then the teacher said, it's wrong. Wrong answer. So when your teacher starts saying that there is only one right answer to your questions, you start becoming reductive. You're starting to de-learn what you know about creativity. And then you're just wired to create what to produce one answer to find the right thing and not to be creative anymore, which is really sad. So one thing to keep in mind is that we do need both modes. Again, we need to be reductive, but what we want to try is to be, to make the best out of the expensive modes that we have, the expensive moments that we have. So think about you having one single idea to do something with your business. Then you decided to talk to someone else and then they come up with a new answer. Now you have two, you already have double, you already have 100% more. Have you thought about that? Just having two ideas helps you make better decisions. To end this chapter here, I wanted to keep this question in mind with the true intent of trying to answer it. How do I make the most of the time we've chosen to be expensive? That's your commitment to yourself and to your teams. How you're gonna foster creative thinking and expensive thinking in your organization. With that, we move to the second chapter here, the rivers of thinking. Theory that underpins that comes from this man, and we proudly stole it from him. He's called Eduardo Bono. Now he's around 85 or something. He's a scientist. He wrote a lot about brains and creativity and how we work. In one of his earliest books, he created a metaphor, and that's the metaphor that I'm gonna work with you guys today. Our brains are like mountains. Think about our brains as mountains. Every knowledge, every experience, everything that we see, that we learn, falls upon our mountains, our brains, as raindrops. They're just coming here. A lot of them. Storms. Then our brains are smart, and they want to help us. Can you imagine a lot of knowledge and a lot of things going on in our brains, and then you cannot access them easily, so our brains try to help and channel this knowledge for us to be able to access them, and they create the rivers of thinking. They create rivers. This water goes deep into rivers in our brains, and that's what we access every day. Rivers of thinking. They are fantastic. Rivers of thinking are a good thing. We all have them, and it's good to have them because it's nice. They keep us safe. They keep us efficient. They keep us highly productive. We don't try 10 different ways of tying up our shoes in the morning. At least I don't. I don't know if some of you do, but you don't try 10 different ways of putting your clothes on or tying up your shoes because you need to be efficient, so that's what the rivers of thinking do. They help us learn and keep this memory and have access to it every time we need. When we were talking about this challenge before, we were accessing our rivers of thinking, and there is no similar experience to tap into. We just don't know what to do because we're not used to going out of the rivers of thinking, and that's the purpose today. So if you need one right answer to things or you need to be efficient, it's okay to access the rivers of thinking, but our goal here today is to try and do something else. We have our brains divided into two main areas, the conscious area and the subconscious area. The conscious area is about 12% of our brain capacity, and it's where our rivers of thinking are. Everything that we learn and we access every day is there. It's how we operate every single day, and we have 88% of subconscious knowledge, things that we learn, and they are not in rivers of thinking, but the raindrops are there. It's kind of a mess. It's a lot of water. It's a lot of stuff, but we don't access them all the time because between the subconscious and the conscious mind, there is a door. There is a door, and this door can be open or closed, and depending on how open it is, it's your ability to access creativity or make new connections or not. So let's talk about these doors. The first door we're going to talk about is delta. Delta is when your door is completely open, so the door between the subconscious and conscious mind is completely open. You can access everything, but it only happens when you are in deep sleep or when you're in coma and you don't want it. So yeah, we do want to have the deep sleep, though. We do need it. One thing that we have to keep in mind on this one is that although we can access everything on our subconscious mind, we cannot remember anything in our conscious lives, so kind of interesting. The second one is theta. The door is slightly less open, but there is lots of room to access the subconscious mind. We like to say it's the inspiration mode, and we are always in this state when we are meditating. Who meditates here? Who likes to meditate? Meditating is a great state of theta because we have our brains really relaxed, but we have some access to interesting things and interesting connections to your mind. Another way of doing this is taking hallucinogenic drugs, and you can do that. It's a good state of theta. Why not? You can. You can. You can. I said you can. You can. You can do that. Please do that if you want. If you need it, yeah. Going for a walk, moving your body helps to bring you to theta. The third state is alpha. In alpha, it's slightly less open than theta, but you still have lots of room to play with your subconscious mind. It's the state where we like to say we are relaxed, but focused, and we have a single focus. My first manager in my life, I was 16, I guess, he told me, every time that you have a problem, go deep into the problem, and then leave it, and then go do something else. And he used to say, move your body, go to the movies, go to do something else, because the solution is going to come. Because it's that place where once you're filled in with all the knowledge that you need, you try to create the connections without knowing it, because you just left the door slightly open, and you can have this connection. You're going to be fully alert, fully awake, so you remember stuff. You do remember stuff here too on theta, but you do remember a lot of stuff in alpha. And then you have beta. In beta, their door is fully closed, and that's how we operate, I would say, 80% of our time, at least. That's where we are. It's scientifically impossible to access anything in your subconscious mind, anything. And that's what you use to do your tasks, to cope with deadlines, and also to make decisions at work, which is not that good most of the time. So it's when you're busy. Beta is the evil one. You don't want to be there. Don't close the door. Don't close the door. It's too much pressure. It's multitasking. It's when you're at your worst. Actually, your IQ drops up to 10 points if you make decisions when you're in beta. And good news or bad news is that you're making your decisions in beta all the time. You are, I am, we are all, because we are used to, because we need to be efficient, because we want to go home to our kids to have dinner, because we want to get things done. That's how we operate. But try not to do that. So let's try to explore the other ways and how we can be on the green side, how we can be on theta. So theta is good for individual works. And there is a fun story about theta. Thomas Edison, the inventor, he used to sit down, put a coin between his knees, hold them with his knees, and rest his feet over a silver tray and sleep. When he's relaxing, so early stages of sleep, the coin would drop, and he would wake up with the noise, and he would write down his ideas. That's allegedly where the expression the penny has dropped came from. So that's what they say about having good ideas on the early stages of sleep. So when you have a problem, and you go to bed, and you forget about it, and then you wake up, you have the solution, you are in theta. You're trying to access this in theta. And then alpha, alpha is perfect. That's where you want to be. Of course, you like to be in theta at work too, but it's harder because it's kind of you're still dreaming a bit. So you want to be more focused. And on alpha, you are relaxed, but focused. So that's where you want to be most of your time.