The creative attitude: learning to ask and answer the right questions PDF
Preview The creative attitude: learning to ask and answer the right questions
BY ROGER SCHANK guter Models ofThought and Language lited with K. Colby) eptual Information Processing ts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An try Into Human Knowledge Structures R. Abelson) 'e Computer Understanding: Five Programs Miniatures (co-edited with C. Riesbeck) ling and Understanding: Teaching From an icial Intelligence Perspective amic Memory: A Theory ofReminding and ning in Computers and People Cognitive Computer: On Language, ning, and Artificial Intelligence (with hilders) anation Patterns: Understanding ranically and Creatively THE CREATIVE ATTITUDE Learning to A\sk and Answertne Kignt Questions ROGER SCHANK with Peter Childers MACMILLAN PUBLISHING COMPANY New York Copyright © 1988 by Roger Schank All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Macmillan Publishing Company 866Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022 Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc. Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schank, Roger C., 1946- The creative attitude. 1. Creative ability. I. Childers, Peter G. II. Title. BF408.835 1988 153.35 87-29717 ISBN 0-02-607170-3 Macmillan books are available at special discounts for bulk purchasesfor sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. For details, contact: Special Sales Director Macmillan Publishing Company 866 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022 10 9 8 765 43 2 «1 Printed in the United States ofAmerica To mychildren, HANA and JOSHUA, in the hope that their world will let them create. Contents Preface 1X Part I: Looking at Creativity 1. What’s the Problem? 3 2. The Creative Attitude: A Look at Creative People 38 3. The Perils of Script-based Thinking 62 Part II: The Natural Creative Process 4. Failure and Reminding 9} 5. Anomaly + Explanation = Creative Thought 127 6. The Importance of Questions 169 Part Ill. Creativity Tools 7. Asking Questions and Tweaking Answers 195 8. Planning with Explanation Patterns 222 Contents 9, Wandering the Paths of Thought: Some Questions 251 10. Question Transformation 284 Part IV: Questions and Answers 11. Ten Questions about Innovation 311 12. Encouraging Creativity in School 329 13. Ten Maxims to Remember 348 Index 363 Preface Ionceattendedalecturebyaprofessorwhoseresearchproject had been to find out what people think of other people in various walksoflife. Among the things she asked hersubjects was whatthey believed was the mostdifficult aspect ofa pro- fessor’sjob. They were asked, Whatis the greatest fear that a professor is likely to haveP The vast majority of people be- lieved that a professor’s greatest fear is to be asked a question that he cannot answer. This made the audience(all of whom were professors) laugh. Why? Because answers are easy. Professors worry about questions, not about the answers to questions. A professor worries about his ability to come up with good questions that give him some idea of what to pursue in his research. Creativity and progress depend upon asking tthe right question at the right time. When the questionis relevant and at the right level, the path to the answeris often fairly obvious. Ifyou have askedall the questions, you don’t need an answer anymore because you have solved the problem at hand. The last question is effectively the answer. Wetendto believe that we need answers. Our society tends to look for answers to such questions as how to stop nuclear Preface war, howtofeed thehungry, orhowtostopdruguse. Butthese questions maynot bethe onesto ask ifwe really wantanswers. Questions have natural biases built into them. With every question comesthe hintofan answer. Howto feed the hungry has an obvious built-in answer: send food. How to stop drug use: crackdown on theimportation andsaleofdrugs. Butthese answers are obviously wrong. They don’t work. Why not? Be- cause those questions are not the right questions. Since ques- tions point to answers, we must learn to ask the right ques- tions—that is, the ones that point to helpful answers. But we must learn to ask questions for another reason as well. Let meillustrate with a story: When I wasin high school, I took biology and was getting mediocre grades. My mother went to see myteacher, and he suggested that I start to ask more questionsin class. More questions? That seemed absurd to me. My problem wasn’t that I neededto ask questions. You asked questions if you didn’t understand. I needed the an- swers. How were questions going to help my grade? This teacher was at once very wise and very foolish. He was wise enough to understand that someone whois not asking questions is not thinking, that it is really impossible to under- stand any subject well if questions are not readily coming to mind. The fact that I wasn’t asking questions certainly did indicate that I wasn’t thinking aboutwhatwasbeingdiscussed. Naturally I was getting mediocre grades if I wasn’t thinking. Onthe other hand, why wasn’t I thinking? I was bored. What questions werethereto ask about how yet another species was classified? I just didn’t care. Good questions come from an interesting environment. Both he and I had failed to provide one. It is all too easy to stifle good questions. Children tend to start out with good questions, but various things conspire to stop them.In this book, I talk about the creative attitude, and whenI talk about this subject, I am invariably remindedofthe time when my daughter, at age seven, was asked to take a “creativity” test. This test included various questions whose answers were drawings of one kind or another. The grader of Preface xi this test was very impressed bythe fact that my daughter had drawn a moosein responseto one ofthe questions. I asked my daughter whyshe had drawnthe mooseatthatpoint. She said that it was obvious that they were trying to get you to draw a happy face, given the parts of the drawing that had already been supplied, and she didn’t want to do what she was sup- posed to do. Whatis the creative attitude? It is, among other things, the desire to go against the mainstream. But such desires are stopped, by parents, in school, at work—nearly everywhere. The creative attitude entails posing one’s own questions, not answering the questions ofothers, andit is not always easy to get away with such a point of view. Onereasonit is difficult to keep posing one’s own questions is that you can actuallybegin to know too much. When myson was five, he was very interested in football. On one Saturday afternoon, Oklahomascored eighty-two points in a game.I asked him, “How, by what combination ofscoring, could they have done that?” While I wasstill thinking about the answer, heresponded,“Eighttouchdowns,eightfieldgoals, eightextra points, and a safety.” I was dumbfounded.I hadn’t gotten the answeryet.Iwasstilldividing82by7. Butmyfive-year-oldson hadnotonly gotten an answer more quickly than I did. He had also gotten a very different answer than the onethat I, and most people, would get. Why? What had he done? He had discovered factoring. Basically, he had asked himself aneasyquestion: Howmanytensaretherein82? Heaskedthis because he knewhowonescoredten pointsin a football game, atouchdown,anextrapoint,andafieldgoal. Thenextproblem after that was to see what wasleft after you had eight tens. Easy. He could come up with such an inventive way of doing things precisely because he didn’t know the “right” method. He didn’t know howto divide by 7. Of course, I am not ad- vocating that one shouldn’t learn to divide. But I am pointing out that there is a cost to learning how to do something— namely, you begin to think that the method youlearnedis the
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