What is creativity?

• Outside of straightforward thinking
• Thinking in a different way from others
• Imaginative

• • Finding the 1% that connects the 99%

• Ability to be innovative
• • Original ideas
    • or…
  • Combining and recombining ideas in unique ways
• Silence

How does creativity happen?

• When you are trying the least (the in-between times)
  • Shower
  • Before bed
  • Walking to work
• In groups where you can bounce ideas
  • Allows one to see different perspectives 
  • Collaboration to spur the creativity process
• Working on random, unrelated activities
• Depends on the person
  • Sitting at a desk alone
  • Working out
  • Listening to music
• Within structures
  • Prompts, academic exercises
  • Deadline 
• Conscious and subconscious 
• When you have limited resources
• Using the environment to draw inspiration 
  • Nature

You can potentially create spaces that enhance creativity

It’s an emergent phenomenon 

If you are a bird, what it flight?

• Innate
• You think and you do it
• An evolved capacity
  • Functional capability to do things that are necessary to survive
• It is emergent
  • When an entity is observed to have properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own
    • Termite mound

→ how do you create or shape an emergent system that exists to accomplish your mission, vision and goals?

→ system: group of interacting, interrelated and interdependent systems? 

Systems thinking: seeing entire system and all the interrelated dependencies. Seeing how they exist and change over time and affect each other. 

Leverage point: the right place to intervene in a system

 

Systems approach

• Consider whole structure
• Look for interrelationships.
• Your leverage point will 
  • create short term and long term impact
  • Potentially shift problems instead of solving them

 

Tenet 1: Interdependence

• Definition:
  • “Interactive effect of tasks, goals, and feedback combinations”
  • All systems depend on other systems or subsystems to successfully meet their responsibilities
  • “When developing the business strategy, one must examine the existing systems (e.g., cultural, social, financial) that can aid or hinder venture acceptance”
• “Mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship between systems”
• Our example: Solving the issue of high maternal mortality rates in Sierra Leone
  • Safe motherhood team cannot lower rates just by themselves, they rely on the MOH, other healthcare innovations, education, etc.
    • One group cannot solve the entire issue on its own and some ventures or groups can benefit from others and advance their goals because of someone else
  • World Hope. They depend on multiple projects (ex: CHAMPs), each with their own system, to improve the livelihood of people in Sierra Leone.
• Example khanjan gave: malnutrition team assigning roles for positive interdependence
  • No one can succeed without the rest

 

Tenet 2: Holism

• Definition
  • “The end result is a whole organism that exhibits emergence”
  • “all of the properties of a given system—whether physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, or linguistic— cannot be determined or explained by their component parts alone”
  • A system exists as a sum of its parts. None of the parts could ever accomplish the goal that the system can accomplish as a whole. 
• Our example:
  • PlasTech: we need manufacturers, designers, and legal workers who all can come together to create the opportunity to make a profit off of recycling plastics. None of them could ever do it on their own. Our “hq” centralizes the opportunity. 
  • Ukweli: we need Hassan, Allieu, World Hope, Wancheng, Lehigh, PHUs, proactive pregnant women to all come together and work towards lowering maternal mortality rates.

 

Tenet 3: Multifinality

• Definition:
  • “Attaining varied alternative objectives from the same inputs, all systems remain constant”
  • “divergence: several outcomes from parameters in an interconnected hierarchical system”
  • Having the same starting point but it later diverges into many possible end outcomes 
  • The same system can produce varied outcomes/solutions depending on variety of influencing factors
  • Each subsystem meets its own goal, while the system as a whole also meets its goal
• Examples:
  • PlasTech: Cleaning up plastic from local neighborhoods and/or preventing plastic from getting into the ocean and/or collecting plastic from companies that would have been thrown into a landfill.
  • Ukweli: What Hassan, Cassidy and Khanjan get out of the experience is different, yet they are all part/ working in the same system.
  • Rob can get personal work experience and personal satisfaction and a bunch of other things from working on this project

 

Tenet 4: Equifinality

• Definition:
  • “for open systems, a given end state can be reached by many potential means”
  • examining technology-based social ventures, equifinality is the concept of convergence: attaining the same desired output through several different channels/inputs 
    • “The social, economic, and environmental impacts of each process must be determined to identify the optimal course of action”
  • Opposite of multifinality
  • Similar solutions can be created from different systemic inputs/processes
  • Understanding that a goal can be achieved in multiple ways or paths
• Examples:
  • Both safe motherhood team and Ukweli want the same end goal–lower maternal mortality rates. However, the teams are trying to achieve it in different ways. 
  • Philippines plastics environment: collecting waste plastic and turning it into art versus recycling it into usable products. Both solutions lock up the plastic waste and prevent it from going into the ocean

 

Tenet 5: Differentiation

• Definition (same as wholism & interdependence in definitions)
  • “Specialized units performing specialized functions within any given system”
  • Enables interdependence and necessitates holism
  • Each independent part is different (in complexity, specialization, focus), but they are all working to reach the overall system goal – they are reliant on each other in order to form the system.
• Everyone example: most of us have different roles/responsibilities on our teams that help us contribute to a larger goal
  • Focus on what students did and what they accomplished as sub-system
    • Students were actors in that subsystem
  • Ex: subsystems of the mushroom team- the different subsystems of their mushroom growing process
    • Spawn system
    • Substrate system
    • Mushroom growth system
    • All are independent systems but would never happen without one another
      • They are interdependent
  • Subsystems of the PlasTech system:
    • Sourcing plastic
      • Relationship management systems
    • Identifying customers
      • Relationship management systems
    • Converting plastic waste into value-added products
      • Manufacturing facility design
      • Mold design
      • Setting upRecycling facilities
        • Legal auditing
        • Personnel training
        • Machine manufacturing

 

Tenet 6: Regulation

• Definition:
  • “a method of feedback that is necessary for the system to operate predictably and to counteract entropy”
  • “a process of ensuring intrinsic feedback to bring about desired operation of the system and to counteract entropy”
  • Checks and balances that alert failure and success points necessary to understand how to optimize the system
  • Feedback mechanism for accountability
• Examples:
  • The presentations that we give during the semester
  • Will it rain enough next year to get the rain water necessary to clean waste plastics?
  • Updates with our PI/advisor, ensuring we are on the right track
  • Ukweli: the forms that Hassan uses to track test strip user data with. It ensures he is doing his job properly and is closer to achieving the end goal of reducing maternal mortality.
  • Weekly meetings to keep us all on-track

 

Tenet 7: Abstraction

• Definition
  • “process for thinking and describing anything with multiple dimensions”
  • “Increasing the level of abstraction implies moving away from specific details about an object, event, or idea, and shifting the discussion or analysis to include broader aspects”
  • Systems-level thinking that moves away from little details and towards the bigger picture and how your system is working to affect it
  • Necessary to not “shift the problem” or create negative long term effects
• Examples:
  • Different parts of the system understand their own layers that make up the greater onion
  • Malnutrition team: supplements
    • There are tons of different types of iron supplements but some have more side effects (like upset stomach) and some are more expensive. While we first thought, let’s just get the cheapest option to reduce cost, we stepped back and thought that because we are trying to make kids healthier, we need to sacrifice cost for less side effects.
    • muffins>pills
    • PlasTech: Will the emissions created by recycling plastics negate the positive effects of recycling them?

 

Tenet 8: Leverage Points

• Definition:
  • An aspect in a system that when deciding upon or working with, can ultimately create/lead to a large change 
  • Archimedes: Give me a lever large enough and I’ll lift the whole world
• Examples:
  • Recipe for malnutrition
    • Changing the definition from one small ingredient can cause good or bad effects
  • Deciding to add protein in the test strip as a parameter, so the test strip now screens for preeclampsia and UTIs
  • Charging a fee for mothers who give birth at home ($5 fine)
    • → encouraging the mothers to go to clinics to give birth
  • Identifying intrinsic motivation for people with depression and anxiety
  • Telemedicine acceptance

 

1, 2 & 5 are all essentially the same construct

 

Hyacinth:

• Give communities briquettes
• Involved with the decision-making process for where the hyacinth gets collected from
  • Frame it as it will improve their fishing with these cleared areas
  • Recognize their value and input
• Hire them on as employees for the venture
• Invite them to collaborate and think about expanding the product line
• Partner with NGO who already works with the community to collect hyacinthe
• Fisherman can advertise it to their customers as a package deal: Fish + briquettes used to cook the fish
  • Make a yummy tasty meal!
    • MMMmmm, Briquettes!!
      • Shit is tasty!!!!!! I love fake charcoal 
  • Fishermen who don’t choose to be a part of this get FOMO then want to be involved