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Transcriber: Michele Gianella
Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
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Sometimes, easy means difficult.
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Have you ever been assigned an easy task,
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which for you is actually
very difficult to perform,
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and maybe for nobody else?
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That is when you experience frustration.
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I have experienced that
when I started taking singing lessons,
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and my teacher told me
to breathe with my diaphragm.
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That's easy, it's our natural breath,
but actually very difficult to do,
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and it's a secret of the great singers.
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It's similar to what happens
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when a boss comes into a meeting
and tells you to think out of the box.
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Come on, give me your creative ideas.
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Think out of the box. I want to hear that.
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I need innovation.
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Easy, simple, but actually
very hard to do.
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You need to practice.
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You need to know how to get
out of the box, where to go,
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and how to come back inside the box,
because that's where we live.
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We actually live inside our boxes.
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I want to ask these questions.
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I asked those questions to myself.
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This presentation is a little journey
through my answers.
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I hope that some of these
will resonate with yours.
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The first thing is to ask, why.
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Why should you really go out of the box?
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Because inside the box, we feel safe.
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We agree with everybody else.
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And when we go out,
we risk our reputation.
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We worked so hard
for a lifetime to build it up,
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why should we risk it?
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Is this something which is a luxury,
that only a few people can do,
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or is it really a necessity?
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Why?
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Think of our lives today.
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We are really a part of a network.
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We are nodes in a network.
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We share information in a real time,
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and we, in the end,
all possess the same information.
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That's the end of it,
and that is a scary thought.
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If we all possess the same information,
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what makes a difference between ourselves?
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Where does our dignity
as human beings lie?
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It really depends on what we generate
with that common shared information.
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To think creatively, to go out
of the box, is not a luxury.
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It's a necessity for us,
and for our dignity as human beings.
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Which box are we talking about?
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We must have a clear definition,
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so that we are really talking
about something specific.
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It's not our mind;
we cannot think out of our minds.
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It's a boundary within our minds.
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The boundary between what we know,
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and what we haven't still,
or yet, thought about.
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What is our mind?
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What is our knowledge structure?
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It's an emergent phenomenon
out of the complex mechanism,
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which is the brain.
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We start with initial conditions,
our genetic heritage.
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We have boundary conditions,
the environment.
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We have indirect experience,
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years and years spent
in school and University
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to learn what other people have thought,
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what other people have discovered,
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what other people have created.
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Then, we have our own direct experience,
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our successes, our failures
that really make what we are.
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All of this builds the anthill
within which we live,
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and we live very well in that.
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Whatever we think inside that anthill,
that box, we feel safe.
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Whatever is outside, it's invisible to us.
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We don't know what it's outside.
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That is why it's so risky,
because nobody else knows.
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We are faced with something
which is necessary to our dignity,
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but actually it's very difficult to do.
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How do we go out of the box?
How do we do that?
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What are the mechanisms?
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Do we need to wait for an apple
to fall on our heads,
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or are there some specific techniques?
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Reality is out there
for us to perceive it.
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It's beautiful. You see these flowers.
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We have a lot of ideas,
which is our convergent information,
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the dominant ideas.
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Whenever we need to think
about an area, a focused area,
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we have ideas on how things should be.
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We have requirements,
we have specifications.
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We know how things are,
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because that's the way
they always have been.
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But if we want to go out of the box,
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we need to add something more,
a little spice,
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something which goes beyond
the convergent information.
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Something wrong, something absurd,
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something which apparently
is not relevant,
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something which takes us far.
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This is what we call
divergent information.
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We need a little bit
of that divergent information
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to cross the borders within our minds,
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from what we know
to what we haven't yet thought about.
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This is the essential mechanism
that is necessary,
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and it takes us to a place
where we don't really know where to go.
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We are suspended.
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It's like the middle game in chess.
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Where do you go
once you're out of the box?
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You have no preset direction.
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It's really a potential situation
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that brings us to a feeling
that we should immediately go back.
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This does not make any sense.
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Let's go back to safe place.
Let's go back inside the box.
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That's a temptation
that we need to resist.
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We need to value long thinking.
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Normally,
we talk about brilliant thinking,
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fast thinking, deep thinking,
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but here we're talking
about something different,
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long thinking.
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What does that mean?
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It's some thought that takes us far.
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It's as if you were reading poetry
or listening to music.
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You don't judge the single notes.
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You don't judge the single words.
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It's the ensemble that gives you
a feeling, and takes you far.
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We must do the same thing
with our concepts.
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We need to go far.
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We can use association of ideas,
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combination of ideas,
extraction of principles,
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and application of those principles
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to areas where they were
never applied before.
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We need to be open-minded.
We need to be fluent.
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Look for alternatives,
and not for the correct answer.
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Because when you think creatively,
there's no single correct answer.
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There are many possible alternatives.
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Suppose now that we are lucky.
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We land upon a new idea in our travel,
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in the exploration out of the box.
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What is the value of that?
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How do we assess the value of a new idea?
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It's very difficult if it's really new,
because you've never seen that before.
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Nobody else has seen that before.
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It's as if we landed on a new planet,
totally undiscovered territory.
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It's difficult to understand
the value of something new.
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First of all, because we don't feel
entitled to be inventors.
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Who am I to be the generator
of that new idea?
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Probably this has been
thought about before.
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If this is correct, somebody else
would have done it before me.
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These are all natural mechanisms
with which we kill our own ideas.
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We have to resist that.
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We have to look for the match
between the new idea
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and our initial drive, our initial focus,
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or evaluate the idea per se,
for its own value
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and maybe see that that's something
that solves another problem,
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which it was not yours.
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Serendipity happens all the time.
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We just need to have the eyes to see that,
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to notice the difference.
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Ok, but we are social animals.
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We live in an environment,
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so to think out of the box,
bring in new ideas,
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is going to challenge that environment.
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When is it a good idea
to challenge everybody around you
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in your working environment?
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You have a boss.
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You don't really want to upset him or her.
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When is it a good idea
to think out of the box?
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First of all, if the environment
punishes mistakes,
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you will never be really tempted
to go out of the box.
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You will remain safely
in a known environment.
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If you want to stimulate
an environment which is creative,
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you need to allow the existence
of divergent information.
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You need to allow
irrelevant information to come in.
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You have to mix and match
different disciplines.
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You have to use metaphors
in the organization.
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Only in that case,
you will allow the environment
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to be really prone
to the generation of new ideas.
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I want to end my talk
with a little experiment.
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We wanted to do this
interactively with you,
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but the time is scarce.
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I have indeed prepared a little thing,
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but if you believe me, and to be honest,
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this has been generated
in the space of few minutes.
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The generation of ideas,
this travel outside of the box,
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is something which happens very fast.
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Where should we experiment?
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Let's say that we want to generate
new ideas about TEDx Conferences.
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We are here, so that's a focused area
which is very clear to all of us.
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Let's start from the convergent
information about TEDx Conferences.
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What is needed to make
an excellent, good TEDx conference?
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You need the brilliant speakers
that will come up.
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You need an excellent theme.
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You need fast
speaker to speaker transitions.
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You need grand settings.
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The list can go on, and all I'm saying
is things that you already know.
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This is all convergent information, safe.
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I'm not generating anything new.
I'm inside the box.
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Now I want to go out,
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so I apply a divergent modifier
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to any of these convergent elements.
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Start from the last one for example,
the grand setting.
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A divergent modifier,
for example, is to exaggerate.
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Bring it to the limit.
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Instead of thinking
of a TEDx conferences in a theater,
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think of a TEDx Conference in a stadium.
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Does this make any sense, in a stadium?
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Very difficult to organize,
even more difficult than in a theater,
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and how do you fill the place?
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How do you fill the stadium?
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It's too difficult.
It doesn't make any sense.
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I'm tempted to reject that idea.
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But then I move, and I say,
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ok, maybe the stadium
is already filled with people.
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From that, you can get the idea
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of having a TEDx Conference
at half-time of football matches,
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a network of speeches which happens
at half-time of football matches.
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Good idea, bad idea?
I leave it for you to assess.
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Take another element:
good speakers, brilliant speakers.
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That's the most fundamental element
of a TEDx Conference.
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Let's take that away.
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We eliminate the good, brilliant speakers.
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Does this make any sense?
No, we're out of the box.
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Does this lead to anything useful?
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I could say that,
OK, I don't need the speakers,
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but I need the speeches,
the talks, the scripts.
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From this comes the idea
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of one speaker delivering
the speech of somebody else.
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We exchange speakers.
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So it's a cooperative TEDx Conference.
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Maybe we have duets on stage,
instead of a single element,
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or we have people that speak about,
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somebody has this topic.
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In that way we have
one advantage at least.
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We take away the element of the ego.
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There's no ego anymore,
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if you're speaking
with somebody else's script.
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These are just examples, just examples,
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to show you that it's possible
and not too hard, actually,
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to think out of the box.
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I hope this journey, in a way,
was interesting for you,
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and now you want to do more of that.
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Thank you very much for your attention.
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(Applause)
