Good afternoon. I'm Andy Burnett.
I am a recovering academic.
Many years ago, I used to run a center for
creative thinking at a business school in the UK.
I was happily minding
my own business and then one day someone from
an Academic Funding Agency came to
us and they said, "We have a problem."
I said, "Oh, we like problems.
Tell us about your problem."
They said, "We want to get people to bring us more novel,
risky, interdisciplinary research proposals."
I said, "That sounds like a jolly good thing to do."
They said, "The problem is
our communities don't do that."
When we went out to the communities and said, "Why?"
The community said, "Oh,
we know if we bring you
novel interdisciplinary risky research proposals,
the review panel take some out back and shoots them."
[LAUGHTER] As anyone who
understands behavior modification would tell you,
we've stopped doing that
because we rather like being funded.
The agency had come to us and they said,
"We have this idea for developing ways to
encourage interdisciplinary collaborations around risky,
wicked problems.
But we don't know anything about creativity."
We said, "Well, we don't know a lot about," at the time,
it was natural sciences,
"but that sounds intriguing.
Let's do something about that."
I thought it was going to be a one-off activity.
Fifteen years later, my colleagues and I are
still deeply embedded in this problem.
What was fascinating about it was that we
discovered that the essence
of what we were interested in,
in creativity and cognitive creativity,
particularly an approach to it,
which I'll talk more about in a moment,
was really appropriate and helpful for the issue of,
how do you get people from
quite different disciplines to
think together in a productive, creative way?
When Faith, and Emily,
and I were planning out this session,
one of the things which we are particularly keen to do
was to see if we could organize it so that in a way,
it gave you raw material
for developing your own little playbooks.
At the end of this,
you might go away with a thought about next Monday,
I'm going to do things differently
and this is my first experiment.
I think for Emily and Faith,
what we're hoping is to paint
a bigger picture of both the reason why
and some mechanisms at
the largest scale of how you might do that.
I want to talk more down at
the micro level of
individuals and teams to be able to say,
here are some thoughts about what we might do.
I'm going to talk about
creative transdisciplinary research.
For anyone who's interested in this area,
you will have no doubt come across
the fact that multidisciplinary,
and interdisciplinary,
and transdisciplinary have specific meanings.
If you know about those meanings,
I invite you to replace anything I'm saying
with whatever word you feel fit to be appropriate term.
But in essence, what I'm talking about is,
how do we get people from
different disciplines to collaborate creatively?
I also want to just bring your attention
back to what happened before we started.
I had never really understood how choreography emerged.
I thought that was fascinating just to see
the way that concepts were embodied.
I invite you just to hold that
in the back of your mind as
an example of a different way of thinking about things.
When you're next faced with the challenge of,
how might I think about this differently?
This, I hope, will have expanded your repertoire.
I point to this as an example because
exactly the same thing will happen if you
are a high-energy physicist
and you're trying to communicate your ideas to
a different community and you are explaining it to
a sociologist and they
offer you their thoughts and you go,
I have no idea what you're talking about.
This is a fairly regular occurrence
when we are organizing those events.
But I just invite you to go back and think,
actually there are different ways
of framing, and expressing,
and inhabiting problems, and they live with you.
You don't have to do anything about it at the moment,
simply be aware of it.
Now, I want to draw upon just briefly,
one mechanism for getting people
to collaborate across disciplines.
In the US, they're known as
Ideas Labs in the rest of the world,
they're known as Sandpits.
But let me just ask,
have any of you attended an Ideas Lab?
Excellent. Perfect. We'll keep
their structure secret to make
everyone else feel really left out.
No, maybe that's not a good idea.
The idea of an Ideas Lab emerged back in 2003,
where it was a vehicle to take a wicked problem,
to deliberately invite as
broader range of people as you could possibly get.
We all go off to a nice country house hotel.
We stay together for a week and at the end,
we would have developed proposals which scared us.
But the funding agency would fund them there and then.
This was a radical thought.
Not all proposals got funded,
but it was an interesting way of working.
Now, over the last 15 years,
what we've been trying to do is extract from that.
What are the elements that we could use intramurally?
What could we use within
your own teaching and
your own labs if that's appropriate for you?
I think what we're looking at in
this kind of approach is being able to say,
how do we manage and enhance our creativity?
How do we ensure we've got
sufficient diversity of perspectives?
How do we make sure we're working on a problem
that is sufficiently engaging?
The people want to do the hard part,
which is really bridging
our understandings across disciplines to say what
exists in this gap at the edge of my knowledge and at
the edge of yours and how can
we create something new from this?
It's interesting when we first started working on this,
our thought was that we were in
the business of helping people generate new ideas.
Gradually, what we realized
was that we were really helping
people ask new and different questions.
This is actually something which I think is really
quite interesting between the academic world and say,
the majority of our experience in the commercial world.
I personally do
practically nothing in the commercial space,
but years ago I used to,
and it was really interesting in that space.
A lot of our effort and a lot of
the research around it was focused on,
how do you get people to generate new ideas?
Within the academic space,
generating ideas is almost never a problem.
It's can we frame
the problem in different and exciting ways?
I'll give you one example from a while ago.
We were running an event on
a topic called synthetic biology.
If you're not aware of it,
I invite you to go and look at it.
It's fascinating.
We are living in the biological sanctuary.
It will change things beyond our wildest dreams.
But I happen to be standing next
to a couple of people who
were both very active in the field.
But one of them was a former civil engineer
and the other was a former contemporary dancer.
One of them happened to say [NOISE] to the other,
what would a cell look like if it
were designed by Apple rather than IBM?
From that one question emerged
an entirely new field called Synthetic Aesthetics,
which is the role of beauty in
the design of biological structures,
and the appreciation of beauty,
and the examination of it.
That came from just asking one question.
The point about it was in any problem space, you,
if you are not immersed in the core of that problem,
bring the fabulous capability to look at
it and ask different questions.
Another example for this,
we were working on a project of
reducing gun crime in urban areas.
This happened to be in the UK,
and we had brought together a group of
social scientists and a group of people who are
characterized as hardcore censor people,
people who are interested
in microwave sensing and that sort of thing.
I was sitting watching a group discussing
the problem when one of the sensor people said,
"I wonder what it would cost us
to persuade someone not to be an armed criminal."
The censor guys who are sat they nodding,
"Yes, that's an interesting question."
Then there was a lady sitting near them
who had not said much for and she said,
"It's £16,000," and there was
a mental screeching of
breaks and everyone turned, "What did you say?"
She said, "Yes, we know the answer it's £16,000."
I said, "How do you know that answer?"
She said, "It's obvious. It's because of gas pipelines."
I said, "Well, that answers it nicely.
Just tell us a little bit more about gas pipelines."
At the time they were
refurbishing the gas lines across a lot of London.
This meant that they were running out of gas fitters,
which meant that TransCo,
the company that was responsible for this,
were starting to recruit gas fitters from
basically lower and lower SES areas.
With the fact that suddenly
this opportunity was being opened up for
people who had previously not had
the opportunity to gain those jobs,
they suddenly discovered,
and I know it's going to be surprising,
if you employ people and treat them reasonably nicely,
their interest in becoming
armed criminals actually goes down.
[LAUGHTER] I know.
Who would have thought,
but the point about it was that did not emerge until
a hardcore microwave scientist happened to ask
that question in the earshot of somebody who said,
"I know the answer to that,
but nobody had asked me before."
Now, I would love to tell you that that
changed government policy, it didn't,
and this goes back perhaps to the question earlier about
the impact of politics on the pursuit of truth.
But I want to emphasize that one of
your most important roles
in any trans-disciplinary collaboration
is ask annoyingly good questions
and be open to the conversation that emerges.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about creativity,
largely because it was in the title
of what I said I was going to talk about,
I feel I ought to deliver.
Creativity is one of these terms that
has been used to cover a multitude of activities.
One of the most useful things I think
we can do when we're exploring this is to
make a separation between creativity as
self-expression and creativity as problem-solving.
I am not in any way suggesting
either way of thinking about it is superior,
they are both hugely important.
I am going to talk though
about creativity as problem-solving.
When we're talking about
how do we structure processes which
help us both frame new problems and then resolve them,
there are things that have been learned over
about the last 60 years of research on this,
which are amazingly simple,
and consequently mean that we could
all go off and start doing them immediately.
Annoyingly, they're also really difficult to do,
like suspend your judgment when someone is telling
you something which really
makes you want to froth at the mouth.
I've just passed onto you
one of the really important principles.
As you can see, it's not complicated,
but you will spend the rest of your life practicing this.
We're talking about problem-solving
and the approaches we can do to this.
When we started running these events along time ago,
our thought was the most important thing
is to have a process
through which these new ideas will
emerge and that will be really process-focused,
and we will train faculty in this process.
This turns out to be almost the
least important thing we can do.
The most important thing is diversity.
If we want to have
new and different ideas that
come from new and different questions,
we must have new and different conversations.
It is as simple as that.
But this is actually surprisingly difficult to do.
We realized early on that we actually
needed to be able to map communities in a different way.
It's not unusual.
For instance, if I go to the
Virginia Tech University website,
I can look up people who know about quantum mechanics.
I can do searches for expertise.
What's actually quite hard to do is to
look up people who know about quantum mechanics,
but are interested in early childhood education.
We need to be able to find people who have
enough overlap to be able to have a conversation,
but not so much that I can
predict what you're going to say.
This was where we came across the work of
a computer scientist in Arizona,
Stephen Cooper off other people have built on it.
Don't worry about reading the names.
What's important is there are ways of being
able to take people's areas of expertise,
which gives you a n-dimensional space,
and collapse it down into simple maps.
I always think these maps which
emerge look a bit like Switzerland.
There are lots of little cantons in there.
When you are having any conversation,
when you're bringing together
any faculty meeting or
even beyond that with our stakeholders,
if you were to produce
some map of people's areas of expertise
and it basically looks like
one blob or maybe two blobs on there,
stop, this is not going to give you what you want,
unless what you want is
convergence around a particular solution
when it's a valid thing to do.
But what I really want to invite you to
do is to think about
with whom do you interact on a day-to-day basis?
If you find the people with whom you are interacting,
really see the world in a similar way to you.
If they understand your language,
they may even be in your same discipline.
There is great value in depth of expertise,
but it is not helping you frame
questions in new and different ways.
Now it is entirely up to you how you want to choose
to spend your time and build your relationships,
but we do know that
the diversity of the conversations you're having is
the most important factor in being able
to generate novel and exciting ideas.
That's all by way of preamble.
I wanted to tell you just a few brief stories about
how this has been operationalized
in different institutions.
The thing that I want to suggest is you don't actually
need anyone's permission to go and do this.
I would like you to feel as though you can go away and
start doing things with this almost immediately.
I'll tell you four things that we're
doing and I would like you
to pick out from this anything that seems intriguing.
I'm going to start with Nebraska.
I want to start with Nebraska because it involves money.
This is going to be important,
particularly for those of you who are only just
starting in your academic careers.
Being able to actually get funding makes deans and
senior administrators smile upon you so much.
Let's deal with this because this is important.
The NSF are particularly interested in the nexus of food,
energy, and water, surprisingly enough.
Nebraska had lots of skills in that area,
but there was a feeling that they
weren't actually combining it in
novel ways that was going to actually
generate proposals that would get
them funded in the way that they wanted.
We engaged their faculty.
We asked them, are any of you
interested in food, energy, or water?
Amazingly enough, lots of them were.
But the important point about it was, in fact,
as Emily was saying earlier,
within Colorado, for instance,
there are issues that are at the top of
mind and it is so much easier to
sell it to people
when it is something which they're thinking about a lot.
We ran just a brief workshop,
more or less the same duration as this.
It's not complex, the designs
for how to do them are all freely available.
When we went back two years later and said to Nebraska,
"Could you give us some indication of the outcome of
this," their view was a brief three-day workshop with
some additional support in time from
the VPR's office netted us about
10 million in extra funding.
This is a reasonable return.
But the important point about it was this was
driven by trans-disciplinary research.
If people are skeptical about it or they
feel you should actually stay within your lane,
I would like to suggest you can actually have
a significant impact and
the funding agencies will fund you.
Not all the time, because, of course,
it would be unfair if they gave you all the money,
it's nice to share, but they will fund you.
In order to be able to get there though,
I want to suggest there are actually
a relatively easy way of doing this.
You can enter this terribly simple model at any stage.
Personally, I think it's a good idea
to start with finding the opportunity.
From that, you then begin to engage a community.
The key thing though is to engage a diverse community.
This is where it gets tricky.
There were people who did not realize that they could
contribute to a useful conversation
about food, energy, and water.
If you are trying to bring this together,
it is your job to reach out and say,
it is the fact that you are not engaged in this,
but you are an intelligent motivated person.
That means I need you to come and
help us see the world differently.
Building this community takes time and effort.
This then allows you to get the community to tell you,
how do we see this problem space?
What are the interesting ways of being able
to frame it and then you can come together,
but the coming together and
the developing ideas is the easy part.
Let me give you another example around this,
just to give you an indication of
the topics that can be run easily.
Within the University of Buffalo,
they decided they wanted to form a community of
Global Health Excellence focused on the Global South.
They start picking up topics around that
from the community they've build and they've now run,
in fact, it's in excessive there.
I think they've run five of
these little mini ideas, lamps.
They're not hard to arrange,
but they can have a significant impact.
The reason that I picked up this one
is I just want to highlight this guy.
John Ringland is a mathematician and he was
working on a food security ideas
lab that we were running.
It was a three-day event for two and a half days,
John said to me, he's a lovely guy and he said,
''I have no idea why I'm here.''
But I'm assuming our building was warmer than
his and so he
stayed where Buffalo gets a bit chilly.
But for two and a half days,
sat there and said,
''No idea how I can contribute.''
Until on the last day,
he suddenly realized that there was
an interesting way in which you could use Google Maps and
data science to be able to actually get
a far more accurate representation of the way
farmers grow food for themselves on
the edges of their field than had ever been done before.
Sometimes being able to generate new ways of framing
the problem and develop new ideas requires persistence.
But it was a way of building a connection with
a community that just
didn't normally get involved in that.
We've also, within this way of working,
taken this approach from faculty down into students.
I think this is really important and really exciting.
You be a running student focused,
interdisciplinary ideas labs,
ASU are doing this not just within ASU,
but they are now partnering institutions
like the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi,
and that's fascinating because with
the technology that we've got available to us now,
you can start linking up student groups to
work on real problems together right now.
I want to talk one last example,
University of Iowa, and this goes
back in fact to what Faith was talking about.
Also have an issue with regards to opioid misuse.
We developed,
again, another one of these
very simple workshops went through
the same approach of being able to build
a diverse community to come and address this.
But the opioid problem makes
us realize that there are some questions
like better ways of estimating the G constant,
which is gravity, that you might
run one national event on it.
It's okay, we've got new ideas.
Then there are other problems and
opioid abuse is definitely one of them.
We you realize the problem is fractal,
we can't solve it at a national level.
We might be able to impact it at a state level,
but we've probably actually got to get
down to even a city or below level.
Now, I'm really interested in that because I
think if as an academic body,
we could get really good
about having creative conversations,
not just across disciplines but across stakeholders,
we could significantly increase the impact of
our work by developing
solutions at evermore local levels.
Now, of course, the other side of that is,
if we can develop a solution that
works in Roanoke or Buffalo,
then there are ways that we might be able to take
that and help other people apply it in other regions.
There's both this local focus
and the need to network it out.
All of that sounds like it might be
jolly good fun and let's go and think creatively.
But we also need to address the question that
transdisciplinary research isn't free, it isn't easy,
and it's also a lot harder than just doing
your mono disciplinary research and following what
your supervisor or head of department says.
We know from looking at the data around
the productivity of people
trying to do transdisciplinary research,
that there is a significant ramp-up time.
If you think about not just knowing your own discipline,
but learning the language of
other people's disciplines as well,
it's not surprising it's hard to do.
It does become more demanding.
You may have enjoyed just venturing
out on the couch previously and binge watching Netflix.
Now, you find yourself constantly
thinking about different ways of framing the problem.
I don't want to suggest that this is easy.
It's also in no way to suggest that
a mono disciplinary approach within
sciences is in any way inferior.
There is still huge work that we have
to do within our disciplines.
But I do want to suggest that if you really want to
have an impact on wicked problems,
as has been suggested earlier,
we have to learn to be better at this.
If we're going to learn to be better at this,
and we're going to do that within the time we've got.
I just want to finish by offering a few thoughts on
things to put into practice if you find them appealing.
First of all, have any of you done improv comedy?
Have you ever? Okay. All right.
One of the rules of improv is say, and, not, but,
and the idea is someone will create a situation,
you have to inhabit it.
This is always great fun if you like that kind of thing.
This idea though, of and, not, but,
is also incredibly helpful when you're first
trying to bridge across disciplines.
I invite you in
your conversations to be able to say, ''Okay,
that's interesting and I can see how that
might connect with the ways
in which we're working over here.''
Try, and, not, but.
I offer you a second thing,
which was when I was a very young academic,
the head of my business school said,
''We need you to solve a problem
to do with collaboration.''
I went off and I discovered the problem was that
we didn't have an NTSMTPMTA.
I came back and reported this to
the dean and I was disappointed by his reaction.
I offer this as a salutary lesson.
We all have our own jargon.
Jargon can be extremely
unhelpful when bridging communities.
We once ran a workshop on the mathematics of evolution,
which had both biologists and mathematicians.
We were a day into it
when one of them turned around to the other and said,
''We're both using the word vector,
but I don't think it means what you think it means.''
There was a screeching of breaks and we said,
''Okay, let's talk about jargon.''
Jargon is usually unhelpful in trans-disciplinarity.
What is incredibly helpful is analogies,
able to explain my problem as if it
were and I come back
to our choreography to be able to say,
what does our problem look
like to be able to do that thing?
Analogies are bridge-building,
better than the one in Avignon.
It can help us go all the way over and
it allows people to inhabit your thinking.
We want to try and say, and not but,
we want to try and avoid jargon,
and we also want to invoke
a Heisenberg compensator whenever necessary.
Now, this has been one of
the most useful devices ever created,
and I will tell you briefly its story.
On Star Trek, which obviously we all love.
There was a limited budget,
which meant going from the ship to the planet was tricky.
So they invented the transporter.
When they invented it,
apparently some clever clogs
came up to one of the writers and said,
''How does your transporter get
round the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?''
The writer who was a quick witted person
said very nicely and they said,
''Oh, tell us how.''
He said, ''We have a Heisenberg compensator.''
Oh, they said, that is useful.
How does it work?
[LAUGHTER] At that point,
the right or left,
because he didn't want to talk to them.
Now, I would invite you to think about
Heisenberg compensators almost like blank scrabble tiles.
Any new idea that you frame will have obvious flaws.
If you focus on the flaws and if you help other people
become better people by
telling them what's wrong with their ideas,
it tends to bring it to a halt.
When you are suggesting an idea
and you are aware that it's not going to work,
invoke the Heisenberg compensator and say yes,
but if it did work,
what might it allow us to do?
Because it is astonishing how often we will be in
a situation where someone will come back and say, ''Yes,
you did break the second law of
thermodynamics there and you can't do that,
but I could help you do 10 percent of it.
Would that be any use?''
You go, ''Yes, 10 percent will help. We can do that.''
When we want to
increase our trans-disciplinary conversations,
we want to say, and, not,
but, we want to do analogies and we want
to invoke Heisenberg compensators wherever we can.