August/September 2003

Is your Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
Perception in Creativity and Innovation

"All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions."
— Leonardo da Vinci

The ability to perceive the world in new ways is one of the key attributes of successfully creative artists, scientists and entrepreneurs. Skills in perception give us the ability to see what others don’t see, find hidden patterns, and make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, objects, or events, that lead to new conceptions, or solutions to problems.

Peter F. Drucker asserts that perception and mood are key factors in finding innovative opportunities. As he points out, describing a glass as half full or half empty, has vastly different meanings:

“Changing a manager’s perception of a glass from half full to half empty opens up big innovation opportunities. A change in perception does not alter facts. It changes their meaning, though — and very quickly. It took less than two years for the computer to change from being perceived as a threat and as something only big businesses would use to something one buys for doing income tax. Economics do not necessarily dictate such a change; in fact, they may be irrelevant. What determines whether people see a glass as half full or half empty is mood rather than fact, and a change in mood often defies quantification. But it is not exotic. It is concrete. It can be defined. It can be tested. And it can be exploited for innovation opportunity.” (From: “The Discipline of Innovation,” Harvard Business Review; Aug 2002)

I recently designed and orchestrated a "Perception Reception" for a pharmaceutical company, which provided 200 Scientific Affairs staff with the opportunity to explore sensory perceptions, kaleidoscopic thinking and innovation. Activities at various kiosks included listening to molecular music, exploring synaesthesia (the ability to receive stimulus in one sensory modality and experience it in another) in art and science, magic tricks, fractals, and how colour affects taste in beverages.

A trick wine tasting activity provoked some amusing responses from participants, especially when they were fooled. It was based on a study by French scientists who artificially coloured white wine with an odourless red dye at a wine tasting. (Participants were first asked to describe the taste and odour of red wine, followed by white wine, then the same white wine, disguised as red.) In the study, the coloured wine was "olfactory described as a red wine by a panel of 54 tasters" who could not tell “red” from “white.”

“Maybe they inhale too often, but wine sniffers are prone to “unconscious synaesthesia”— the jumbling of different senses in the brain." (Gil Morrot, Frédéric Brochet and Denis Dubourdieu "New Scientist" Nov. 2001). I can attest from our group that this is true.

In a similar ruse, Herald wine writer Huon Hooke recounted the story of how "dinner-guests sent back a bottle of wine, dismissing it as one of the sweetest and most disgusting rosés they had ever tasted. Unbeknown to them, the wine was, in fact, a Chateau d’Yquem, one of the world’s greatest and most expensive whites, which had been dosed with a couple of drops of red food dye by their mischievous host.”

Source: Sidney Morning Herald Nov. 2, 2001
http://old.smh.com.au/news/0111/02/national/national12.html

For an overview of synaesthesia (also spelled synesthesia) visit:
http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/synesthesia.html

Magic tricks are another way to challenge perceptions. According to magician Ken Bellemare, magic teaches us to break out of our assumptions, and conceptual paradigms in our approach to problem-solving. This is tricky, because our assumptions are mostly unconscious. Ken says, “In magic, it’s often the least emphasized gesture or movement that is the most important in solving the trick.”

Have you noticed that when the solution to a magic trick is revealed to you, it's always elegantly simple?

As you explore the many ways to sharpen your senses, consider your business challenges from a kaleidoscopic perspective. Is your glass half empty or half full?

Happy creating,

Linda Naiman