Embarrassment, judgement and self-editing

One of the reasons that design thinking is not widely practiced, Brown explains, is that most adults are already socialized out of many of the behaviors it requires, and educated in more cautious, analytical methods. As a result, people are embarrassed to express outlandish ideas, engage in playful experimentation, or take part in role-play. In his TED talk, “Tales of Creativity and Play”, Brown sets his audience two tasks to demonstrate some of these learned inhibitions.

First, he gives audience members 30 seconds to draw the person next to them. Afterwards, he notes that lots of people’s first instinct is to say sorry: expressing both immediate, unreflective, and negative judgements towards their own work; but also showing a fear of the judgement of others. As a result, most of us end up pursuing work and proposing ideas that minimise the risk of judgement, rather than work that expands what’s possible.

Second, he provides the audience with a piece of paper with 30 circles on, and gives them 1 minute to transform each of those 30 circles into something different (like the sun, or a football). You can try the exercise now, if you like, by printing out the image below, and using the stopwatch app on your phone. Go!

If you tried it yourself, how many circles did you transform within the time?

The exercise shows that most people are conditioned to prioritise quality over quantity, even when they’ve been told explicitly that the aim of the exercise is to fill the page. The chances are that you came up with some ideas that you immediately, almost unconsciously, decided not to pursue. This might have been because you felt they were too simple, too off-the-wall, or too similar to another idea you’d already used.

And yet one of the ideas we dismiss, or prevent ourselves from even thinking about in the first place, could be just the answer we need.