Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius. Michael Gelb

AND CREATIVE

      PROBLEM SOLVING

      Think back to your school days. We all remember what curiosity did to the cat. But what happened to the kids who asked too many questions? A common refrain from overworked, beleaguered teachers was “We don’t have time for all these questions; we’ve got to get through the curriculum.” Now persistent question askers are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or “hyperactivity” and treated with Ritalin and other drugs. If the young Leonardo were alive today and attending grade school, he would probably be on medication.

      “Why is the sky blue? Leonardo’s answer: “I say that the azure that the air makes us see is not its proper color, but this color comes from warm, damp air, evaporated into minuscule and imperceptible particles, which, being struck by the light of the sun, become luminous below the obscurity of the mighty darkness which covers them like a lid.”

      Although we all started life with a Da Vinci-like insatiable curiosity, most of us learned, once we got to school, that answers were more important than questions. In most cases, schooling does not develop curiosity, delight in ambiguity, and question-asking skill. Rather, the thinking skill that’s rewarded is figuring out the “right answer” – that is, the answer held by the person in authority, the teacher. This pattern holds throughout university and postgraduate education, especially in a class where the professor wrote the text. (In a classic study at a top university, summa cum laude graduates were given their same final exams one month after graduation, and they all failed. Researcher Leslie Hart summarized the results: “Final exams are final indeed!”) The authority-pleasing, question-suppressing, rule-following approach to education may have served to provide society with assembly-line workers and bureaucrats, but it does not do much to prepare us for a new Renaissance.

      Leonardo da Vinci’s life was an exercise in creative problem solving of the very highest order. The principle of Curiosità provides the primary key to his method. It begins with intense curiosity and an open mind, and proceeds with a stream of questions asked from different perspectives.

      “First, there are questions about the construction of certain machines, then, under the influence of Archimedes, questions about the first principles of dynamics; finally, questions which had never been asked before about winds, clouds, the age of the earth, generation, the human heart.”

      – KENNETH CLARK ON LEONARDO’S NOTEBOOKS

      You can increase your problem-solving skills, at work and at home, by honing your question-asking ability. For most people this requires shifting the initial emphasis away from focusing on “the right answer” and toward asking “Is this the right question?” and “What are some different ways of looking at this problem?”

      Successful problem solving often requires replacing or reframing the initial question. Questions can be framed in a wide variety of ways, and the “framing” will dramatically influence your ability to find solutions. Psychologist Mark Brown offers the example of an evolution in questioning that resulted in a major transformation of human societies. Nomadic societies were based on the question “How do we get to water?” They became agrarian and stable cultures, Brown says, when they began asking “How do we get the water to come to us?”