Table Of ContentBY ROGER SCHANK
guter Models ofThought and Language
lited with K. Colby)
eptual Information Processing
ts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An
try Into Human Knowledge Structures
R. Abelson)
'e Computer Understanding: Five Programs
Miniatures (co-edited with C. Riesbeck)
ling and Understanding: Teaching From an
icial Intelligence Perspective
amic Memory: A Theory ofReminding and
ning in Computers and People
Cognitive Computer: On Language,
ning, and Artificial Intelligence (with
hilders)
anation Patterns: Understanding
ranically and Creatively
THE
CREATIVE
ATTITUDE
Learning to A\sk
and Answertne
Kignt Questions
ROGER SCHANK
with
Peter Childers
MACMILLAN PUBLISHING COMPANY New York
Copyright © 1988 by Roger Schank
All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means,electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the Publisher.
Macmillan Publishing Company
866Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schank, Roger C., 1946-
The creative attitude.
1. Creative ability. I. Childers, Peter G.
II. Title.
BF408.835 1988 153.35 87-29717
ISBN 0-02-607170-3
Macmillan books are available at special discounts for
bulk purchasesfor sales promotions, premiums,
fund-raising, or educational use. For details, contact:
Special Sales Director
Macmillan Publishing Company
866 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
10 9 8 765 43 2 «1
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
To mychildren,
HANA and JOSHUA,
in the hope that their world
will let them create.
Contents
Preface 1X
Part I: Looking at Creativity
1. What’s the Problem? 3
2. The Creative Attitude: A Look at Creative People 38
3. The Perils of Script-based Thinking 62
Part II: The Natural Creative Process
4. Failure and Reminding 9}
5. Anomaly + Explanation = Creative Thought 127
6. The Importance of Questions 169
Part Ill. Creativity Tools
7. Asking Questions and Tweaking Answers 195
8. Planning with Explanation Patterns 222
Contents
9, Wandering the Paths of Thought: Some Questions 251
10. Question Transformation 284
Part IV: Questions and Answers
11. Ten Questions about Innovation 311
12. Encouraging Creativity in School 329
13. Ten Maxims to Remember 348
Index 363
Preface
Ionceattendedalecturebyaprofessorwhoseresearchproject
had been to find out what people think of other people in
various walksoflife. Among the things she asked hersubjects
was whatthey believed was the mostdifficult aspect ofa pro-
fessor’sjob. They were asked, Whatis the greatest fear that a
professor is likely to haveP The vast majority of people be-
lieved that a professor’s greatest fear is to be asked a question
that he cannot answer. This made the audience(all of whom
were professors) laugh. Why? Because answers are easy.
Professors worry about questions, not about the answers to
questions.
A professor worries about his ability to come up with good
questions that give him some idea of what to pursue in his
research. Creativity and progress depend upon asking tthe
right question at the right time. When the questionis relevant
and at the right level, the path to the answeris often fairly
obvious. Ifyou have askedall the questions, you don’t need an
answer anymore because you have solved the problem at
hand. The last question is effectively the answer.
Wetendto believe that we need answers. Our society tends
to look for answers to such questions as how to stop nuclear
Preface
war, howtofeed thehungry, orhowtostopdruguse. Butthese
questions maynot bethe onesto ask ifwe really wantanswers.
Questions have natural biases built into them. With every
question comesthe hintofan answer. Howto feed the hungry
has an obvious built-in answer: send food. How to stop drug
use: crackdown on theimportation andsaleofdrugs. Butthese
answers are obviously wrong. They don’t work. Why not? Be-
cause those questions are not the right questions. Since ques-
tions point to answers, we must learn to ask the right ques-
tions—that is, the ones that point to helpful answers.
But we must learn to ask questions for another reason as
well. Let meillustrate with a story: When I wasin high school,
I took biology and was getting mediocre grades. My mother
went to see myteacher, and he suggested that I start to ask
more questionsin class. More questions? That seemed absurd
to me. My problem wasn’t that I neededto ask questions. You
asked questions if you didn’t understand. I needed the an-
swers. How were questions going to help my grade?
This teacher was at once very wise and very foolish. He was
wise enough to understand that someone whois not asking
questions is not thinking, that it is really impossible to under-
stand any subject well if questions are not readily coming to
mind. The fact that I wasn’t asking questions certainly did
indicate that I wasn’t thinking aboutwhatwasbeingdiscussed.
Naturally I was getting mediocre grades if I wasn’t thinking.
Onthe other hand, why wasn’t I thinking? I was bored. What
questions werethereto ask about how yet another species was
classified? I just didn’t care. Good questions come from an
interesting environment. Both he and I had failed to provide
one.
It is all too easy to stifle good questions. Children tend to
start out with good questions, but various things conspire to
stop them.In this book, I talk about the creative attitude, and
whenI talk about this subject, I am invariably remindedofthe
time when my daughter, at age seven, was asked to take a
“creativity” test. This test included various questions whose
answers were drawings of one kind or another. The grader of
Preface xi
this test was very impressed bythe fact that my daughter had
drawn a moosein responseto one ofthe questions. I asked my
daughter whyshe had drawnthe mooseatthatpoint. She said
that it was obvious that they were trying to get you to draw a
happy face, given the parts of the drawing that had already
been supplied, and she didn’t want to do what she was sup-
posed to do.
Whatis the creative attitude? It is, among other things, the
desire to go against the mainstream. But such desires are
stopped, by parents, in school, at work—nearly everywhere.
The creative attitude entails posing one’s own questions, not
answering the questions ofothers, andit is not always easy to
get away with such a point of view.
Onereasonit is difficult to keep posing one’s own questions
is that you can actuallybegin to know too much. When myson
was five, he was very interested in football. On one Saturday
afternoon, Oklahomascored eighty-two points in a game.I
asked him, “How, by what combination ofscoring, could they
have done that?” While I wasstill thinking about the answer,
heresponded,“Eighttouchdowns,eightfieldgoals, eightextra
points, and a safety.” I was dumbfounded.I hadn’t gotten the
answeryet.Iwasstilldividing82by7. Butmyfive-year-oldson
hadnotonly gotten an answer more quickly than I did. He had
also gotten a very different answer than the onethat I, and
most people, would get. Why? What had he done?
He had discovered factoring. Basically, he had asked himself
aneasyquestion: Howmanytensaretherein82? Heaskedthis
because he knewhowonescoredten pointsin a football game,
atouchdown,anextrapoint,andafieldgoal. Thenextproblem
after that was to see what wasleft after you had eight tens.
Easy.
He could come up with such an inventive way of doing
things precisely because he didn’t know the “right” method.
He didn’t know howto divide by 7. Of course, I am not ad-
vocating that one shouldn’t learn to divide. But I am pointing
out that there is a cost to learning how to do something—
namely, you begin to think that the method youlearnedis the
