at Google.

We're incredibly pleased to host David Burkus, who

is the author of "The Myths of Creativity",

"The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate

Great Ideas".

David is a contributing writer for "Forbes" and "Psychology

Today", and has also been featured

in "Fast Company, Inc.", "Bloomberg Business Week",

"Financial Times", and even on "CBS This Morning".

So I'm sure that you're all excited to spend time

with him over the next 40, 45 minutes.

He'll be sharing a little bit of insight about his book,

and then opening up to questions.

So without further to do, over to you.

DAVID BURKUS: So, thank you, thank you.

Yeah, the CBS thing, it was cool.

I saw a couple people nod, there, quite cool.

Unfortunately, I was on the Saturday edition.

So I did not get to meet Charlie Rose.

But life goal for the next book.

So I want to talk to you a bit about this book now.

And really I want to tell you a bit

about the story of a realization that I had.

The weird thing about writing a book

is you learn things after you publish it.

After you send it to the publisher

people then start discussing you.

And you realize that, I set out to write a business book,

or I thought I was writing a business book.

And I found I've written a book that has I hope a little bit

broader implications for how we rethink things.

And it's this one sentence that I didn't really

figure out until after I had published,

which was, the stories we tell ourselves are true,

even if they're not true.

So the things that we tell ourselves

are true even if they're totally false,

even if they have no basis in reality.

Because if we tell it to ourselves enough

we eventually start to believe it.

And there's a psychological principle

called confirmation bias that confirms this.

Confirmation bias that confirms this, that's funny.

What confirmation bias essentially does

is it says that you filter out things

that don't conform to what you already believe.

And you willfully seek out things

that will conform to what you already believe.

It will confirm your beliefs.

So, you probably have realized this.

If you've ever been car shopping you

have found confirmation bias at work, right.

Who has been car shopping recently?

And what kind of car did you decide on?

AUDIENCE: A Ram 1500.

DAVID BURKUS: A Ram 1500.

How many RAM 1500s did you see shortly after you bought it?

AUDIENCE: Oh, a lot.

DAVID BURKUS: They're all over the place, right?

And it's not like anything changed, I mean,

unless you decided to drive through Texas after you bought

it.

It's not like anything changed.

It's still a Ram 1500.

There were still just as many on the street as before.

But your mind is drawing attention and flagging

and signaling you when it's there.

And interestingly, the things that you chose not to buy,

it sort of just fades to the background.

Now if you really, really want to get a taste of this wait

until this fall, because we have an election season coming up.

And this is when confirmation bias

is on display for the world to see.

So if you still don't believe in the Ram 1500 example,

get into a political argument with someone who thinks

differently than you on some social network, via Twitter,

Google+, Facebook, whatever.

It has to be a social network because it

has to be asynchronous.

You have to give them time to find some blog that supports

their world view and then come back to you.

So it can't be a face to face discussion because then it'll

be like human and you'll find common ground.

We don't want that.

We're showing confirmation bias at work.

But what eventually happens is the stories

that we tell ourselves become true because of confirmation

bias.

And this happened in this case with this book.

I used the term myths because myths are stories.

And myths are stories that we make up

to try and explain things that we can't really explain fully.

And what happens over time is those myths

become true, even if they're not true.

So I set out, actually, to write a leadership book.

I did my Doctoral work on strategy and leadership.

And I set out wanting to know, what

is it that the leaders of amazingly

creative organizations do that other people don't do.

And it came down to this idea of stories.

And it really-- the deep dark secret-- it

wasn't all that much about the actual leader.

It was just about what are the stories

that people are telling themselves.

So we tell a lot of different stories, lots and lots

of different stories.

One of my favorites is, if you pay attention

to the way we describe creativity,

we tell an almost religious story around creativity.

It almost feels like it's some religion.

And if you go to certain parts of the world-- San Francisco,

Austin, Texas, parts of New York-- creative people

actually look like priests of some near eastern religion

you've never heard of.

Piercings, tattoos, things that you're like,

wow, you really could be a guru on a mountain somewhere.

But you're a barista.

But you know what I mean.

So we talk about it in these weird, almost religious terms.

And I think we do that to our detriment.

Because in reality it's something

that's sort of accessible to everyone.

So we talk about creativity like it's a gift from the gods.

We talk about innovation like it happens in a flash.

In reality it's actually a little simpler to explain.

I can do it with a picture.

So a woman by the name of Teresa Amabile

did this amazing series of research

and came up with what she calls the Confidential

Model of Creativity.

Which essentially says, every creative insight

happens when four things are at play together.

Now I already know what you're thinking

because I see people's eyes.

There are only four circles on the slide.

We'll get to that.

So four things essentially in play, expertise,

creative thinking, skills, and motivation.

Expertise, you actually have to know something

about where you want a creative insight in.

Interestingly enough, too much expertise

can sometimes be a bad thing.

We'll get to that.

Creative thinking skills.

Do you actually know the processes,

especially in groups, for coming up with lots of great ideas?

Or are you just sort of winging it?

Or are you throwing yourself in a room

and doing what we call brainstorming but looks nothing

like what its creator intended?

So creative thinking skills, I think,

we have a hard time thinking that expertise,

in particular, and creative thinking

skills are two different circles.

Most of the time we use this term creatives a lot.

We use this term creatives.

We describe advertising copy as creative copy now.

And what I think is interesting about that

is that's actually merging these creative thinking

skills with expertise.

But you can use creative thinking skills

and, even in fields of expertise,

that no one would call creative, like accounting.

Now sometimes you do that at the detriment of the world.

But, I mean, I use mint.com every single day.

It's an amazingly creative product.

So the last one is motivation.

And intrinsic motivation is generally better

than extrinsic motivation, things

like bonuses and incentives.

But there are things we can do to structure and align

those two to actually have an even more powerful force.

But in general intrinsic motivation works really well.

It's often been said necessity is the mother of invention.

I'd say necessity is the mother innovation.

Why?

Necessity is a really good intrinsic motivator.

If you have a problem that desperately needs to be solved,

you have a lot of motivation to solve said problem.

Now three circles, four components.

The fourth component is the social environment.

What is the environment in which you are actually operating in?

Is it generally supportive of new and creative ideas?

Does it squelch ideas?

Does it support idea sharing?

Does it support what a friend of mine calls little bets?

Does it support the idea of taking lots of little risks,

deferring judgment?

All of these sort of things help shape a social environment

that can harbor creativity.

And what I think is interesting is

when I think about the perfect social environment,

I actually think about a kindergarten classroom.

Does anyone have kindergartners or younger kids?

So I have a two-year-old and a two month old,

which means we're looking at the beginner

programs-- preschool programs, working our way up.

And if you go in and visit a kindergarten,

you'll see a classroom of 25 people and maybe four really,

really frazzled looking teachers.

But you'll see 25 kids, little people.

All of them are incredibly creative.

I teach college most days out of the year,

and when I get a classroom of 25 students,

if I asked them if they think they're creative, two of them

will raise their hand.

And both of them are marketing majors.

That doesn't even count because they just

think they're giving me the right answer.

So we go from 25 to two.

And I just think this is incredibly depressing.

And the reason that we do is that the social environment

changes.

As you move through life you become more and more

aware of the fact that not everyone loves your crazy,

off the wall ideas.

And eventually it becomes easier to just not bring them up.

You learn that regurgitating the right answer back to a teacher

is just easier.

And even if you have a very forward thinking,

progressive school, we still have a society

that doesn't really value creative, new ideas.

And we'll talk about that at the tail end

because I think that's the most devastating story that we

tell ourselves.

But again, to go with this idea that the stories we

tell ourselves are true, there's a lot

of stories I've found that we tell ourselves

around creative people, creative companies,

that we use to discount ourselves.

One of my favorites is this Eureka story.

And I'm indebted to a lot of people.

I'm not the first person that's taken aim at the Eureka story.

One of the most fascinating examples of this

is Newton and the apple.

How many people have ever heard the story

of Newton and the apple?

Tell it to me, Newton and the apple.

So Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree.

What happens?

Apple falls.

Isaac Newton discovers gra-- no.

Does something related to gravity, right.

Great story.

Great lesson for aspiring, creative people.

What's the lesson?

Sit under a tree and wait for stuff to happen.

Now, I can tell you because I've searched

lots and lots of sources.