Greetings, fellow statisticians! I write to you from Austin in the midst of the Texas weather/utilities disaster. I consider myself lucky for not having lost power, even though water service has been out in my neighborhood for days. Fortunately, there is plenty of snow to harvest—at least for the next 24 hours—and we have a modest supply of drinking water stored.

I’ve kept in touch with my statistician friends in Texas and, like most Texans, many are suffering from this catastrophe. Thank you to all who have checked on my situation through this challenging period. We will survive. Please send good thoughts and wishes to us all. The restoration of utilities is one thing, but recovering from the trauma caused by power or water issues for days and potentially weeks is quite another. As I said in my last President’s Corner, these are the times we must dip into our personal resilience reservoirs, and we should remember to help others to fill theirs.

Now, how about a story that might help you become a better statistician? It’s about “thinking differently.”

A few years back, I challenged myself to something completely bonkers. I wanted to challenge my creativity, so I sought to intermingle ideas that had nothing to do with statistics, research methods, or generating inferences at first glance. More generally, you should know I like to intertwine disparate ideas and concepts just for the fun of it and to see if the combinations can be used as the genesis of new insight. In this instance, I seek to connect the dots between a fishing trip, a SXSW festival, the movie Star Wars, and, of course, our beloved field of statistics.

I was on a fishing trip about a decade ago that required a two-hour drive along Florida’s Emerald Coast. I tuned in to an NPR program that focused on the life of Steve Jobs, a fascinating tale of creativity and dreams that unfolded with each mile I traveled. Jobs was a visionary who aspired to create technology that was not just of highly technical utility, but visually beautiful, ergonomically functional, and ubiquitous in culture and society globally. His vision germinated at a time when computers were visually a metallic mess and hard to learn and navigate.

For Jobs, a superior technological product was necessary but not sufficient. In addition to user-friendly and visually appealing attributes, the product’s performance and utility had to capture the hearts and minds of consumers. The latter is why huge media events preceded new product releases. (Recall the controversial 1984 Superbowl sledgehammer commercial and the buzz it created.) Interestingly, Jobs really wasn’t as much of a technical computer geek as he was a brilliant designer, visionary, and marketer.

Reflecting on that warm afternoon winter drive, it occurred to me that even our own statistical community could benefit from cool ideas that transcend conventional thinking. So, I asked myself, “How can we stoke the idea factory within ourselves as statisticians, as well as within the ASA and our broader statistical community?” There is at least a modicum of visionary dreamer inside everyone! And that leads me to offer you some thoughts catalyzing creativity.

I’ve often contemplated how visionaries go about developing their wild and crazy ideas. I posit that it sometimes results from cross-fertilization by being exposed to other disciplines. Guess what? We statisticians often “play in other disciplines’ backyards.” That puts us in a propitious position to leverage our own creativity in how we approach and contribute to statistical problems of the day.

My area of expertise is survey research. I recall the market research world routinely conducted focus groups in the 1980s, long before the survey research world developed a theoretical framework to incorporate them into the process of survey question development. Turns out a method long used by one industry had a useful application in another. We just had to think about the methodology differently to realize that.

More generally, creative ideas can emerge from everyday experiences such as child care (children can ask the most provocative questions), but also from activities such as hobbies, ‘play time,’ or other personal entertainment. For instance, as many of you already know, I am a longtime member of the photo crew for the SXSW Festival, which occurs annually in Austin, Texas. I photo-shoot the SXSW Music Festival and SXSW EDU; it affords a great opportunity to legitimately snoop around the plethora of events, including panel sessions of highly successful entrepreneurs, singer-songwriters, gaming creators, and entertainment production executives; keynote speeches by visionaries such as Astro Teller of Google X and Bill Gates; and hands-on testing of the latest advances in electronic technologies. It also features intellectually challenging and fun events such as hackathons.

Yes, it’s absolutely fun, but it also provides great fodder for what ‘can be’ in our own statistical disciplines. The exposure to all those novel approaches has always sparked ideas about how our community might better leverage statistics and new technology to conduct research and gain insights in ways that are different from classical quantitative statistical methods on which we routinely rely.

Returning to a focus on creativity, keep in mind that creative ideas can emerge anywhere and at any time if we can only keep ourselves receptive to them. Try it sometime. Join me in removing your blinders to the world around you. For instance, there are so many aspects of the survey research industry that deserve creative solutions—the increasing difficulty of conducting probability sample surveys, the proliferation of data collected from nonprobability methods, the utility of big data to gain insights. And this represents only a select few of the issues facing survey research, a small subset of our larger, diverse statistical community. In the survey world, some of these problems seemed intractable a few years ago—for instance, how to draw statistical inference from nonprobability surveys. Yet through creative application of statistical theory, new frameworks have been developed that explore how statistical inferences can be drawn.

One way to think about developing creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems is to consider the infamous exchange between Luke Skywalker and Yoda in Star Wars: “[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.” Failure need not be an option when your statistical toolbox includes creative thinking.

Finally, if, like me, you believe in the power of creativity to help make yourself a more effective statistician, then please note it is precisely an openness to new ideas and perspectives that lies at the core of making the statistics community and our society more diverse, inclusive, and equitable. Being creative and being open to and valuing different perspectives, cultures, and people represent two sides of the same coin. So, let’s allow ourselves the space and time to brainstorm our own creative solutions to the problems facing our statistical community and society. Sweet dreams, everyone!