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Creativity Techniques

> in practice

Creativity tools are used to help policy makers develop innovative solutions to problems and spot opportunities that might not be identified through more conventional analysis and policymaking approaches. There are a number of different creative techniques that can be useful when approaching a strategy project. These include Brainstorming, ?WhatIf!'s 4Rs, Synectics, and Edward de Bono's Thinking Hats.

Brainstorming

The brain is a very powerful instrument. It learns responses based upon previous experiences. This can be very useful - we do not have to learn how to get dressed every day, we know that pants go on before trousers (usually). ?WhatIf! describe these regular responses as 'rivers of thought'. When faced with a problem, we automatically start exploring the things we know for a solution. But radical solutions are never going to be found within the problem area. We have to force our brains to jump out of the well-worn river channel into another one. There are a number of brainstorming techniques to encourage this out-of-the-box thinking. ?WhatIf!'s technique is called the '4 Rs'.

?WhatIf!'s 4 Rs

Random Links

This is the technique that feels most creative - and it is also the easiest to do and is very effective. There are 2 rules: the random item must be truly random; and you must find a connection. The random item can be physical (a tennis ball, some feathers, a glove . . .) or a word picked at random from a book or a list of words. The technique then involves thinking about the characteristics of the random stimulus, and applying them back to your problem.

Example: You are looking at the problem of young adults' education; your random object is a pack of sweets. The sort of connections you may start to make might include:

There are thousands of other connections that can be made. Each of these ideas would collapse easily if faced with criticism at this stage; so they need to be built upon, greenhoused, and support built up around them. An idea should never be discarded until it has been given a chance.

Revolution

This is creativity at its most provocative. It is the deliberate challenging of rules and assumptions. Very often, our ability to come up with innovative ideas is limited by the rules of our own particular river. Revolution breaks those rules. Here are 5 questions that may get you started:

• What if we did nothing?
• What if we had to do it at half the cost? - reduce adult learning courses to bare essentials and have 'key points' packs
• What if demand was twice as high? - energy may lead to home study groups
• What if we reversed the process? - young adults have to teach a skill to others
• What if we exaggerated the issue? - information everywhere: billboards with dates of major battles, bus tickets with useful foreign words

Re-expression

The way tasks and issues are expressed tends to be limited. We rely on jargon, which send us off down the same old rivers of thought. Describing the problem in a different way can make the brain jump to a new river. Re-expression is a way to do this:

• Re-express with alternative words
• Re-express using different senses
• Re-express from someone else's perspective (e.g. a child, an alien)
• How would it appear to Napoleon? Or Abraham Lincoln? Or Florence Nightingale?

Related worlds

Never assume you are the only person to have faced an issue like the one you are facing, or that you cannot learn from the world around you. Related worlds is a technique that allows you to harness the experience of others in a creative way. For example, the roll-on deodorant was invented by stealing the principles from ball-point pens.

• importance of 'freshness'
• visit other businesses
• talk to people not in the field
• look in other disciplines (e.g. nature)

> See the 'in practice' from the Strategy Unit Workforce Development project.

Synectics: Developing an idea from a brainstorming session

Brainstorming sessions are great for generating hundreds of ideas and building up energy and motivation within a team. The danger is that all this will be lost if the ideas are not developed and are either abandoned or shared too soon.

Synectics is a creativity consultancy which has pioneered a way to develop ideas beyond the initial phase to realy implementable new solutions. They have a model that can be represented by the diamond shape below:

© Synectics

Beyond the 4^th stage, Selection, is the main part of the diamond, where most of the work takes place and where the hundreds of ideas that were created in the top half are turned from the intriguiging or appealing into a few that are really workable. For each idea, one needs to list all the benefits that will come from it and all the major concerns that you associate with it. Then use the rest of the team to brainstorm possible solutions to these mini-problems phrased in a positive way. Between the problem and the ideal solution are many small hurdles, but each can be fenced off and dealt with individually. This stops you from feeling that the ideal solution is so far away from where you are now that it is unattainable....

© Synectics

...by dealing with each of these on its own - so you can move along the line from problem to solution.

For example, Sub-problem: My colleagues will think it's a stupid idea

This is a problem because without their support I'll never get the resources I need to develop and implement the idea. I wish I could show them how this would work. If I built a model, or tried it out on our office team, or found a case study, then I could demonstrate the benefits to them. But I do not have time to do this.

You've hit another hurdle, so it's through the process again. I wish I could find the time to run a demonstration of my idea. If I could delegate some more of my work, change my working hours to devote half a day a week to this, agree with my manager that the report on ABC can wait for a month . . .And so on.

Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats ®

Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats ® technique can help to organise thinking and make it more effective and more powerful. The approach is widely used by multi-national organisations, such as Siemens, IBM and Shell.

The hats represent alternative perspectives from which to view an issue. By wearing one hat at a time, the energy of the team can be focused in a particular direction allowing opinions and ideas to be expressed more freely, and unnecessary conflict to be avoided.

The benefits of using the Six Hats include:

• accessing the intelligence and knowledge of all the group
• limiting opportunities for argument and counter argument
• saving time through parallel thinking
• cutting down on ego and power displays
• giving each aspect of the issue time and space to be discussed.

The six hats are each given a different colour:

• The white hat is neutral and focuses exclusively and directly on the facts
• The red hat allows for emotions and intuition
• The black hat advises caution, pointing out the risks, threats and obstacles
• The yellow hat sets out to find the benefits and how an idea might be put into practice
• The green hat is used to put forward new ideas, building upon existing proposals
• The blue hat defines the problem and organises the thinking.

Lessons from trying to be creative

1. It can take time. After the excitement of a creativity session, the plunge back into day-to-day working can be depressing. The wonderful ideas seem to have been shelved, the camaraderie and motivation seems to have disappeared. We found this was all normal. Synectics describes the Path of Innovation like this:

© Synectics

2. Some changes are only small. The ideas may include ways to change the world, and if the changes you manage to implement are small - new organisational changes for instance - there may be a tendency to feel downhearted. Don't be, small changes can have more effect than you think. Which leads to:
3. Change the atmosphere and culture first. Making a place feel creative is something that is fun and easy to do - by legitimising the creative process in this way (brainstorming rooms; office art; a new language; and so on) so you encourage bravery which is key to people being creative.

Strengths

• Creativity tools can generate radical and innovative solutions
• Lots of fun and can help with team building

Weaknesses

• Radical ideas are often not developed after the session and policy makers fall back on "safe options"

References

There are hundreds of books on creative thinking, and you'll find the ideas touched upon here repeated in very similar ways. The information above is drawn mainly from

Allan D et al (1999) Sticky Wisdom, How to start a creative revolution at work. ?WhatIf!, London.

The rights of Dave Allan, Matthew Kingdon, Christina Murrin and Darren Rudkin (the "Authors") to be identified as authors of Sticky Wisdom (the "Work") have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in the work belongs to ?What If! Limited.

All rights reserved. No part of the work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the copyright owners.

The ideas, tools, techniques and knowhow expressed in the work including, without limitation the 4Rs and the 6 Behaviours are the exclusive property of ?What If! Limited.

?What if! Limited and are trademarks of ?What If! Limited and may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of ?What If! Limited.

De Bono E (1999) Six Thinking Hats. Penguin Books, London.

Synectics

These other web links to free creativity resources may also be useful:

globalideasbank - A suggestion box for socially innovative non-technological ideas and projects

brainstorming

creativityatwork

creativitypool

gocreate

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