Perspectives
How To Conduct A Creativity Session:
Creativity
Within Organizations
by Mary Jo Huard
The world has changed! To
maintain world leadership, you must re-conceptualize your business. Better quality and better service are essential,
but they are not enough today.
Creativity and innovation are the primary engines that will drive
lasting competitive advantage. Creativity Tools can help advance creativity and
innovation--tools that become increasingly valuable within any level or scope
of transition.
In 1969, Edward de Bono (psychologist and physician) coined the phrase
Lateral Thinking™, which is now contained in the Oxford English
Dictionary and defined as:
“A way of thinking which seeks the solution to
intractable problems through unorthodox methods or elements which would
normally be ignored in logical thinking.”
Over the last two decades, the two main trends in business have been
(1) total quality management and (2) rightsizing—doing more with less. Today, neither concept is enough. How much less can we do more without? You need creativity in order to find better
ways of doing things.
Today, it’s not enough to improve quality in each separate part of an
organization. The result is that the
organization is still locked into an overall operation that really needs
changing. Because we have only looked at
quality, not creativity, we end up operating very inefficiently, but with very
high quality.
Within downsizing, it is very inefficient if you have a blanket “get
rid of everything, cut all costs” philosophy.
What you do is remove any cushion that allows you to do new things, to
do new ventures. You maximize only your
existing concepts. With shrinking
resources, you need far more creativity than is currently the case.
When you have wrung out all the fat, all of the excess, all of the
unnecessary redundancies, you’re not going to get any more benefit out of
becoming leanest even with the pursuit of quality—that is where creativity
comes in. There is a growing need for
creativity techniques. Why?
Because we have a tendency to think in set patterns; which is of value
overall, we are limited in how to tackle problems from totally new angles. Our
minds are trained to find typical and predictable solutions to problems. We continue to implore our employees to think
outside the box--but how do we really accomplish this?
Most of us believe that one is born creative,
that some people are given creative instincts.
If you look back over your life, how often have you ever sat down and
thought about: How do I think? What is my thinking process? How can I create new and better
thoughts?
The traditional view of creativity is that you
take off your tie, sit on the floor, feel free, and wonderful thinking is going
to happen if you are uninhibited. That
is a very weak approach to creativity and has held back the development of
creativity as a skill. The right tools can move you beyond the tool we call
brainstorming. Below are three tools developed by Dr. Edward de Bono to
increase and focus group or individual creativity.
SIX THINKING HATSÔ process
has four specific uses:
1)
A
critical meeting facilitation tool. When used as a meeting management tool, Six
Thinking Hats directs all individuals to be focused and to-the-point.
2)
An
outstanding team productivity/communication tool, it’s also very effective in
neutralizing employee rank, equalizing input when the very assertive and the
introverted are on the same team.
3)
A
creativity enhancer
4)
A
control mechanism used to maximize and organize a person’s thoughts.
The Six Thinking Hats (or
modes of thinking) are:
·
WHITE: The White Hat calls for information known or
needed. “The facts, just the facts!” and where those facts may be found.
·
YELLOW: The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and
optimism. Under this hat you can explore
the positives and probe for value and benefit.
·
BLACK: The Black Hat is judgment—the devil’s advocate
or why something may not work. Spot the
difficulties and dangers, where things might go wrong.
·
RED: The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches, and
intuition. When using this hat, you can
express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, and hates.
·
GREEN: The Green Hat focuses on creativity; the
possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas.
It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
·
BLUE: The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking
process. It’s the control mechanism that
ensures the Six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed.
LATERAL THINKINGÔ is a systematic approach to thinking
creatively—outside the box. This set of
tools will help an individual or a team to:
1)
Innovate
2)
Be
creative
3)
Break
out of paradigms
4)
Develop
new processes and products or improve old ones
The seven Lateral Thinking
tools include the following:
·
ALTERNATIVES: How to use concepts as a breeding ground for
new ideas. Sometimes we do not look
beyond the obvious alternatives. The
Alternatives tool shows how to extract the concept behind a group of ideas and
then use it to generate further alternatives.
·
FOCUS: The Focus tool provides a discipline of
defining your focus and sticking to it.
This technique aids in the development of alternative definitions of the
problem and a Creative Hit List.
·
CHALLENGE: With Challenge, we act as though the present
way of doing things is not necessarily the best. It is the willingness to explore the reasons
why we do things the way we do.
·
RANDOM ENTRY: This exotic tool uses unconnected input to
open up new lines of thinking. Random
Entry (word, picture, or object) achieves true out-of-box thinking in an
ideation session.
·
PROVOCATION: Generating provocative statements and using
them to build new ideas can have a powerful effect on idea generation. This technique explores the nature of
perception and how to tap (trick the brain) into increased and expanded
creativity.
·
HARVESTING: Capturing your creative output. At the end of a creative thinking session, we
normally only take note of the specific ideas that seem practical and have
obvious value. We need to make a
deliberate harvesting effort to collect ideas and concepts that are less developed.
·
TREATMENT: How to develop ideas and shape them to fit an
organization or any given situation.
DIRECT ATTENTION
THINKING TOOLSÔ is a framework of 10 tools that will
result in easier problem solving and more effective decision making. The way we
see the world—our perception of it—determines the decisions we make.
Perceptions and existing beliefs powerfully drive our thinking, choices, and
actions. Unfortunately, most mistakes in thinking are mistakes in
perception. Direct Attention Thinking Tools (DATT)
encourages a broad and inclusive viewpoint.
These tools create a framework for completely defining a situation.
The ten DATT tools are:
·
CONSEQUENCE AND SEQUEL: Directs your attention to the future
state. It causes you to look ahead to
see consequences of an action, plan, decision, or rule.
·
PLUS, MINUS, INTERESTING: Ensures that all sides of a matter have been
considered before a decision or commitment is made.
·
RECOGNIZE, ANALYZE, AND DIVIDE: A tool that helps one break a larger concept
into smaller, more manageable parts so that thinking can be sharpened.
·
CONSIDER ALL FACTORS: Used early in the thinking session, one can
explore all factors related to an action, decision, plan, judgment, or
conclusion.
·
AIMS, GOALS, OBJECTIVES: A focus tool that helps to clearly define the
topic deliberately about the intentions behind actions.
·
ALTERNATIVES, POSSIBILITIES, CHOICES: A creative tool that deliberately causes one
to find other ways to achieve results.
·
OTHER PEOPLE’S VIEWS: Forces one to direct attention to specific
other people who may be impacted by the solution or decision.
·
KEY VALUES INVOLVED: Helps to identify positive and negative
values and helps ensure that your thinking serves your values.
·
FIRST IMPORTANT PRIORITIES: A narrowing tool which helps select the most
important ideas, factors, objectives, consequences, etc.
Creative thinking tools can and must be used
deliberately and specifically. We can
then move away from this lip service—it’s nice to be creative—to a really
serious commitment toward creativity. Creativity
is like investing in R&D. You cannot
guarantee that every time you put a dollar into research you’re going to get a
dollar out of it. You can guarantee that
if you never put any money into research, you’re not going to get any good
ideas out of it. It is the same with
creativity. Ideas are the currency of
success; they can separate you from your competition.