Creative thinking

I don’t remember having any lesson in creative thinking at school. Yet, creative thinking is fundamental to individuals and organizations. When I first heard about this, there were immediate negative connotations involving business coaches and ineffective company brainstorming meetings. I used to think creativity was exceptional, almost like the initiation of some kind of magic moment, as described in the “light bulb” analogy. It turned out that it can be learned, not dependent on luck or innate intelligence.

Nevertheless, movies try to convince us that very creative people must always be weirdos and outsiders, disconnected from reality.

These myths are destructive, stopping creativity, whereas the reality is entirely different. Not only can creativity be learned, but more importantly, it can be fostered.

Everyone can be creative

Being creative may decide if your business is going to survive or not. Let’s take Kodak as an example. Kodak was a leader in photography, but yet missed the digital change and lost its superiority. Without trying something new, without experimentation, without trying utterly new technology or challenging the status quo, companies cannot be innovative. And if a company won’t be innovative, someone else will be.

What fosters creativity

To create a supportive environment for creativity, we need to understand what are some cues which trigger the generation of creative ideas. There are four primary cues which make our brain more creative.

The impasse cue. Whenever we reach a point where no progress is possible, the only option is to develop a creative idea.

The dissatisfaction cue suggests that if we are not happy with the results, we need to go back and think differently.

The surprise cue is present when we apply our understanding to solving some problems, but we are surprised by the gaps in our knowledge. This is an excellent opportunity for creativity, as it shows us that our knowledge is incomplete as well as giving us the chance to analyze and add this new insight to our model.

The last cue is crosstalk. Crosstalk happens when we go somewhere else, meet different people, maybe from different professions, and we exchange our opinions. We may realize that a solution to a problem in another domain can be transferred to our field. That’s crosstalk.

It all starts from perspective

Imagine a situation where your boss tells you that there is a problem of theft in the company. You only have one week to solve it. What do you do?

Think for a moment what you would suggest to your boss. Notice what you do while you’re trying to solve this problem.

The first thing we do is throw some ideas around, based on your understanding of the problem. That’s great, but this is only the first step. Your answers mainly depend on how you interpreted your boss’s words. The image in your brain about theft from your workplace is called a perspective. This is only one perspective, but there are more.

Generate more perspectives to have more ideas

What if we change our perspective? Then we will have many more ideas. To make this process repeatable, we need to have a framework. I’m going to use the framework presented in Creativity Toolkit I: Changing Perspectives called PAGES. However, it can be any manifestation of this process. PAGES separates your perspective into five categories: P - parts, A - action, G - goals, E - events, S - Self-concept - one page being one perspective.

Step 1. Note down your original perspective within the PAGES framework:

Parts	Actions	Goals	Events	Self
Company equipment	take outside of the company	use it at home without paying	stealing equipment	angry employee

Table 1. The initial idea in the PAGES framework.

This step may have more than one row, more than one perspective. The point is to have your initial thought split into categories.

Step 2. Generate a new perspective by changing at least one category in PAGES.

Parts	Actions	Goals	Events	Self
Company equipment	take outside of the company	use it at home without paying	stealing equipment	angry employee
Time	Playing online games	entertainment	burning time budgeted on this project	bored employee

Table 2. Example of idea generation in the PAGES framework.

As you can see, we have expanded our initial narrow view of the problem to a wider one. Now, there is an employee who is bored with their tasks and, instead of working, plays online games. In effect, the team loses the time scheduled for this project.

Adding this new perspective opens our thinking to completely new ideas in order to solve the original problem of stealing from the company.

Changing or building new perspectives produces insight. Many insights build invention. For example, consider the Wright brothers. They had insights on how to control a flying machine, insights on how to build wings, insights where to test, how to test, and much more, only to try and fail. Failure gave them another new opportunity to build new ideas they didn’t have before the experiment. When many insights are created, they lead to invention.

Tools for changing your perspective

In step two, we had to modify some of our original concepts. It sounds easy, but we may run out of ideas on how to alter each section of PAGES. There are a few techniques to unlock this:

• Analogy - discovering similarities helps to identify patterns
• Combination - link two concepts together, merge to contrasting ideas, or take property from one item and map it onto another one
• Recategorization - change the category by zooming in for a more detailed view, zooming out to see something in a more general way, or considering the opposite
• Association - Mental connection between concepts

Organization level of creativity

We saw that creativity can be more structural, and once we come up with a repeatable process, we will be able to cultivate this within our organization. This is an essential insight for leaders who can support those ways of thinking by creating a proper environment.

Research [2] shows that people are more creative when they are intrinsically motivated. People are more determined if they like what they do. That’s why it’s crucial to hire the right people and allocate them to projects they enjoy.

Moreover, positive emotion can obviously improve our creative thinking. However, creativity does not come so naturally, and especially within an organization it is very often ignored or simplified. There is a common antipattern which blocks creativity. It happens when an organization encourages employees, directly or indirectly, by paying bonuses for being creative. More often than not, the requirements of being creative are restrictive to many.

On the other hand, supporting employees by creating a no-blame, experiment-friendly environment with frequent, honest, direct feedback from the upper levels of management to the employee is the most efficient way to reach significant improvement in company creativity.

To foster creativity, top executives should encourage failures, insubordination, and rebelliousness. Only by trying something new, by challenging the status quo, innovation can happen. Extrinsic incentives also play an essential role, but those are not the most important. Ideally, there should be a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic stimuli.

Two things. Creativity is a long journey. Innovations almost always encounter initial rejections. Because of this, the business process must thoroughly understand the lifecycle of innovations and human behavior. It’s possible to create a framework, but this framework must be less rigid than those of other companies. There are several ideas that work well in fostering creativity, for example free Fridays when people work on their ideas. It may also include an event unrelated to a current project. Other more common occurrences like training, conferences, or a team meeting on self-development also help. Additionally, employees need to have their autonomy nurtured as well as support from the management.

Summary

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

— Amos Tversky

Creativity is not magic. Neither is it a random moment. It can be learned, and it should be structured, especially within an organization.

On an individual level, a person can change their perspective to generate new ideas. Changing one’s view reduces anchoring problems and frees up the mind to ensure the birth of different solutions.

A company can prepare an environment that helps creative ideas happen. However, this requires the development of cultural changes, which should eventually be encoded into the company’s DNA.

Resources

• [1] Creativity Toolkit I: Changing Perspectives. https://www.coursera.org/learn/creativity-toolkit-1
• [2] Amabile, T. M. (1997). Motivating creativity in organizations: On doing what you love and loving what you do. California Management Review, 40(1), 39-58.