Some More Practical Tools to Ensure Your Business Doesn’t Take a Gamble On Creativity!
In another recent piece for Thoughts And Ideas entitled, ‘Can Your Business Afford to Take a Gamble With Creativity’ I looked at what People, Process & Structural changes you should be considering to ensure you have the best market position, optimum capacity and capability, and a true competitive edge?
In this piece though I want look specifically at some more practical tools and techniques you might use to promote Inspiration & Creativity and support the capacity to Innovate!
In the ‘Can Your Business Afford to Take a Gamble With Creativity’ piece I also looked at Alex Osborn’s Brainstorming technique, which he first wrote about in 1948 and subsequently developed at the Ad Agency BBDO during the 1950’s and 60’s.
Today Brainstorming goes by various names including Ideation and Multiple Idea facilitation amongst others, but the essential principles remain valid: Produce lots of ideas; Embrace the off-beat and unusual; and most importantly suspend judgement in the moment.
Other techniques can include Inverting or Subverting the issue or problem, which is essentially to approach it from a different angle or perspective.
For example, you could ask yourself how a different person (real, or fictitious) might approach the problem.
Whilst the ‘6 Thinking Hats’ technique developed by Edward de Bono, is another great technique for altering perspectives.
With this approach, individuals are assigned a different coloured Hat to wear during a problem solving exercise. Each Hat wearer adopts a factual approach, whilst a Black Hat wearer takes a logical or objective approach and Hats are exchanged during the exercise to help trigger insights through Hat wearers having to reverse their perspective.
Different media can be used as a catalyst for Creative Insight too
Drawing pictures, doodling, using symbols. Whilst through language and proto-linguistics, metaphors can be used to provide a different way of framing, describing or defining the issue or problem.
Mind-Mapping, a technique developed by Tony Buzan, helps to avoid simply thinking about issues and problems in a linear fashion and allows Creative Thinkers to incorporate words, images, symbols and colours to weight items and specific thoughts and ideas. And finally,
Integrative Thinking approaches are also another powerful way to approach problem-solving
Developed by Roger Martin at the University of Toronto, these really come into their own where apparently irreconcilable or competing choices need to be reconciled.
When using these approaches you are encouraged to, “Think about a difficult trade-off in a more thorough way, searching for a creative resolution that contains elements of both options, but is superior to both!”.
Roger Martin outlines 3 methods for reframing issues to create tensions between different options and subsequently arriving at an Integrative Solution:
1stly, ‘The Hidden Gem’ which tries to remove conflicting elements from incompatible choices, thereby allowing other elements to be combined.
2ndly, ‘Double Downing’ which pushes one option to its extreme and in so doing produces the conditions for an alternative 2nd option; &
3rdly, ‘Disassembling’ which allows you to re-evaluate and reconstruct the problem to circumvent the clash of having to choose!
If you’ve enjoyed and found this an interesting companion piece to ‘Can Your Business Afford to Take a Gamble With Creativity’, why not also check out ‘Why Does Success Always Start With Failure’ also on Thoughts And Ideas.
Paul Mudd is the author of ‘Uncovering Mindfulness: In Search Of A Life More Meaningful’ available on Amazon and www.bookboon.com; the ‘Coffee & A Cup of Mindfulness’ and the ‘Mindful Hacks For Mindful Living & Mindful Working’ series. He is also a Contributing Author to The Huffington Post and a Contributing Writer to Thrive Global. Through The Mudd Partnership he works with business leaders, organisations and individuals in support of change and transformation, leadership excellence, business growth, organistional and individual wellbeing and well doing, and introducing Mindfulness in the workplace and in every place. He can be contacted at paul@themuddpartnership.co.uk and you can follow the continuing journey uncovering Mindfulness on Twitter @TheMindfulBook and at @Paul_Mudd
