Creative Process

If we consider the development of the economy over the coming years it is clear that intellectual capital will be the primary generator of wealth. It will be ideas, new technologies, new products and new processes that will drive the global economy forward. For companies, it will be the ability to foster creative thinking in their people that will differentiate the winners from the losers.

If creativity is the source of value, having so many of our team involved in the design profession should give us a strategic advantage in business. To gain from this advantage, we will need to expand the scope of creativity beyond the design services provided to clients. We need to expand our creative approach to everything that we do.

How can creative thinking build value for us? I suggest that creativity is the ONLY way we can successfully build our company. We will be successful only if we can bring value to our clients:

• Offer new and integrated solutions.
  
• Provide ideas and valuable advice.
  
• Design new and innovative software tools.
  
• Communicate our value through compelling marketing messages.
  
• Streamline our integration with client systems.
  
• Build a workplace that attracts smart and creative people.
  
• Since creativity will be the source of value creation, our collective success will be based on two things: First, we will need to develop all of our creative talents. We must learn to become more creative in every aspect of what we do. Second we will need to create a culture that will foster, develop and implement new and innovative ideas.
  

Here some of my research on this topic. I have focused on ideas for how we can hone our creative talents and harness them for success.
 

Here is a list of techniques to help teams and individuals become more creative. I got these from Dilip Soman, a professor at the Rotman School of Business at U of T. His idea is that creativity is innate but our mental habits restrict us from fully using our talents. People are judgment machines. We are particularly fast with their judgments, especially if it is negative. The problem is that we are often too quick to dismiss ideas before we have fully thought them through. We need to train ourselves to avoid being judgmental before critically evaluating ideas. Here are some techniques for achieving this:

Technique 1) Constrained Brainstorming:

This is a technique to widen the total number of ideas and points of view when considering a problem. The technique involves team members coming up with as many ideas as possible even if they are obscure or seem silly. The rest of the team then has to add comments under each idea about why it is good. No negative comments are allowed. At the end of this process the team should have many more options to explore further. Some of the crazy ideas (that would normally have been dismissed out of hand) many not be so crazy after all!

Technique 2) Problem Reversal / Reframing:

Look at the reverse problem. How can I make customer service bad? How can I damage the health of Canadians? How can I decrease sales? Worsen public relations? As absurd as these reversed objectives sound they can give us insight into root causes of problems that we have not yet considered. By looking at a problem in reverse, we may seen things that we were previously blind to.

Technique 3) Imitation:

In this technique we look for ideas in other fields and disciplines. If someone else is doing it right, it doesn't hurt to imitate them. The revolutionary distribution system that FedEx's founder Fred Smith came up with was based on his study of how cancelled checks were cleared and returned between banks. The original typewriter design borrowed a great deal from organ mechanics. The imitation techniques are used in other fields as well: Inventory managers study ants; town planners study beehives. The idea here is that the problem we are facing may already been faced and addressed in another context.

Technique 4) Assumption Smashing:

When considering a problem we should look at the constraints. What assumptions are you implicitly making? Is there any way in which the most obvious assumption could be overcome? What would be necessary to do that? Can that be done? If not, is there another implicit assumption? The idea here is that we may be looking at a problem too narrowly. The solution may not be in the scope that we have defined for ourselves but within the bigger context - a context that we are incorrectly assuming to be immutable.

The underlying theme in all these techniques is that we all have the capacity to come up with creative solutions. To develop our creative abilities we have to delay our judgment of ideas and we have to expand our view of the situation we are considering.