I heard a story the other day (it may be apocryphal) about an irate BBC manager who walked into his office one morning and noticed that every single member of his staff was reading The Guardian. He flew into a rage. His exasperation, however, wasn’t caused by his disapproval of that particular publication but by the conformity of his staff. “Go out and buy The Telegraph, The Mail, The Sun,” he railed. “You’re meant to be creative, so see it as part of your job to get a multi-dimensional view of the world.”

Now, whether or not this manager’s outburst had any beneficial effect is neither here nor there. This story shows that organisational survival can depend on people coming up with new ideas and they are unlikely to come up with anything new if they are all thinking the same way. As the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Albert Szent-Gyorgi; said “discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

I spoke to Clive Lewis, the MD of Illumine Training for some ideas to share with you. I posed the question to him, “So is it always appropriate to be creative?” His response was, “The answer to that is, clearly, no. In many environments there are very good reasons for following the rules. But, at the same time there are many occasions when individuals and teams need fresh perspectives or new ideas. So how then can they develop different thinking? Here are some of the ways to start breaking out of that box.

1. One of the best ways to provoke new thinking is by starting to ask questions. By asking questions, you are challenging the context in which you spend most of your time. So, for example, ‘what if?’ or ‘why not?’ questions will have you immediately wondering about new possibilities.

In this respect, one of my favourite challenges is to try to stop yourself saying ‘no’ for a whole day. If you practise this it will guarantee that you start asking questions about the rules that govern your life and you will certainly start coming up with some creative solutions to the situations you face.

2. Dare to speak the absurd. There is a story which illustrates the power of this technique. In this case, a telecommunications company in Canada was wondering how to deal with the problem of its power lines icing up in winter and becoming so heavy that they couldn’t bear their own weight.

The team involved had a brainstorming session where they had permission to say things that were absurd – and, in this respect, someone said they should get the Canadian bears to come up and give the lines a good shake.

But how would you get the bears to come to the poles? Well, you’d need to put a jar of honey on top of each pole of course. But how would you get the honey up the poles? Ah well, you could fly a helicopter above the poles and someone could lean out and position a pot on top of each pole. And then someone asked… but, wouldn’t the air from the helicopter blades blow the snow off the lines? It’s now common practise in Canada for helicopters to fly along the lines after heavy snowfalls in order to stop them icing up.

3. Make time to think. Sometimes it seems remarkable that managers are so busy, so much of the time. They don’t appear to like it, they complain about it but they never stop being busy. One conclusion to draw from this is that people get rewarded for being busy – and that does seem to be true because when people have nothing to do we make all sorts of negative assumptions about them.

But Thomas Edison – one of the greatest inventors of all – got around this problem. He spent a great deal of time fishing. And late in his life he revealed that he never used any bait. This seemed crazy to most people! When asked why he fished without bait he responded that when he was fishing in this way neither people nor the fish bothered him in the slightest, and it gave him a perfect time every day to think.

4. Invite a different perspective. We will all have noticed that we often come up with our best ideas when we are somewhere else – the shower, on holiday, on a walk. But it isn’t only different environments that can suddenly stimulate our thinking; different people can too. In fact, it can often be very powerful to invite people who know nothing about the problem you are trying to solve to your meetings. They won’t have any of your assumptions about what can and can’t work and will often ask questions or offer ideas that will have you looking at the issue from a completely new angle.

Of course, there are a whole host of brainstorming, Lateral Thinking™ and creative thinking techniques to add to the above. Our Creativity for Logical Thinkers (Illumination Workshop^®) and our courses on idea generation cover some of the best of these.”

Let me finish this short article by focusing again on the benefits of creative thinking. What’s in it for you or your organisation?

The short answer to this is that creativity and breakthrough thinking leads to much improved performance. Faced with specific problems, individuals start to find creative solutions. Faced with the need to be successful, teams find new and innovative ways of working. Faced with unremitting change, organisations start to unleash their talent and exploit new opportunities. In all these respects, creativity and the generation of new thinking lie at the heart of business success.

Why not try out some of the tools and techniques that I use to question and generate new ideas from my team:

Questioning Techniques Mind Map^® – this is my template that I use when questioning.

Facilitation is another tool you can use when working with groups (teams, individuals or customers). We offer a number of courses and workshops that will help you to engage the collective wisdom of your groups and help you to get buy-in. Find out more about our range of facilitation courses and workshops here…
You can find out more about the uses of Mind Maps by downloading our Mind Map – “The Uses of Mind Maps”

Mind Map® and Mind Maps® are trademarks of the Buzan Organisation.
MindManager® and Mindjet® are trademarks of Mindjet.

  

Tags: Creativity for Logical Thinkers - Illumination Workshop, Facilitation Skills, February/March 2008 (Creativity and Innovation), Generating Ideas (Training), Mind Mapping, Questioning techniques, Thinking techniques

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