Are you ever guilty of making the single most common creative thinking mistake?
In business and the public sector, creative thinking sometimes gets a bad press. There are lots of reasons for this, but one mistake above all others ensures that far too often, time is wasted and results from time spent trying to be creative, is wasted. In this short article, Clive Lewis, CEO of Illumine Training, the thinking skills specialists, sets out what the mistake is and how to avoid it.
‘Let’s have a brainstorm about that’ is how many creative thinking sessions are initiated around the world. Put aside for a moment whether brainstorming is the right tool and let’s also ignore the questions of whether the right people are going to attend the session, whether the manager or facilitator has the skills to get the most out of the attendees and whether the session has been set up in such a way that success is more likely than failure… or the reverse!
The thing that never ceases to amaze me, is how little time is given to defining the problem or challenge. Asking a few simple questions and thinking about what you are trying to achieve can make an enormous difference.
Let me give you an example. Many companies are very dependent on their website to generate enquiries. I was working with a company recently who told me that they were planning a ‘brainstorming session’ on ‘How to generate more leads from our website’. On the face of it, a pretty good topic; but is it? As soon as I heard this I had some questions, such as:
Are you concerned about the quality of the leads? The topic suggests that ideas to generate poor quality leads would be welcome.
Is the scope of your session going to incorporate paid search as well as organic search?
Do you know how your website is performing at the moment, regarding different stages of the process of generating leads through the website, such as:
- How well the site performs on the search engines for key search terms?
- How compelling are the web page descriptions?
- How compelling are the web pages and do they have effective ‘Calls to Action’?
- What are your bounce rates for particular landing pages, particular search terms – and combinations of each?
- How well do enquiry forms perform – do you lose people once they’ve started to fill them out?
- How do existing enquirers find your website?
…you get the picture!
Without properly understanding the problem, it’s all too easy to waste time wallowing about coming up with ‘solutions’ to problems that don’t exist.
So, understanding current performance and its constituent parts, has to be the first step and then you are in a position to think more clearly about the problem and in particular the scope that is going to be either implicit or explicit in how you phrase the question, problem or challenge.
Returning to our example, you’ll recall that the planned session was going to look at ‘How to generate more leads from our website’. The manager could choose to use a narrower focus:
‘How to generate more leads from the ‘products’ area of our website’; or
‘How to generate more visitors to our website’; or
‘How to generate more visitors to our website for a specific search term’; or
‘How to increase the percentage of visitors who enquire’;
The company could of course broaden out the discussion:
‘How to generate more enquiries’; or
‘How to sell more’; or
‘How to generate more revenue’.
I am not trying to suggest here that any one of these is ‘right’ in some objective way. A detailed understanding of current performance will help, but other factors may also be relevant:
- Who is available for the discussion and what knowledge and perspectives can they bring to the discussion?
- How much time do you have?
- Which is the most urgent part of the problem?
- Are you looking for specific, actionable ideas or for fundamental changes in how you think about something?
So, no simple formulae or easy answers. But here’s something that will help. Take your problem or challenge as you have initially defined it and having answered some of the questions about what you know and what you don’t know, simply rephrase the challenge; use different words and experiment with deliberately widening, narrowing and changing the scope of what you write. Involve other people if you think it will help. Almost always, doing this will at least get you thinking about the question before you start to try and answer it. And that can result in you spending your time effectively; being creative about the right thing.
If you would like to find out more about how a creativity workshop could be tailored for your requirements simply call us on +44 (0)1753 866633 or e-mail us
Click here to see details of “Creativity for Logical Thinkers” – our one day creativity workshop that’s available in Central London or as an in-house course for groups and teams.
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Tags: creative focus, creative thinking techniques, creativity and innovation
