Coaches and mentors need creativity skills for two main reasons. Firstly, they need to have effective ways to help the client overcome “stuckness” — to generate new thinking by proffering new ways of looking at problems and opportunities. Secondly, they need to be creative in their approach to the learning conversation, recognising when experimenting with different techniques will be helpful and having the courage to try them.
Each of the creativity activities described in this short booklet has been selected because it is straightforward, well practised and effective in helping clients work with difficult and multi-faceted issues.
Myths and facts about creativity
1. Creative people are more intelligent than others. In reality creative people are only marginally more intelligent than the average.
2. Creative people are impatient. On the contrary, highly creative people tend to be more tolerant of ambiguity and better prepared to wait for a solution to
emerge. They are attracted to complexity and are good at resolving conflict.
3. Creative people are more prone to insanity. Partially true. Lateral, divergent
thinking can exacerbate emotional dysfunction and lead to mental illness, if
there is insufficient balancing convergent thinking. Highly creative people’s
brains are more open to incoming stimuli than less creative colleagues. (They
have low latent inhibition.) But structured thinking, good memory and the
ability to manage large amounts of perhaps conflicting data enable them to
manage this complexity. Mental illness appears to be associated with low
latent inhibition and reduced ability tin these concept-managing processes.
4. Creative thinking involves two very different mental operations. Idea
generation or inspiration occurs when people are relatively relaxed. Their
brains are quiet and alpha wave activity dominates. Idea development
engages far more areas of the brain and has relatively low alpha wave
activity. The bigger the difference between these two mind states, and the
more easily people move between them, the more creative they are. The
more creative you are in the development stage, the more areas of the brain
are active.
5. Creative solutions emerge when you don’t think about them too hard. True.
Sleeping on problems does generate ideas. Highly creative people typically
also “use different rhythms of the day, the weekend and the holidays to help
shift focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk, then go
for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them, and they don’t feel
guilty1.”
6. Positive moods stimulate creative thinking. True. And creative thinking also
stimulates positive moods. Harvard Business School studies show that the
creativity slumps when people are de-motivated by financial pressures,
excessive workload and other stressors; but that engaging people in creativity
away from these pressures has a positive effect on removing their subsequent
motivation.
1 Phllips, H Looking for Inspiration, New Scientist 29 October 2005
Techniques for improving creativity
According to Robert Epstein, visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, everyone has the capacity to be creative. Our creative instincts are frequently squashed, however, by school routines, which penalise daydreaming and oblige people to focus on “right” answers to problems.
Epstein claims there are four key competences in becoming more creative:
1. Capturing – noting down ideas as they occur to you, without judgement or
criticism. For example, spending a few minutes early every morning just
writing about anything that comes to mind. (The brain is still actively
developing ideas while we sleep!) The mind’s internal censor normally kills
promising ideas because they don’t fit our existing perspective, but free
writing bypasses this censor.
2. Challenging – finding tough problems to chew over promotes new approaches and perspectives. These problems need not initially be related to an individual’s specific goals – those connections are likely to emerge later.
3. Broadening – developing interests in lots of different areas, which need not
necessarily be closely connected. The more interesting new knowledge you
require, the more connections you perceive with problems, which you want to
solve. One practical approach is to plan an “adventure” – a foray into new
territory – once a week.
4. Surrounding – making the physical and social environments more stimulating. For example, finding interesting places (such as art galleries or museums) to do some quiet thinking; or having conversations with people, who have very different perspectives or jobs to yourself.
Other experts point out that:
• Fear of failure is a significant block to creativity. Replacing fear of failure with
anticipation of discovery provides a more positive basis for creative thinking.
One technique for doing this is to write down all the fears and concerns you
have about a problem and let your sub-conscious work on them individually.
• It’s easy to put boundaries on our creative thinking by limiting our expectation of the volume of new ideas we might generate. So instead of asking for three new ideas, it is better to ask for at least three.
• The hypnagogic state – the point between being awake and being asleep – is
a powerful source of creative ideas. Many people have their best ideas as
they wake in the morning. However, highly creative people, such as Salvador
Dali and Thomas Edison also used the point just before falling asleep. Dali,
for example, is reported to have held a spoon loosely in his hand as he
relaxed. When he dosed off, the spoon fell onto a metal plate, which woke him
and he would sketch the images that had come to him in the semi-conscious
state.2
2 DiChristina, M, (2008) Let Your Creativity Soar, Scientific American Mind, June/ July 24-32
Some groundrules about applying creativity techniques
• Don’t expect instant revelations every time. Some issues require a number of
attempts, perhaps using different techniques, with time built in over days or
weeks for people’s sub-conscious minds to work on the problem. It’s a bit like
doing a hard, cryptic cross-word – what stumped you in the evening often
appears obvious the next morning. Most really creative, big ideas percolate
over time – the Eureka moment usually comes after a lot of bouts of thinking
round an issue.
• Give yourself permission to be creative, to be silly, to silence the inner voice
that tells you how things should be. Remind yourself that reality is an illusion
our minds create by ignoring most of the information available to them. Use
the exercise Preparing to be creative, to help establish this mood.
• Express belief in the ability of you and your colleagues to be creative.
• Take short creativity breaks of five or ten minutes at ad hoc times. These can
cumulatively be much more effective than more formal, planned creativity
sessions
• Maintain a diary or log of crazy ideas. You’ll be amazed at how many of these
can be adapted and used in some way, in due course.
Preparing to be creative
The more we focus our minds and bodies on doing, the less we focus on thinking and vice versa. Most of the time, we operate in a very low state of awareness of what is going on around us. To prepare for creativity, we need to establish an appropriate mental state.
Start by closing your eyes and feeling the pressure of your feet on the floor and of your back on the chair. Become aware of other touch sensations, such as the feel of your spectacles. Listen to your breathing and maybe your heartbeat. Become aware of the smells around you.
Open your eyes and focus on a spot immediately ahead and above you. Without moving your head, increase your awareness of what you can see to the sides – your peripheral vision. Note, but do not be distracted by, things you hadn’t observed before. Do the same for other points in the room. Enjoy the quiet for a while. You should now be in a much better mental state to begin to be creative.
Creativity workouts
These should be short and, where possible, amusing, to increase people’s sense that different, viable perspectives are possible. There is a wide range of puzzlers, which can be tackled in a few minutes. For example:
• How can you pass a whole team of people through a whole in an A4 sheet of
paper? Ans. Cutting the paper into the correct pattern of strips allows you to
open it out into a circle of more than adequate width.
• Which organ of the human body expands to more than six times its normal
size when stimulated? Ans. The iris of the eye (of course).
Any good book on creativity techniques, or many Mensa textbooks can provide ideas for creativity workouts.
Some creativity techniques useful in coaching and mentoring
Separate selves
This exercise capitalises on the fact that we are all composed of multiple
expressions of personality. We all have an adventurous and a cautious self; a
serious and playful self; a ruthless and a caring self, and so on. Examining a problem from the perspective of a number of such pairs of selves frequently provides insights about reasons why change has not occurred and identifies different ways of dealing with the problem.
Attila the Hun
Start by identifying a range of extreme personalities, from history or modern times, real or fictional, who would bring a particular approach to an issue. Try to seek at least six contrasting characters – for example, George Bush, Nelson Mandela, Bob Geldorf, Rasputin, Madonna and Don Quixote. (The approach is called Attila the Hun, because this was the persona, who provided the conceptual breakthrough the first time we used this technique.) Each participant in the exercise takes on one of these persona and examines the issue from that persona’s perspective.
Work through the following process:
• What questions would they have asked to understand the issue?
• What outcomes would they be looking for?
• How would they engage others in managing the issue?
• Which elements of their approach have merit in this situation?
• What clues do they provide as to what NOT to do?
• What can we learn by combining these perspectives?
Expand and contract
Another very simple approach, this one simply takes key steps in a process and either exaggerates or minimises them. It asks questions like: “Suppose that instead of having 1,000 people visiting the site every day, we had 10,000 – how would we cope?” “Instead of charging £1 an hour to park, what would happen if we charged £10?” “What would we do if we had no acute beds at all?”
Although none of these situations is likely to occur, thinking them through in this way provides useful clues for risk analysis and service improvement.
Doing it different
This approach comes from the book of the same name 3. Research into companies, which thrived in hostile commercial environments, showed that they often had a high degree of creativity in the way they approached their products, tier markets, the business structure and the way they managed people. Some of these businesses had started by analysing in detail what the “normal” companies in their industry sector did in all of those aspects of the business. The founders then looked at each element and wondered what would happen, if they did exactly the opposite.
Gradually, they evolved very different business models, which were much more difficult to copy than changes in one part of the system, guaranteeing themselves – where it worked! – competitive advantage that was relatively sustainable.
You can follow the same approach at any level within an organisation. The first step is to develop a process map (as with FUFs). Then take all the key elements of the map and think how to redesign them to operate in an opposite manner. Keep an open mind about how an accumulation of changes could provide a radically different approach. For example, important process elements in GPs surgeries are the appointments system and the waiting room system. An opposite approach to the norm might relate to ensuring that more people didn’t come to the surgery, where they will risk catching something else as well, but carried out their own examinations under the telephone guidance of a nurse, or perhaps using an IT solution.
3 Clutterbuck, David, (1999) Doing it different, Orion, London
Assumptions
Assumptions works in much the same way. On a flipchart or post-its record all the assumptions that you are working to on this problem. For example:
• Why it is a problem
• Who owns the issue
• The financial and/or other restraints we are working within
• The consequences of getting it wrong
• What can’t be changed
For each assumption, attempt to argue the opposite case. It’s remarkable how often this process of challenge leads to a radical repositioning of the issue.
MDQs
MDQ are massively difficult questions – the kind that force you to consider an issue differently. They are a basic tool of effective coaches and mentors. Good MDQs include:
• How pure are your motives?
• What would happen if you did nothing?
• Why do we have to control this? What would happen if we didn’t?
• How much will this matter in a year’s time?
Before tackling a difficult problem, it is often much better to identify the really good questions than to go straight into finding good answers. Indeed, one of the most powerful creativity approaches of all is to postpone for as long as possible the generation of any solutions. Instead, focus on finding some really good questions, then on how those questions could be improved, or on what new questions can be inferred. In general, the longer you postpone finding solutions, the better are the solutions you do eventually agree on.
Restatement
Start with a reasonably concise statement that describes the problem in less than 20 words. Gain agreement that it broadly covers the issues, but don’t allow any debate about particular terms. Now ask everyone to redraft the statement in different words, using as few of the original nouns and adjectives as possible. From these restatements it is often possible to reposition the issue and to understand the component sub-issues more deeply.
Combine and divide
This very simple approach is based around the two questions:
• Could we tackle this issue more effectively if we combined it with another?
• Could we tackle it more effectively if we tackled it as several different issues?
You may wish then to use other creativity techniques to seek out less obvious
options for combination and division.
Criticism for criticism’s sake
This is a technique useful for a) identifying unrecognised areas of risk, b) generating ideas for new services/ products and c) informing the weakness and threats areas of a SWOT analysis. It is, in general, not a technique to use the first time a group embarks on creative thinking together, because it begins by being entirely negative about something you are all (or most of you) agreed you do really well.
The adage “build on success” has a lot going for it. But understanding what underlies success is often difficult – we apply a lot of rationalisation, especially as to the relative roles of our competence and the vagaries of luck! Here, the group takes a totally negative view of the service. “It might look good on the surface, but….”
In summarising the thoughts this provokes, look for clues to potential significant improvements.
End with a re-affirmation – if this service can be so good, in spite of all the criticisms, what can we learn that could sustain this level of excellence and be applied to other services, to improve them?
The level chain
This technique comes from the book Crash Course in Creativity, by Brian Clegg and Paul Birch. It is effective at opening horizons around an issue.
Start by generating at random a number of words or short phrases related to the process you are working on – say, theatre, anaesthetic, gown, hot water. For each word or phrase, generate more words or concepts, which are either at a higher or lower level of specificity in their description. So a higher level concept for hot water might be hygiene. A lower level concept for theatre might be operating table. Allow the word association to be quite free – an alternative to operating table might be the Palladium.
Make notes of any ideas that emerge from the rapid fire of associations. After five to ten minutes, follow the most interesting ideas through in more detail, using a more structured analysis.
Starting from somewhere else
The yokel’s comment to the lost driver “If I were going there, I wouldn’t have started from here” has a lot of resonance with real problems organisations face. History creates a lot of baggage that suppresses creativity – reasons why things can’t be done differently. So, for the period of this exercise anyway, invent a different history – one with a different starting point, perhaps a greenfield site or a radically different architecture. What would you be doing differently? Once you have listed these differences, think creatively about how to those approaches might be adapted to overcome some of the constraints you operate under in the real world.
What didn’t work before?
One of the most effective ways to kill innovation is “Oh, we tried that in 1997 and it didn’t work.” Really creative individuals and teams regard ideas that didn’t work as a prime resource for generating ideas that will. Sometimes ideas fail because they are simply bad ideas. More often, however, they fail for one of the following reasons:
• They were ahead of their time
• They ran into resistance from vested interests
• They were poorly implemented
• They were badly sold to the people, whose support was needed
• There was no champion, or the champion moved on before it could be
embedded
• It was a casualty of a cost-cutting crisis
A starting point for any discussion on innovation should be those ideas that didn’t work before. Why didn’t they work? Have circumstances now changed, so that they might? What can we learn from those failures that will help prevent us from making the same mistakes again?
The change balloon
This process and the next (the jigsaw solution) come from the book Techniques in Coaching and Mentoring, by David Megginson and David Clutterbuck. It helps you make difficult choices by ranking various attributes against each other.
Let’s say you have ten factors that are important to you in choosing a new job. You have several job offers, but none of them can offer more than half of factors.
Draw a hot air balloon, with 10 sandbags on the side for weight. Label each sandbag with one of the factors. Now imagine the balloon springs a leak – which sandbag will you throw overboard first? Score that as one. The leak gets worse. Throw out another and label that two and so on till they are all gone. You now have an idea of the relative importance of each factor.
If you wish to be more sophisticated, select a reasonable level that you might expect to achieve in one job. The numbers one to 10 add up to 55, so you might want to look at combinations of factors that score 35-40, for example. It often happens that some of the factors, which you gave high scores to in the first part of the exercise, turn out to be negotiable when you examine a range of combinations.
The jigsaw solution
This exercise is a way of visualising unclear situations. Take a large sheet of paper and draw a blank jigsaw on it. Only the outline of the pieces (20 to 30 is usually enough) is visible. Ask the question: “What do we know?” For every item you do know, write a note in a piece of the outer edge of the jigsaw, gradually working inwards. Ask also; “What do we not know?” and write these items in pieces at the centre. Finally, ask “What do we not know that we don’t know?” and place any items this generates somewhere between. Assume any remaining pieces belong to this category and add colour to emphasise the differences.
In most cases, the “do knows” will outnumber the other categories substantially, but any combination can and does occur.
Once you have completed the jigsaw, you can begin to discuss how you can change more of the picture to the colour of the “do knows”.
Second-best solution
This is another suggestion from Crash Course in Creativity. It is based on the
frequent occurrence that the solutions generated from brainstorming and other creativity techniques are often very cosy and unchallenging to the status quo. People compromise on aspirational goals, because it is easier to go with the consensus.
Before signing off on a solution, everyone is asked to participate in nominating the second-best solution – the also-ran. They are then challenged to find ways to make that better than the first choice. You may well still end up with the first choice, but it will almost always be enhanced by ideas generated from this second round of creative thought.
Rules
This is another simple way of both challenging the status quo and reducing risk.
Take an activity or process that you find troublesome or inefficient. Draw up a chart to capture your thoughts in response to questions such as:
• What are the rules that operate here?
• Which ones are formal/ explicit and which informal/ implicit?
• Who made the rule?
• Who owns it now?
• Who needs it? Who does it help?
• Who or what does it hinder?
• Who can change it?
• Who would like to change it?
• Who would care if we did change it?
The more closely we examine rules, the more likely we are to a) abandon those that don’t make sense any more and b) to reinforce those that do.
SCAMPER
SCAMPER is a simple menu of creative perspectives to draw upon. It is an acronym for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Maximise/Minimise, Put to other uses, Eliminate (Elaborate), Reverse (or Rearrange). You might spend ten minutes considering “How could we substitute elements of another, unrelated process into the problem process?”; then switch to a discussion of how to adapt ideas raised to make them work in this context.
Metaphors
Stories are powerful creative tools, because they touch our deepest emotions. In this process, the group selects a metaphor or story that can be adapted to the situation – for example, a battlefield, round the world yacht race, or the ugly duckling. Together, they then recount the problem, in the context of the metaphor. What happened, for example, to the ugly duckling’s family? How did the experience affect the way he dealt with ducks and his peer swans after his transformation?
Big picture
Drawing pictures helps people access creative circuits they may not normally use. Start with a picture that describes the situation now. Then draw one that illustrates the desired situation. (This approach can be combined effectively with metaphors, above.) Finally draw and discuss what would have to happen to move from one picture to the other.
© David Clutterbuck, 2015