Encouraging creativity
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‘If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.’
Albert Einstein
In Session A, we saw that creativity is usually associated with artists and craftspeople but that everyone is capable of being creative, of thinking novel and appropriate ideas. Unfortunately most people lack the confidence to think such ideas, at least at work.
We spend so much of our lives learning to think and act conventionally, and to follow the rules and procedures the way that things have always been done. If you want to get people to think novel and appropriate ideas you need to create an environment in which this is seen to be possible. There are also a number of different techniques that you can use to encourage people to think of creative ideas, and in this session we will help you to use some of these techniques to encourage creativity in your team.
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This session and Session C will use the idea of the innovation cycle to help you use creative techniques to finding innovative ways of resolving problems and developing news ways of working, new products and new services.
The innovation cycle involves four stages, and this session will focus on the first two of these:
These four stages start with Divergence, the ‘opening up’ stage; this means encouraging people to come up with as many new and different ideas as they can, with no limit on imagination — the more outrageous the better. This is the chance to be creative, to look for ways of doing things which have never been thought of before because they turn received opinion upside down. Practicality must not be allowed to interfere with the generation of ideas, and quantity of ideas is better than quality.
Assimilation is the stage at which the ideas are sorted and their value is judged. It is important not to discard those which are different just because they are different but to sort through them and find the bits that are worth using. This is the stage which takes most time and is when the real breakthroughs can occur, when the impossible starts to be seen as the possible.
Some of the creative techniques (to encourage divergence) also have assimilation built in to them, others require it to be added on, as you will see.
It is valuable still to have more ideas than can actually be used after the assimilation stage for the move onto Convergence or ‘closing down’, deciding just what to go ahead with. The criteria for agreement before making the decision should be agreed, so the final choice is based on rational decisions and not just what people feel most comfortable with. The final stage is Action, implementing the decision.
The four creativity techniques we will look at in detail in this session are:
Brainstorming
TRIZ
SCAMPER
Synectics
We will also consider some variants on these, including Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and Trigger Sessions (variants on Brainstorming), and Lateral Thinking and Random juxtaposition (variants on Synectics).
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Brainstorming is probably the most widely used (and abused) technique for encouraging creative thinking. Is has been round for more than half a century, having been developed by American advertising man, Alex Osborn. He first described it in his 1948 book Your Creative Power.
Activity 8
Have you ever taken part in a brainstorming session? What did you think about it? What rules (if any) were used to govern the activity?
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Brainstorming is designed to be used with a group, ideally one that is large enough to include some diversity of experience and personality, but not so large that individuals may not get a chance to contribute. Around five to nine people are probably ideal. The rules (and there must be rules to make sure it works properly) are:
Make sure that the purpose of the brainstorming session is clear and understood.
Someone must control the group, to make sure that everyone takes part and nobody is allowed to dominate.
Every idea is allowed, and is written down so that everyone can see it.
Encourage people to build on the ideas of others (rather than discussing or objecting to them).
3.1 Make sure that the purpose of the brainstorming session is clear and understood
You may have heard that ‘brainstorming’ is offensive to people with certain conditions, particularly epilepsy. This isn't true and has explicitly been denied by the National Society for Epilepsy. A good manager always checks the facts before accepting rumour and hearsay. |
The participants need to know what they are doing, and why. You may be trying to find creative solutions for a production or operational problem, such as repeated breakdowns of equipment or delays in meeting customer orders. You may be trying to develop new products or services for customers, or find ways of extending operational hours whilst giving greater flexibility of working conditions. This is the purpose of the brainstorming session, and it is useful to write this up on a whiteboard or flipchart in clear view of everybody the whole time they are developing creative ideas. |
3.2 Someone must control the group, to make sure that everyone takes part and nobody is allowed to dominate
Start by explaining the rules of brainstorming so that everyone knows how they should behave. Watch who is contributing and encourage those who haven't said anything to do so. However, don't single people out. Some people have ideas but lack the confidence to call out. By asking them direct (‘Any suggestions, Dianne?’) they may feel safe to contribute. But don't challenge them to come up with something (‘You've not said anything yet, Dianne. Come on, you must have some ideas.’). You won't encourage creativity by making people feel bullied.
On the other hand, don't allow someone to dominate. If one person keeps coming up with ideas, ask them to give others a chance to break in. If necessary, work round the group if everyone is itching to get their ideas heard.
3.3 Every idea is allowed, and is written down so that everyone can see it
Encourage people to call out their ideas, writing them down as they do so. This should be done so that everyone can read the ideas that have been generated. Again, a whiteboard or flipchart is useful for this.
3.4 Encourage people to build on the ideas of others (rather than discussing or objecting to them)
You should only allow anyone to query an idea if they haven't fully understood it. Otherwise, no discussion is allowed at this stage. If someone disagrees with an idea, then encourage them to suggest their own, contradictory idea.
If people seem to be running out of steam, set them a target — ‘Ten more ideas before we stop.’ You may be surprised at how people can generate ideas just to get the process completed, and come up with the most outrageous and creative ideas to do so.
There is one more feature of brainstorming that you should be aware of, and it's one that applies to most creative ideas generation. The physical environment needs to be right.
What do you think are the ideal physical conditions for brainstorming to work well?
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You may well have said that people should be sitting somewhere comfortable and, whilst the comfortable part is right, sitting isn't always the best way to generate creative ideas. You may find that by getting people to stand around the whiteboard or flipchart, even giving out pens to people, encourages them to be more creative.
They do need to have some privacy though. Other people mustn't be able to watch or hear what is going on, as that makes people self-conscious, which is the last thing you want if you are trying to encourage creativity. This is true for all the techniques we'll look at in this session. Creativity is about doing things differently, and repressing normal reservations about seeming to be a bit silly. This can't be done if other people can see and overhear what is being done.
The most important thing is for everyone to feel safe that they can let their brains loose without being made fun of! That requires mutual trust and confidence. That is something you need to be able to guarantee. Get everybody to agree that whatever anybody says or does, nobody will make fun of them. Instead they will try to outdo them in their creativity.
3.5 Variations on brainstorming
Brainstorming relies on the people taking part feeling confident to suggest ideas publicly. If the group contains both senior and junior staff, this may inhibit the freewheeling that is an important part of brainstorming. Ways to get round this include:
Nominal Group Technique
Developed by Andre Delbecq, Andrew Van de Ven and David Gustafson, NGT starts by people writing down their ideas (a sort of private brainstorm) and then sharing these with the group, in turn, so that each person reads out one idea. They go round again until everyone has completed their lists. Instead of the ‘no discussion’ rule of brainstorming, these ideas are discussed as they are described.
Trigger Sessions
Members of the group each write their ideas down on a sheet of paper and then pass this on to the next person. Having read someone else's ideas, people can add their own thoughts (triggered by these ideas) to the list, and pass this on again. The sheets get circulated until they are back where they started, or everyone runs out of ideas. This technique does allow duplication, so the different ideas are called out, in turn, round the table, people missing out any ideas from the list in front of them that have been said already.
A variant of this uses Post-it™ notes. Ideas are stuck up and read as people come up with them, and variants can be added. The advantage of this technique is that similar ideas can be physically grouped together to encourage development and refinement of the ideas.
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TRIZ (pronounced TREEZ) is the acronym for the Russian name that translates as Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. It is a technique developed by the Russian engineer and patent expert Genrich Altshuller, who studied some 200,000 patents filed in the USSR. He concluded that the novel ideas that were the basis of these patents could be classified into 39 different categories. From this he identified 40 different strategies, called inventive principles, that could be used to encourage creative solutions to problems. These 40 principles are listed in the table below.
Although these principles apply mainly to manufacturing or engineering environments, some can be adapted to services as well. For example, a service could be modularized so that customers or users can combine elements to produce a customized version.
Look through Altshuller's 40 Inventive Principles and see if you can think of any examples of this in your workplace:
Clearly this is a long list, but it is long because it is comprehensive, so it provides a very useful checklist of techniques to solve problems creatively. The way that the TRIZ approach to creative problem solving works is to:
state the problem;
look for an analogous standard problem (i.e. a similar type of problem that has been solved elsewhere);
explore the solution to this analogous problem;
adapt this solution to your own problem.
The checklist helps you to identify the characteristics of the analogous solution so that you can apply this approach to your own problem. You will find that there are similarities between Altshuller's approach and the next two techniques we'll examine, SCAMPER and Synectics. SCAMPER uses a simpler list than TRIZ (six not 40 approaches) to identify potential solutions, and Synectics uses the idea of analogy to find a solution. You may find it easier to start with either of these at first, and build up to using TRIZ once you have got confident with either of them.
Altshuller went on to research the degree of inventiveness used in solving problems with products and processes, and found that there were five levels in the solutions being proposed. The table shows how common each of these five levels are:
| Level | Level of inventiveness | Percentage of solutions | Source of knowledge |
| 1 | Routine solution, no novelty | 32% | Personal knowledge |
| 2 | Minor improvement, some novelty | 45% | Within organization |
| 3 | Major improvement, quite novel | 18% | Within the industry |
| 4 | New concept, very novel | 4% | Outside the industry |
| 5 | Discovery, radically new | 1% | ‘All that is knowable’ |
In other words, about three-quarters of all problem solutions are reliant on little or no creativity and are unlikely to give the organization a significant advantage over others in the industry. Only 5% rely on ideas that are unknown in the industry, 1% of these being completely new ideas based on leading edge knowledge.
Activity 11
Think about some recent problem-solving decisions in your organization. Which of these levels of inventiveness were apparent? Don't try and force them into a higher level than they are, but consider whether they reflect Altshuller's findings.
If you want to learn more about TRIZ, then you can follow up the topic by reading Extension I.
SCAMPER stands for:
Substitute components, materials, people or processes.
Combine things or activities together.
Adapt or change an activity or object.
Modify something, making it bigger or smaller, change its shape or its features (e.g. its colour).
Put something to another use.
Eliminate something by removing components of stages in a process, simplify things and reduce them to their core functionality.
Reverse something, turning inside out or upside down, or ask how you would do the reverse of what you want to do, to suggest how to do it better.
SCAMPER was developed by Bob Eberle, based on ideas originally put forward by Alex Osborn, the inventor of brainstorming. By using the checklist you can identify creative ways of addressing problems. What's more, the process applies in any kind of organization because it isn't manufacturing oriented.
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Think of a problem you face (or have faced) at work. Write the problem down and then use the SCAMPER approach to see what ideas you can come up with. |
| The problem: | |
| Substitute | |
| Combine | |
| Adapt | |
| Modify | |
| Put | |
| Eliminate | |
| Reverse | |
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The term synectics to describe a creativity process stems from the book Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity by W.J. Gordon, published in 1961. It is based on the principle of bringing together contradictory or very different ideas in order to generate a creative solution to a problem. It starts by detailed analysis and definition of the problem, on the grounds that you need to be very clear just exactly what it is or will finish up trying to solve the wrong problem or a symptom rather than a cause.
Solutions are generated based on analogies or metaphors — in other words, by looking for different situations where similar or equivalent problems exist and have been solved (like the analogous problems and solutions used in TRIZ). This can be helped by using triggers. These are words, phrases or ideas that may prompt people to think of analogies. What is important is that people feel able to identify analogies from quite different arenas. For example, triggers can include:
| Subtract | Add | Transfer | Superimpose | Change | Scale |
| Substitute | Fragment | Isolate | Distort | Disguise | Contradict |
| Hybrid | Repeat | Combine | Parody | Mythology | Fantasize |
Some of these triggers are similar to the list in SCAMPER, but others are more unusual, such as ‘mythology’ or ‘fantasy’. Imagine you are trying to work out how to solve a security problem. In mythology this might be solved by invisibility or using giants as guards. From this analogy, the idea of disguising something so it isn't easy to see (invisibility) or using glass that magnifies guards may be considered.
The ideas are discussed in detail to refine them and make them manageable, but the key purpose of the synectics approach is that it encourages a very creative approach to problem solving by combining the unreal or impractical with the real problem to come up with a viable solution.
Activity 13
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Look at the problem you considered in Activity 12. Think of a mythological or fantastic analogy, where the same or a similar problem occurred. Use this to try and generate a viable solution: |
| The problem: |
| Mythological or fantastic analogy: |
| Possible solution based on this: |
Similar ideas to synectics include:
Lateral thinking
Developed by Edward de Bono, lateral thinking encourages people to look for solutions to problems that don't fit into the fixed mindsets that often condition our thinking. Mindsets are the way that we have always done things or approached issues, and these limit our ability to see things from new perspectives. De Bono has written several books on this approach.
Random juxtaposition
This is a fancy name for a simple technique that uses random words or ideas to encourage people to look for links between the idea and the problem. The random words can come from a dictionary (or any book in fact). Just open it at any page and use the first word on that page. Like synectics, the challenge is to find a link between the random word and the issue being considered.
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All these different techniques — brainstorming, TRIZ, SCAMPER, synectics, and their variants — have one thing in common. They try to encourage people to think ‘outside the box’. Outside the box simply means not thinking in conventional ways or doing things the same way as always. Creativity is about novelty, about doing things that haven't been done before.
If you start from the point of view that everyone is able to be creative, if they have the opportunity and the encouragement, then you are more likely to generate creative ideas. So, the first step in using any of these creative ideas generation techniques is to believe that they are going to work.
The second step is to use them carefully. Far too many people ignore the rules of brainstorming:
Make sure that the purpose of the brainstorming session is clear and understood.
Someone must control the group, to make sure that everyone takes part and nobody is allowed to dominate.
Every idea is allowed, and is written down so that everyone can see it.
Encourage people to build on the ideas of others (rather than discussing or objecting to them).
Remember Altshuller's findings, that most new ideas are really only the reworking of existing ideas, and that most don't give an organization any real advantage over their competitors. This reflects failure of most organizations to treat creativity (and innovation) seriously. They assume that saying they want creative ideas is the same as working hard to generate them.
So the third step is treat creative ideas generation as a critical task. Prepare properly and develop your knowledge and skills in using these techniques. Some are more demanding than others, so start with what you feel comfortable doing. A technique like SCAMPER is often easiest if you are looking at a quality problem and want a creative solution. It is a clear and fairly simple technique to use. Although brainstorming looks easy, it is often done badly because it does require that you keep the process under control and to the rules. It can be difficult to keep up with the ideas if people get enthused.
Although it looks complicated, TRIZ is a very structured technique that you will find that your team will soon understand. It is designed to work with manufacturing or production activities, but does also work in services. Synectics is probably the most demanding in that you rely heavily on the participants to get actively involved, but if they have done some brainstorming they will rise to the challenge of trying to link up quite different ideas or objects in creative ways.
Both TRIZ and Synectics have assimilation built into their processes, TRIZ in the fourth stage (adapt this solution to your own problem) and Synectics through the discussion that takes place after the extreme analogies have been generated (this is also true for NGT, where discussion is built into the process).
Brainstorming specifically discourages discussion, so you will need to move on to examine the ideas that have been generated as a separate stage. This is also true of Lateral Thinking and Random juxtaposition. One way of organizing the assimilation process is to transfer the list of ideas to Post-it™ notes and get the group to physically sort these, to find linkages. They can also show how valid they think ideas are by placing them centrally in a group or on the periphery.
SCAMPER is really a structured form of Brainstorming and the rules of Brainstorming also apply, but the SCAMPER process tends to build in assimilation, through the structure it uses.
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Think about the four techniques we have looked at, and the other variants as well, and decide which one you are going to try out. Plan your session carefully, make sure the environment is appropriate and that you have the resources you need. |
| Try out the technique and write down your thoughts on how it went here. | |
| What was the problem? | |
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| What technique did you use? | |
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| What went well when you used it? | |
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| What areas do you need to improve on? | |
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| Did you come up with some useful ideas as a result? | |
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Looking at Altshuller's five levels of creativity, where would you place the best idea(s)?
| Level | Level of inventiveness | Source of knowledge | Your solutions |
| 1 | Routine solution, no novelty | Personal knowledge | |
| 2 | Minor improvement, some novelty | Within organization | |
| 3 | Major improvement, quite novel | Within the industry | |
| 4 | New concept, very novel | Outside the industry | |
| 5 | Discovery, radically new | ‘All that is knowable’ |
If you want to learn more about the techniques we have looked at in this session, you will find Tony Proctor's book (Extension 2) very useful.
In Session C, we will look at how you convert creative ideas into successful solutions and what makes some organizations good at it, and some less good.
Self-assessment 2
1 Complete the empty boxes in this diagram of the innovation cycle
2 What are the four rules of brainstorming?
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3 What are the two variants on brainstorming called?
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4 What does the acronym TRIZ stand for (in English)?
5 What do the five Inventive principles mean in practice?
1 Segmentation
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2 Extraction
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3 Local quality
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4 Asymmetry
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5 Combining
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6 What are the four stages in the TRIZ problem-solving process?
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7 What percentage of solutions to problems did Altshuller find were radically new discoveries?
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8 What does SCAMPER stand for?
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9 What is the principle underpinning Synectics?
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10 List two other techniques similar to Synectics:
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8 Summary
Brainstorming is probably the most widely used (and abused) technique for encouraging creative thinking. It is based on four rules:
Make sure the purpose is clear and understood
Control the group, make sure everyone takes part and nobody dominates
Every idea is allowed and written up for all to see
Build on the ideas of others, don't discuss or object to them.
Two other techniques that are similar to brainstorming for encouraging creative ideas are NGT and Trigger Sessions.
TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) was based on research into patents, and has identified 40 basic approaches to creative problem solving.
TRIZ involves a four-stage process for problem solving:
State the problem
Look for an analogous standard problem
Explore the solution to this analogous problem
Adapt this solution to your own problem.
Altshuller found that there was little real inventiveness in most solutions to problems, with 32% offering only a routine solution with no novelty, and 45% only minor improvements showing some novelty. Eighteen per cent were quite novel major improvements, only 4% involved a really novel concept, and just 1% involved a radically new discovery.
SCAMPER is a checklist of ideas for generating creative solutions to problems. It stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put, Eliminate or Reverse.
Synectics is based on bringing together contradictory or very different ideas in order to generate a creative solution to a problem.
Two techniques similar to synectics are Lateral thinking (developed by Edward de Bono) and Random juxtaposition.
The three steps to using any creative ideas generation technique is:
Believe that they are going to work.
Use them carefully, keeping to the rules.
Treat creative ideas generation as a critical task.