Six Ways to Become a Creative Catalyst

by Cheryl Nee-Gieringer, founder, Corporate Creativity Training

More than 50 years of academic research on innovation processes supports the notion that innovation can be fostered with a few tools and a structured approach. Based on that research, here are six suggestions for catalyzing creativity in your company.

1. Practice the innovation two-step
Boiled down to its simplest components, innovation consists of a dynamic interplay between two kinds of mental activity: 

• Divergent thinking, characterized by ideation fluency, openness, elaboration and flexibility.
  
• Convergent thinking, characterized by analysis, selection and refining of ideas and planning.

The guideline for managing this interplay to achieve greatest productivity is simple: keep the two steps distinct and structured.

When you and your team are exploring a challenge or generating ideas, resist the universal impulse to discuss and evaluate comments as they are offered. Then, when it’s time to focus, select the best options using affirmative judgment.

You can prepare your team for a problem-solving meeting by reviewing with them the following divergent and convergent guidelines taught by the Creative Education Foundation.

Divergent thinking guidelines:

• Defer judgment
  
• Combine and build on ideas
  
• Seek wild ideas
  
• Go for quantity

Convergent thinking guidelines:

• Be deliberate
  
• Check your objective(s)
  
• Improve your ideas
  
• Be affirmative
  
• Consider novelty

Teams that manage their problem-solving efforts in two-steps won’t get derailed by discussion of the first two or three ideas that come up. Instead, they generate more possibilities and fresh angles. Selecting from a list of great possibilities is easier then trying to perfect one or two good-but-not-great ideas. Plus, the process keeps energy high and everyone involved.

2. Follow a process
The innovation two-step should be used during each phase of the creative process. Though phases of innovation have been identified and called by different names by different researchers and practitioners, whether they break into seven stages or six or four, the creative process can be categorized roughly into three acts:

• Act 1: Exploring the challenge. This includes exploring, amending and ratifying goals and challenges. It starts to bring definition to opportunity and problem areas. It includes gathering data and ensuring you’re focused on the right issues.
  
• Act 2: Idea generating. This is the when you come up with and explore solutions. It’s when you need to stretch to make connections and try new combinations. 
  
• Act 3: Action planning. During this act, the best ideas are strengthened and improved, and you begin developing your plan for implementing selected ideas.

When you gather your team for an innovation session, know which act you’re in. This will help guide selection of facilitation tools and help you determine the time you need to divide between divergent and convergent activities.

3. Stay in the question
In Think Better (2007), creativity consultant and author Tim Hurson explains that staying in the question means resisting the urge to answer, the urge to know, or the urge to show that you know. It means hanging back to keep asking questions even when answers seem obvious. Answers are obvious when we have preconceived notions. These preconceived notions help us jump to conclusions, but not necessarily to new ideas.

Staying in the question enables divergence, particularly in the opening act of creative problem solving. To make room for creativity you need to suspend what you know for a few minutes and ask why and how, ask how to, and ask why again.

4. Push past the obvious
Developed by ad exec Alex Osborn in the 1940s, brainstorming is the granddaddy of divergent thinking techniques. It’s still popular, though often misused. Too often, brainstorming fades after the initial purge. It’s important to push past what might be an excruciating lull to tap more creative and provocative ideas.

The initial burst during a brainstorming session helps create the list of the most obvious options by getting them out of your head and onto paper (or into a computer), so you can make room for stretching that imagination. Start digging deeper by asking “what else?” and keep asking it and keep recording the responses, all the responses. Research shows that the bulk of breakthrough ideas emerge during the last third of robust ideation.

5. Learn and use three or four “idea sparking” tools
In addition to asking “what else?” find three to four favorite divergent-thinking tools and ensure that everybody on your team or, better yet, everybody in your company is familiar with them. Then, whether you are in a product-development meeting, a strategic-planning meeting, or an ad hoc hallway meeting, you have tools to keep the group generating options.

Coined by Bob Eberle in Scamper: Games for Imagination Development (1971), Scamper is a well-used example of an idea-sparking tool or way to help you look at a problem or challenge from different angles. Scamper is a mnemonic for:

• Substitute. Pick items from your brainstormed list and ask what can you substitute for an idea or issue? Who can be included instead? What other process/material/group can be used instead?
  
• Combine. Explore which options can be blended. Ask how can parts of one idea be used with part of another. Can purposes be combined?
  
• Adapt. What other thoughts are suggested by an idea? What else is like something on your list?
  
• Modify. How can you change the meaning, or the color or the shape of an item or issue? Can you increase or decrease capacity? How can you streamline? What can you streamline? Can you understate?
  
• Put-to-other-uses. What else can an idea be used for? What other markets might be interested? What other developers might be interested?
  
• Rearrange. What other patterns or processes might work? What can you transpose? What can you interchange? What if you turned it inside out?

6. Learn and use three or four “deliberate selection” tools
Your creative problem-solving tool box also should have several selection tools that help your team choose and strengthen options for further exploration or development. Highlighting is one example.

Use Highlighting to narrow down lots of ideas, focusing on the most compelling, or to screen, select and sort options that are interesting, intriguing or useful. Highlighting sorts your list of options in three steps:

• Hit. A word, phrase or statement that jumps off the page because it is exciting, intriguing, useful or compelling. Have participants indicate their “hits” with sticky dots or markers.
  
• Cluster. A number of hits connected by a common relationship that indicate an area of important or significance.
  
• Restate. A statement or restatement about clusters in a way that is specific enough to be useful. If you are in a stage looking for ideas, make sure the restatement is an idea. If you’re looking for problem statements, make sure it is properly phrased as a problem statement.

This short sampling of ways to catalyze creativity is just a taste of tested techniques and processes. Several books offer instructions and directions on a number of divergent tools and convergent techniques that facilitate innovative thinking. Two popular ones are Van Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head and Michalo’s Thinkertoys.

To catalyze creativity in your organization, start with the innovation two-step, find a process that suits your company culture, and start experimenting with tools and techniques to add to your innovate thinking kit.

Links:
Creative Education Foundation 
Thinkertoys

About the author
Cheryl Nee-Gieringer is the founder of Corporate Creativity Training LLC. She has developed training programs and taught creative problem-solving processes and techniques to participants from around the globe. For more than 20 years, she also has taught at the Creative Problem Solving Institute. She is a former member of the Creative Education Foundations Board of Trustees and holds a Graduate Certificate in Creative Studies from the State University College at Buffalo. She can be reached at cheryl@corpcreativitytraining.com