- makes a company much more agile in development
- develops the full potential of good ideas and trashes the bad ones rarely fast
- makes the whole company more creative
All in all it makes development much more profitable if succesfully applied. It contributes to the overall company innovativeness by constanstly developing and renewing the business foundation. Of course this is only true when a company really feels a NEED to change...a need to be innovative and do things in different ways! Many companies have great visions of the future and how to innovate but often these visions comes from the minds of top managers that will never work practically with innovation....the result is that the people that are really working with developing the company don't have a good understanding of "why to change".
It's a process and a journey...
That's why a creative process often starts out with clarifying "why innovate". All people involved should discuss and inspire each other to get a sound understanding of the "problem to be solved". It all ends up by defining a "FOCAL QUESTION" to be answered during the creative sessions. The question should motivate everybody to find solutions and everybody should feel a need for answering the question.
When the focal question has been defined it's all up to the process leader/facilitator to make things happen. A golden rule in systematic creativity is "Preparation"...the more prepared you are, the more you will get out of your process. The first task is to set up a good process structure which respects how people think.
Divergent (creative) and convergent(rational) thinking
ALL people can be creative...!!! Some people just doesn''t use their right brain-half very much and then they conclude: "I'm not a creative person". Well maybe not, but by training your right brain-half, you can become more creative...you have to "wake-it up" and hammer it out of the day-to-day rational thinking....we're all very good at rational thinking....at work you calculate, measure, evaluate, etc, etc...when you drive your car, when you're shopping, and so on....nearly all our daily activities requires logic thinking......after all very few goes to the roof and and do bungee-jumping while taking the dishes....but when you want to wake up your sleepy right brain-half, - this could be a very good way to do it!!! I've facilitated several of creative workshops that started out with a beer-run!! Maybe this is out of limits at a workplace...but it is actually what it's all about if you want to become creative....break down the barriers of "how we do things around here", loose the tie and DANCE..!
Should we then all just go crazy to make profit?
Not at all....there's a meaning in calling it "SYSTEMATIC creativity". A facilitator has to take control of the process and add what's really needed....because logic capabilities are STILL crucial in this process...we just don't have to dig that deep to find them...everybody is able to criticize and judge things....it's much harder to develop something unique. Ideas are fragile and have to be nurtured....it's too easy to judge an idea and what seems to be a bad idea in the beginning can turn out to be the next milking cow for the company when we use systematic techniques to develop it into a concept. That's why it's CRUCIAL to separate the two thinking methods....whenever the group of people should be creative and use their right brain-half NOONE should be allowed to judge anything.....it sounds fairly easy, but believe me it's a hard job as a facilitator to maintain control in a creative workshop! We're so used to being rational that it comes to us as an instinct to evaluate...but nevertheless you could be killing a great idea if you fail to follow the "rules"....remember....ideas are fragile! We have to treat them right. After the creative process, which developed lots of ideas ofcourse, it's time to use logic to separate the good from the bad ones. In the beginning of a process you have hundreds of ideas and many of them are the same and some of them don't make sense, etc, etc.. After you've picked some of the best 10-15 ideas you can carry on to another creative process to further develop the ideas into concepts which makes it even easier to evaluate them afterwards.
It's a well used method to use this divergent/convergent split of the process. In the beginning of this blog post you can see a typical model of how to structure a full process.
If you think this is a little odd to read and maybe you are a little skeptic...then I hope that you've become a little bit interested in knowing if there is any truth in what I'm writing....Maybe you tell yourself..."why can't I just get people together in room and brainstorm over a subject"...well you could do that...and brainstorming is also the first example of a technique (rather simple) to be systematically creative...and it's a start and MUCH have been done since it was invented...for inspiration I will encourage all to read Edward De Bono's "six thinking hats" at least...For danish readers I would recommend Ole Striim, who has written "Kreativ problemløsning og praktisk idéudvikling". After all it's not all about the process....e.g. the place the workshop takes place is extremely important....very rarely it's a good idea to do it at your company...because people will often have a hard time breaking down the rational barriers....
I'm sure you will be convinced...or else....try to attend to a creative workshop once in a while...and feel the magic when a good facilitator can leverage upon everybodys creative potential and maximizing the energy in a room.
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