Creative Thinking

My week begun Monday morning with a WIP (Work In Progress) meeting. We hold these every two weeks to discuss our live projects. The value we gain primarily rests in the ability to learn from past projects and use these learnings for live and/or future ones.

This happened at the end of last year. We had two projects running concurrently, and in one, we'd been struggling to design a journey to take our client down to immerse them into their customer's world. In one impromtu WIP meeting, we discovered another project team had already done this and quite successfully. Our WIP was led down one of those long paths of discussion, but we got a lot of inspiration, confidence and value from it to go forward with some fresh ideas.

This particular project of ours was challenging. We were deliberately not giving our client answers, but getting them to experience our process for inventing things themselves. We more had to be more facilitators for creative thinking, rather than do it ourselves. Being facilitators is challenging, because we are not only putting faith in our process, but in other people's enthusiasm and ability.

I have a lot of faith in people. I believe everyone is creative. When people say they aren't creative I reply, "Everyone puts together an outfit in the morning with matching colours and styles. That's creative." I remember once reading a management writer in Harvard Business Review write, "when we get to the office, creativity is left at the door." How true this is of most organisations.

Creativity allows you to express the messages and ideas you want to send out to the world. It can be very personal and very valuable. I have always seen fostering creativity in individuals in organisations as valuable for two main reasons:

1. It can create new products, services and processes
2. It is hugely satisfying for individuals

I couldn't imagine not being allowed to be creative in my life and work. I love colour, vibrancy, freedom, being allowed to imagine possibilities. Call me an optimist, but what I have learnt over recent years is that I am more a pragmatist. I think this comes from my practice as a designer where my job has always been to turn ideas and concepts into a reality.

But back to the facilitation of building creativity in people and cultures… Over the long weekend I had the pleasure of spending time with friends from a diverse range of backgrounds. At a dinner party on Friday night I was sitting next to a young doctor who was giving us some insights into her everyday job. She didn’t speak much of the technical, but spoke more of how she deals with the emotional side of her patients, and if those patients are kids, then she has to also deal with the emotional side of the parents. I got thinking the next day about the human and emotional sides to our jobs. Everyone’s job, because there is always a human and emotional side. This makes empathy very important.

Empathy is a ‘big word’ for me (I have many ‘big words’). As a designer, we start with our process with empathy ie. Some customer research to decipher the ‘wicked problem’ which lies ahead of us. We have conversations with our customers (who end up as the users of our designed products) and discover their world in hope to find a small nugget which will burst into a fabulous idea to solve the problem.

It’s a great process and one which I love because I am naturally curious about things, especially people and the way they live (a good test is if you are ever walking past someone’s house and the front door is open, do you peek in to see what the inside is like? I do. I am curious to know how people arrange and design their space which gives me insight into how they live). So being curious is a great start to being a creative person.

The second part is about identifying and noticing connections. Someone once said innovation can be about connecting two previously unconnected things to make something new (thanks Phil for jogging my memory on this). I love doing this too. I love mind mapping, because you easily make connections to things that you miss if you were writing chronologically (I have a good test for this too. Are you a good networker? When a friend tells you something they need, do you often connect them up with someone or something you know who can help with that need?).

So, to reference my favourite university lecturer Paul (ex-advertising agency owner and now Sydney Uni lecturer) creativity is all about “curiosity and connections.” So start being curious about things. Research, observe, talk, discover. And then work on it, to find connections.