Get the challenge right
To be more creative we have to understand what creativity is. In a 2008 study by Lichtenburg 48% of supervisory level managers said creativity is about problem solving.
A similar survey of leaders showed the majority of those in charge of organisations felt that creativity is more about problem identification – the ability to identify patterns or spot problems that others don’t see, than it is to do with finding solutions.
Jeff and Staney McGraff’s Creative Mindset argues on the side of the leaders. They propose there are no effective solutions unless you first of all understand the problem. Otherwise it’s like coming up with the answer without knowing the question. This is logical and great news for leaders who employ people with more expertise than they hold themselves. If the critical skills in creativity for leaders are to identify, seek to understand and clearly articulate a problem, then we can harness the collective wisdom of all the experts in our employ to find great solutions – once that is, we know what the problem is.
Getting the challenge right takes a combination of wonder and rigour. Rigour can often come from data and appeals to those who feel deeply drawn to taking comfort in understanding things in quantitative form.
And yet it’s important for leaders to pull both on rigour and wonder. Wonder embraces a curiosity that is broader than the data set you own and a world outside your organisation. If you’re highly wedded to understanding things solely through data you risk not engaging with a problem or opportunity without the accompanying data to back it up. This is not an argument against the use of data but rather being open to accepting gaps in things you can’t measure might actually be where the true and rich treasure lies.
Not everything that is valuable can be measured. Not everything that can be measured is valuable.
This is particularly true of behavioural insight. Often when we talk about improving decision making through data, it’s the quantitative data that take comfort in such as measuring widgets of productivity. The muddy waters of qualitative data are harder to mine and yet this is often where the rich vein of emotional resonance, of customer reaction to a problem or a service will give you insight and clues.
Often our instinct for numerical data means surveying and bracketing qualitative insight to achieve a quantitative result. Take for example customer experience of using a product. I could turn this in a quantitative result by asking a series of questions around satisfaction with usability, value for money, durability. All these things would be valid. But the customer sits with more information that I’m not accessing because they can only in this format provide me with insight aligned to the questions I have devised. And since I don’t know and can’t craft a survey with every possible combination of opinion, necessarily to get that comforting quantitative result I am deliberately ignoring and masking available insight. And even my choice of wording in a question can achieve a result and interpretation that the customers themselves would be surprised by.
Data is great at measuring what has happened but far less capable of being able to predict what will happen. It’s important to recognise the temptation to be pulled into recreating the past just because it is what you’re able to measure. Let data be a compass but keep the eyes on the road for edge of the cliff all the same.
One of the challenges when we’re working with creativity and concepts that are new is how we source insight. So here are some tips from the McGraff’s for wayfinding in the field of creativity – you just have to get comfy with different ways of generating and using insight in order to benefit from these. Remember if you attempt to exercise creativity within the confines of data you already hold, you’re likely to be reinventing within what you already have, so the game is about becoming comfortable with recognising other sources of insight around you, not just that which you hold already.
Technique 1 is called following the river upstream. Just as wilderness explorers know if they’re lost to follow the river to the headwaters so it’s easy to get lost and side tracked in a field of insight and data. Instead we can navigate from where we are right now. Taking a metaphorical piece of string and pull on it back to its roots. In product design you can take a product and analyse what it’s being used for, what problem was it trying to solve, what problems is it still trying to solve. How well does it solve those, what else would consumers ideal want for it to do – to be more durable, lighter, faster, accurate, less costly, more reliable. You don’t need to invent the brand new, often the best ideas come from incremental change and improvements derived from following the river upstream.
Technique 2 is about talking to the locals. If you stay in the boardroom or other people’s boardrooms then you’re either hoping people will come to you or you’re fishing in a small pond. Talking to the locals is about getting out in your organisation to find out what people truly think. Often when leaders organise back to the floor visits, they inadvertently end up in artificially constructed viewpoints of an organisation as intermediate supervisors wrestle with the risks to their own careers of exposing deficiencies in the company, of hosting the “royal visit” and the risk of some inadvertent if actually completely truthful insight from the shop floor. Talk to the locals such as your suppliers and their networks, what’s tough for them, how well does the partnership work, what ideas do they have for your business and your customers. Lots of EQ will give you lots of insight.
Technique number 3 is what the McGraff’s call Forage and Fish. Often where people get stuck with creativity is because you’re looking for a perfect understanding or a perfect solution and if it’s not perfect then you make no progress at all. It is rare indeed that you’ve discovered a problem area that no one has ever thought of before. Foraging amongst those on your front line and visibly casting your net for specific ideas can crowd-yield insight the most amazing insight and absolute frustrations for people on your front line who can see it clearly but lack the power and authority to do anything about it.
These are the folk who’ll tell you they’re following a rule, doing a report, completing a return and no-one can remember why but everyone’s scared about the consequence of not doing it. You can fish in your industry space too – casting your net across your peers – you needn’t fear giving your great secrets away, most creativity comes through incremental and additive change – you add one element to what you already have – even if your competitor does the same because they’re building on a different base, they will get a different result but you’ll have brought diverse skills and perspectives together to find new possibilities.
As a leader you may not hold much truck with conventional ideation techniques, you may shudder at another wall of post it notes and dotocracy exercises but that’s OK. Ideation is part of but not the start of the creative process. Your job as leader is to observe, wonder and question why and what if. Organisational surveys repeatedly show most workers believe their bosses tap into less than 50% of their available skills. Ask the right questions in the right way and unleash the creativity that’s within your organisation.
