How Creative Are You?

Creative people don't sit and allow problems to surface. Instead, they scan their environment for potential issues, and they see this as time well spent. Also, they're excited by the opportunity to change things. They aren't intimidated by change; they embrace it.

To develop your creative skills, you need to adopt a positive attitude toward change, and take an active role in identifying opportunities and looking for potential issues. To do this, challenge your business processes using Failure Modes and Effects Analysis   , and look for bottlenecks   in these processes. Carry out SWOT   and PEST   analyses on a regular basis. Keep up-to-date with customer experiences   and expectations, and try to spot problems from other people's perspectives.

Also, engage in benchmarking   to find out how well others are addressing similar issues, and look at the issue from a wide range of perspectives. Then, analyze your findings to ensure that a real problem does exist. This fact-finding activity can save you a great deal of time later on, and will help ensure that you only act on the most relevant problems and issues.

Look first for problems and potential issues that interest you. These are the things you'll be most motivated to pursue when you're learning to solve problems creatively. Then, as you become more confident, challenge yourself to investigate issues that are more complex.

When you have a potential issue or problem, gather as much information   about it as you can. As part of this, investigate solutions that have been tried previously (both in your own organization, and in other areas), and identify ideas that might have surfaced, but were never acted on.

At this stage it's also a good idea to step away from the problem for a while, and allow new thoughts and ideas to enter your mind. When we concentrate on one issue for too long, there's a tendency to latch onto one or two ideas, and this can block other good ideas. (One of the benefits of being proactive in your problem-finding is that you have time to incubate ideas, rather than being pressurized to find an immediate solution to a problem.)

Once you've identified and verified your problem, you can figure out what's really going on. Often, the initial problem that you've highlighted will turn out to be a symptom of a deeper problem. Therefore, identifying the root cause of the problem is extremely important.

When you do this, you'll find that techniques like CATWOE   , Drill Down   , 5 Whys   , Cause and Effect Analysis   , and Root Cause Analysis   are all very effective. While creativity may invoke ideas of spontaneous insight and far-out inspiration, the truth is that being creative in the workplace is rooted in a practical understanding of the situation at hand.

Don't, however, be so practical that you become negative. What often separates creative people from others is the ability to see past potential barriers, and believe in their insights. For instance, you could easily dismiss a great insight by saying, "Oh, that could never be the problem!" But you won't ever know if something is contributing to a problem unless you allow yourself to explore the possibility. That's what creative problem-exploration is all about – being open to all ideas and possibilities.

When you have clear insight into the cause of the issue, you can move on to generating ideas for a solution. Here you want to look for as many ways to inspire ideas as possible. Brainstorming   , Reverse Brainstorming   and Starbursting   are popular for this. However, these can all be undermined by problems with group dynamics. Techniques like Brainwriting   , Round-Robin Brainstorming   and the Charette Procedure   can help you to circumvent common problems.

You can also enrich your ideas by using tools like the Six Thinking Hats   , Random Input   , the Reframing Matrix   , and Metaphorical Thinking   to look at problems from different perspectives.

Obviously not all of the ideas you have will be practical or possible. So, as part of this step in the creativity process, you need to decide which criteria you'll use to evaluate your ideas. (Without a solid evaluation process, you'll be prone to choosing a solution that's perhaps too cautious.)

There's a wide range of tools you can use for the evaluation, including:

• Risk Analysis   : This helps you to explore where things could go wrong.
• Impact Analysis   : This gives you a framework for exploring the full consequences of your decision.
• Force Field Analysis   : This looks at the pressures for and against change.
• Decision Tree Analysis   : This shows you how to evaluate different options from a financial perspective.
• Paired Comparison Analysis   : This helps you to work out the relative importance of various factors.
• Decision Matrix Analysis   : This allows you to weigh many different financial and non-financial factors.

A common misconception is that creative people spend all their time thinking of new and interesting ideas. In fact, truly creative people recognize a good idea and run with it.

For this final step, you need to be committed to taking your ideas and making them happen, and you need to be confident that you can, indeed, propose innovative ideas and inspire change.

To implement your ideas successfully, develop a solid plan, using action plans   for simple projects, and more-formal project-management techniques for larger, more complex projects. You'll also need to be able to sell your idea   to others in your organization. If your idea is likely to affect other people, you'll want to develop strong change-management skills   so that the people around you accept and use the products of your creativity.

Once you bring one idea through to successful implementation, you'll be motivated and inspired to repeat the process again and again!