Four techniques to unleash your inner creativity
Are you creative?
Not so long ago, I was considering myself to be the most uncreative person in the world. That’s why I went to Harvard to take an intensive course on Creativity and Organizational success. It was so cool and exciting that I want to share with you my favorite tips and tricks I learned there.
1. Accept all ideas
First, when it comes to creativity, quantity is quality. Set a goal for the number of generated ideas and go for it full-speed! Usually, ideas come in waves. The first wave creates the most obvious approaches, the second wave makes more exciting ideas, and the third one truly taps into creativity resources. This observation is called the rule of three.
As we are talking about quantity, it is essential to welcome every idea and suspend any natural judgment. Vernā Myers, Vice president of Inclusion at Netflix, once said, “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.” Of course, the original metaphor was about people, but I think it also perfectly applies to ideas in a brainstorming session. Every thought should be asked to dance by being accepted both verbally and non-verbally. It is easy to see how often we object ideas by simply counting the number of the “yes, but” appearances in a conversation.
-I am so excited about what I’ve learned about Creativity, I want to share it with everybody in the world!
-Yes, but there are more than 7 billion people in the world.
Or,
- Yes, but you only finished a summer intensive course, you don’t know everything about creativity. You cannot teach others about it!
I tried counting objections in my own head and was astonished how many thoughts and ideas got rejected. These ideas were stopped even before they were formulated in my mind.
2. Separate diverging and converging
Having said that, critical and analytical thinking is still necessary, but it should be done separately from idea generation. Generating ideas utilizes the mode of thinking, which is called divergent thinking. While analyzing and filtering uses another mode of thinking, called convergent thinking. Harvard’s recommendation is to strictly separate them into distinct phases. Meaning that when we are creating new ideas, we should not be analyzing or discussing them, but only collecting them. Only when we have enough ideas, we should start converging, which may involve grouping ideas together, choosing the best thoughts, or refining those that can be improved.
3. Refine ideas: GPS
One of the techniques for refining ideas is Good Problem Solving (GPS), I learned it from Anne Manning and Susan Robertson. It distills the good parts and externalizes the bad parts to build a better idea. Let’s take the previous example — “I am so excited about what I’ve learned about Creativity, I want to share it with everybody in the world.”
Now, let’s improve it with GPS.
The first step is G, good, in the GPS, we need to find what’s good in the initial idea, as every idea has something useful. the good part is that “I learned about creativity and I want to share it with others because it’s something interesting and I think it can help many people in their lives and careers.”
Then, let’s find the problem, P in the GPS. Here, the issue is that I cannot share my knowledge with everybody in the world. Also, my knowledge is still basic and limited. Based on this constraint, I can reframe my challenge as
“How might I inspire other people to be more creative?”
This one is more productive and achievable. And here we are approaching the final step, the solution, the S in the GPS. One of the solutions is to write a blog post on Medium about Creativity.
These techniques, Accepting all ideas, separating diverging and converging, and refining ideas with GPS, they look very simple, yet they are very effective tools.
The good news is that we can take it to the next level with the use of special ideation techniques.
4. Use ideation techniques
My favorite ideation technique is assumption smashing.
We all live in a world of assumptions, such as: “I am too old to learn a new language,” or “an apple always falls towards the Earth.”, or
“You cannot be a programmer, because you are a woman, and women are not good with computers”
(And I’ve heard this one too many times). Assumption smashing works like this: List assumptions, choose the one to smash and smash it — imagine that this assumption is not correct. It always opens new possibilities, and if they are too crazy they can be refined, for example, with GPS.
I hope that you are now convinced that everybody can be creative. Often times, all we need to do is to simply allow ourselves to be creative. In addition to this, we can use special ideation techniques which are described in books or on the internet. Creativity is not innate, it’s like a muscle — you can grow it with practice.
“Creative, surprising, and beautiful.”
These were the words used when Artificial Intelligence won a Go game match against the world’s best player. It means that even a computer can learn creativity! If a machine can learn creativity, we, humans, can do it too.
