Managing Problems Creatively: Concepts

Wonderful. Finally on to the next book. It’s about time. This one will focus more on techniques that can be useful to manage creativity or creative management or managing creatively or something else with creative in it.

Problems and Challenges

This is an easy but important one. Not all problems are problems. They might be challenges, opportunities, annoyances or simple SomethingThere. Sometimes it is good to just leave them be and sometimes they will even resolve themselves, or rather happens as an emergent process. Just because the issue is there doesn’t mean it needs to be actively resolved. Often if there needs to be a solution it cannot be seen by the problem owner because he or she is stuck and needs to be unstuck, which can happen with the help of some outside force/person. In that it is with a person it is important how that person is and has been to allow for a trusting exchange.

But this already allows you to rephrase the entire situation. It’s not called “problem solving” but for example “opportunity finding” and maybe your problem is even another person’s opportunity, just by nature of a different mindset and circumstances.

Problems have hierarchies:

\- Personal identity: Who am I?

\- World view: What do I value?

\- Life choices: What major goals am I aiming for?

\- General capabilities: What skills do I need?

\- Individual tasks: How do I do this job?

This can be translated over a to a company if you want to. It the same thing. And every problem has different levels and you need to solve the lower level things. But you can often solve them by solving the higher level problem, and sometimes the higher level problem, that the lower levels derive from, cannot be solved or is not worth solving. Then you shouldn’t think about the lower level problem. When you criticise, you should aim it at the lower level and reframe it, because attacking higher level problems, will feel too much like destructive criticism.

It often helps to include other people in the problem tackling activity because they will help repattern and reframe it, which is often all that it is about. One thing you also need to do is clearly stating your problems, not vaguely. Because only then can you make them a clear challenge, bringing up further problems but allowing your to go in the right direction. Leadership is about articulating the “Whats” so that people can identify with them and find their own “Hows”.

Also remember that problems aren’t just there. They don’t get up in the morning and say hy all by themselves. They are created by us. This means we can do several things:

\- change the situation

\- change ourselves (e.g. the position from which we look at the problem)

\- get out

\- learn to live with it

But first you need to detect the problem. This will often work via a trigger and experience and local knowledge might make you more aware of such triggers or might make you colorblind.

The hardest problems are the wicked ones. You kill one head and three new ones grow up. You can identify wicked problems via their (via Manson and Mitroft, 1981, pp. 11–13):

\- interconnectedness

\- complicatedness

\- uncertainty

\- ambiguity

\- comflict

\- societal constraints

Wicked problems often can’t be solved but only require you finding a way to cope. You will need to find a way to frame the problem, creating the rules of the game. What is the hierarchy of the higher level problems, what is the history and time frame and what are personal viewpoints? But watch out, some problems do need real solving rather than continuous problem management.

Using Methods and Techniques

You should distinguish between 4 different levels with techniques.

\- Precepts: the basic rules underlying creative thinking

\- Techniques: clearly defined procedures to achieve a certain outcome

\- Method: A complete package from awareness until plan of action

\- Framework: A conceptual view

Choosing your technique and method is as much a personal choice as anything else. There is not one you have to choose and you might prefer some over others. Choose some and get better in them. But you likely need different styles throughout the process as Basadur’s cycle shows.

Implementer Style (Do): learning by direct concrete experience, using knowledge for evaluation

Generator Style (Awareness): learning by direct concrete experience, using knowledge for ideation

Conceptualizer Style (Understand): learning by detached abstract thinking, using knowledge for ideation

Optimizer Style (Decide): learning by detached abstract thinking, using knowledge for evaluation

Different styles will preefer different stages and techniques that fit this stage. There are some objective aspects of choice:

\- Function

\- Resources

\- Problem

\- Analytic mode

\- Intuitive mode

\- Social mode

A more conceptual approach draws from Backoff and Nutt’s strategic management process and Peter Checkland’s soft systems method, focussing on messy problems and takes for criteria:

\- Functionality

\- Innovation

\- Feasibility

\- Acceptability

These can be broken down further:

\- Utilarian solutions (used for functionality above innovation): you need a sensible, practical idea, realiably evaluated

\- Innovative solutions (Innovation and Functionality important): ordinary ideas have not worked, going beyond normal limits

\- Ideas: it is more about innovative ideas than technical functionality

\- Decods: Fake solutions for appearance or political impact

Feasibility and Acceptability can be needed or not and create another 4 types. You then have four decoy methods for example:

\- seductive ratification strategy: quality is irrelevant but they need to be feasible and acceptable. You influence people and their ideas

\- seductive strategy is about getting stakeholders to agree and only acceptability matters

\- ratification strategy is only about feasibility

\- gesture strategy is about an “empty” gesture, maybe for training or group development

So what is a technique. The instruction should help but it is more than that. You can take the technological view with methods as maps. Alfred Korzybski said that “The map is not the territory” in that it is only a way to help you find out way. The performance view is about open scores, like improvised music. You start with a known melody/framework and then run with it. You play with it, within the structure. Reinterpret but get it to work. The pragmatic view sees techniques as ad hoc practices, something that has been known to help. If you just do it it will work. Humans are complex and you might find that a given routine helps to get things going. Try to find out needs and find something that helps those needs. The technique needs to connect everyone.

There are some secondary roles for techniques though, beyond helping you explore problems, stimulate ideas, find solutions, … . They are training aids and cross-communication devices. A creative workshop will get people in the right mindset, possibly creates new communication channels and enables a new “different” vibe. They are also commodities in that consultancies love to sell them. This is often the driving force behind their adoption.

There are some so called competence stages of learning with techniques:

\- Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence

\- Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

\- Stage 3: Conscious Competence

\- Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

You move through them bit by bit and per technique. The better you get the more you will be able to pay attention to the smaller details and auxiliary things. This is when generative learning kicks in, when you are so skilled that you become skilled at getting skilled. This is the same with computers. You learn application and get used to working in them and get better in them and at some stage you get how computers work and can work with anything. Then it spirals upwards in skill.

You also need to amaze yourself about what you are doing. You need to find it interesting, as this spurs attention, which again makes things interesting. There is a nice activity in the book.

know your peanut:

\- get a bag of peanuts, pick one out

\- examine it closely, write down what makes this one special, aim for 20 items

\- draw it in a lot of detail, capturing even more

\- write down another 20 items of what this peanut reminds you

\- Put it back in the bag, shake it, pour all of them out, find yours. :)

But remember, techniques aren’t everything. Creativity depends on place, people, process and product. I found in my own usage that especially place is often overlooked in importance. And if you have good people in a wonderful environment with the right resources, you will get all the creativity you need.

Creativity and other kinds of thinking

You can either do creative problem solving rationally or go beyond it, inhibit your sensible thinking to some extent and use other kinds of thinking. I mean how do you come up with ideas? Where will you hang a new picture? It’s likely that you have an exact idea where to hang it. The unconscious has some interesting phenomenons. In the “Deadalus” column in the New Scientst the idea of the Random Idea Generator (RIG) was brought forward.

The conscious mind gets information, that’s processed by the Observer-Reasoner. This can interact with the unconscious Censor and this again can interact with the unconscious Random Idea Generator and at the end there are ideas coming out of the Observer-Reasoner. The RIG is “like a permanent internal brainstorming expansion process” as the book says. You just need to tab into it.

The right brain handels images, feelings, music, metaphors and the like, thinking holistically. The left brain trys to impose order into chaos, and this is why a small child is a lot more creative, as everything is fascinating and there is no order needed for the child, it is comfortable with chaos. It thinks with the whole brain. George Prince (1982) argues that the experimental self takes risks, brakes rules, makes connections, plays and feels ok with being confused. The safe-keeping self punishes mistakes and avoids risks. In that sense, you need to make surethat you are in friendly and foregiving environments to think creatively. You need to learn to let the two brains talk to each other or, which is likely easier, make a time shareing agreement in which one part of the brain is allowed to take over fully for a given time. You kind of let the RIG get through.

Imagery and visualization are important here and useful concepts. Its also sometimes better to tackle frightening material from within fantasy. You can get superman to help there! It’s your fantasy ;)

Metaphors and story-telling is also important, shown also by the amount of traditional fairy-tales and folk stories that are all around us. They allow us to make something visible that would otherwise be hard to put into words.

Psychosomatic connections are important in that for example tension can block imagination. The body is devided in two parts. The sympathetic sub-system deals with danger situations that re highly task oriented. If you need to run you will put all your energy into running. The para-sympathetic sub-system is triggered when we feel safe and relaxed and the body then moves into autopilot. Robert McKim said that for creativity you need to move into a state of relaxed attention. Some muscular tension seems to be needed for mental processes to work, just not too much. When you get your insight in a relaxed state, you will need to snap back to attention mode to retain it. The cool thing is that this optimal tension mix seems to be most easily attained through laughing! Now how cool is that people? :)

Different sub-personalities is something that Robert Dilts, one of the founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) found. There is the dreamer, the realist and the critic. Different kinds of thinking can be seen as a movement between these chairs. Why chairs? He suggests personal role play. Take 4 seats, one being for the wise observer. The others for the dreamer, realist and critic. Then you move from chair to chair to get into the sub-personality. Some people can do it without the chairs but they do help.

Multiple intelligences is something that Howard Gardner talked about, taking a different view on intelligence. Each of them is a different way to find problems and work them out. Linguistic intelligence is central to language based cultures and this is where things like brainstorming comes from. Logical-mathematical intelligence is about understanding of abstract patterns, long chains of reasoning, like used in the Clarification technique. Spatial intelligence is about mapping techniques, visual memory. Musical intelligence is abou emm… music ;) Bodily-kinasthetic intelligence is about being able to handle complex things in very skilled ways. Intrapersonal intelligence is about being able to label your own emotions and understand and guide your behaviour. Interpersonal intelligence is about working with people, understanding their moods, motivations, desires. Some creativity techniques allow you to express a problem that is presented to you in one modality in another, finding a totally new way of thinking about it.

To work with these different kinds of thinking, a few things must be there: desire, belief, acceptance.

There you go. Go!