Fifteen years ago I had the good fortune of attending an event where Dave Hall from The Ideas Centre spoke about Thinking Money Down the Drain: his approach to growing critical and creative thinking in organisations.

I loved the energy and humour he brought to the topic, and the challenge he brought to the kind of traditional and conventional thinking that binds us into doing more of the same.

At the end of the talk I chatted with Dave and asked if I could carry his bags and learn from him. I’d recently taken redundancy and was looking for a new path. Thankfully Dave said yes, and a new pathway opened up.

For a while I shadowed Dave at talks and Ideas Centre Groups, where 10–12 people from a range of companies came together to learn how to think differently, and stop thinking money down the drain.

Of the many things I liked about the approach was that it embraced effort. Sure, there were elements that were playful and fun (finger painting or Lego, anyone?) but there was a lot of graft as well because — just like a spaceship at liftoff — it takes a lot of energy to break through the atmosphere of traditional and conventional thinking that surrounds us.

Looking back now, I realise I wasn’t just learning about creativity. I was learning how thinking works. How cognitive biases shape our judgement. How creativity isn’t just a lightning strike for gifted people. It’s something that can be cultivated and grown.

That changed my whole way of thinking and ultimately led me into the work I do today as a facilitator, trainer and teacher.

Creativity is a process

I think the single biggest thing I learned was that creativity can be understood as a process.

That may sound slightly diminishing, but I actually found it incredibly freeing because it changes a question that people struggle with: “How creative are you?”

Most people shrug and say, “Dunno.”

Instead, a process let us ask “How are you creative?”

That’s a completely different question. Everyone has an answer to that, even if they haven’t discovered it yet.

Every artist, creator, team and organisation has a creative process – a way of noticing, responding, creating and adapting. But our families, schools and workplaces often alter our natural self-concept as creative agents and reintroducing a creative process helps revive the parts of us that have become dulled over time.

The process we followed was designed to interrupt the kind of linear, reactive and highly patterned thinking captured in the phrase “Ready, fire, aim!” 

Instead of repeatedly missing the mark by resorting to ‘the way we’ve always done things,” we used a double diamond process: the first diamond explored the problem; the second generated creative solutions through cycles of divergent and convergent thinking.

The first stage: Understanding the problem

We worked on the problem itself to understand its deeper dynamics and the desired outcome for the problem owner(s).

I’ve always imagined this stage as being a bit like a therapist listening to a client’s presenting problem while quietly knowing that the real issue lies several layers deeper.

We used techniques that helped groups move from The Problem as Presented to The Problem as Understood.

This was pure critical thinking, and people often got so much value from this stage alone that entirely new solutions appeared before we’d even started the creative work.

For example, one client looking at building a new car park realised they could instead encourage more people to work from home. Sounds basic – but it’s much easier to address. This was 12 years ago now and many companies are facing entirely different challenges around working from home.

I often saw a look on the problem owner’s face that seemed to say, “Can I just go and get on with this now?”

Those moments made me realise that critical thinking isn’t the boring precursor to creative thinking. It’s a profoundly creative act in itself.

Two techniques I particularly loved and still use today, were Boundary Examination (what assumptions and definitions are constraining the challenge?) and Multiple Cause Analysis (what different tributaries feed into the problem we’re looking at?).

The second stage: Creative solutions

The homeward turn towards solutions often surprises people.

People tend to think that after some good critical thinking – and armed with a clear challenge statement – they could just get on with solving it. And sometimes they can. But sometimes it’s with the same limited thinking that created the problem. And sometimes they can’t resort to traditional and conventional thinking – they just have a challenge-shaped hole.

We defined creativity as:

The process by which you generate novel and useful solutions.

The important point was that adults generally spend most of their time doing ‘useful’ thinking. And that generally means doing more of what already works… until it doesn’t.

So when we want novel and useful solutions, we have to let go of usefulness for a while and embrace something that initially sounds ridiculous: useless thinking.

That can be surprisingly difficult. Even when people understand that the destination is a novel and useful idea, they often resist travelling through the part of the map known as: ‘novel and useless’. It’s an interesting phenomenon because it reveals just how deeply conditioned we are to be useful, to get it right.

But it also reveals something hopeful. It’s relatively easy to transform a novel-but-useless idea into a novel-and-useful one. On the other hand, it’s much harder to take an already useful idea and somehow make it novel.

So we’d happily take groups off into the world of novel and useless (sometimes willingly, sometimes kicking and screaming) before inviting judgement back into the room. Once people trusted the process it became remarkably reliable.

One of our evergreen approaches was to use random images, objects, words, greeting cards and other prompts to disrupt thinking that would otherwise follow its familiar tracks towards sensible, obvious and non-novel solutions.

It’s an improvisational process

One half-baked idea can lead to another equally dumb, or slightly better idea. It’s the classic ‘yes, and’ of building on each other’s contributions and building momentum towards a goal – in this case a goal of finding creative solutions that we didn’t have at the start of the process.

This is fundamentally an improvisational process because it is underwritten by not-knowing, and it was out of our use of the idea of using ‘yes, and’ to create momentum that I decided I should explore improvisational theatre and that led me to start my own community theatre company (that’s another post for another day!)

A willing group who’ve been through the process a few times can stay on track, and use the novelty to generate new insights and ideas for resolving stuck situations and guiding positive change – or even ways of dissolving a problem by solving a higher-order one.

Other approaches included reverse thinking (making the problem as bad as possible – known as TRIZ in Liberating Structures) and, my personal favourite, using biomimicry for relational and systemic inspired by the genius of the natural world.

It’s an editing process

Another way to think about creativity is as an editing process. Not every scene makes the final cut. Writing is rewriting. Just as the divergent phase calls for judgement to be lightly held, the convergent stage calls for judgement to be sensitively brought back to the table.

It’s fine if nineteen ideas are discarded because we can’t land them as viable and desirable solutions – but one genuinely new and useful idea can have extraordinary value that might change the balance sheet, or better yet metrics that take a more holistic view.

I still use these approaches today and have come to see creativity as a renewable energy source. You can’t wear it out. The more you do it the more you get. And being open to creativity of any stripe brings people to life.

I’ve also come to think of creativity as regenerative practice — reaching into deeper water sources within us, and restoring the parts of ourselves, and our teams, communities and organisations that have gradually become desertified through cultural conditioning.

Looking back, I realise Dave didn’t simply let me carry his bags, or teach me about creative thinking. He taught me to trust the creative process.

Image – Caroline Selfors