Deliberate Creativity: Idea production or learning?

Being raised almost from birth immersed in the deliberate development of creativity, I learned to constantly focus on getting better ideas and on getting people to accept the ideas.

One of the key tricks was that changing the way we describe and  understand a situation can make better alternatives obvious and possible.  Ironically, I my research forced me to realize that the practice of deliberate creativity can be improved by reconceptualizing it.

When I began to research team creativity, certified professionals in the field of value engineering were kind enough to answer about eighty questions each on three different projects they had done.

As I analyzed the data, I began to see impossibilities. The value engineering process, like the creative problem solving process and many other deliberate creativity approaches is taught as a series of about six steps separating fact finding, problem redefinition, idea generation, idea evaluation and analysis, and preparing proposals to sell the ideas. Most value engineers manage this process in a fixed schedule of steps over a one week, 40 hour, five day sequence with a presentation to management or client on the Friday afternoon.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the best ideas came from teams that spent more time in idea evaluation and proposal writing. If ideas are generated before these steps, how can investing more time in the later steps generate better ideas earlier in the process?

As I examined my own working experience, I noticed something. Many projects had one or more really cool ideas that made a major impact. As I examined them, I realized that many of these ideas had popped into our heads as we were immersed in the tedium of analysis and proposal writing. I informally surveyed my colleagues and found that most of them had similar stories.

Here is my interpretation. The deliberate creative processes tend to be described like a manufacturing process. You get your specifications, you acquire resources (facts and knowledge), produce ideas, inspect for quality, pack and ship. Of course in a manufacturing process, you don't make the product better in inspection or in packaging.

It seems to make more sense to think of the creative process as an individual or team getting smarter and smarter about the problem until a solution is obvious. Even in creative techniques like brainstorming the ideas generated are not as important as the way the process changes the group culture and enables team members to learn about other perspectives on the project. In this view, it makes sense that the team is best prepared to create as it leaves at the end of the presentation.

In response to this model I have made a few changes in my attempts to help teams be more creative. I plan all the creative steps and techniques for the effect on the team's attitudes and knowledge, as well as for output. I take breaks during the documentation phase and throw some impossible problem we have already given up on at the team for a silly creativity exercise to refresh their minds before they get back to writing. The resulting ideas are amazing. And I try to schedule time after the presentations so that if the listeners raise objections, the team can immediately rethink a better solution in the light of the new information provided by the evaluator. Again, this is when the team is at the peak of their powers, and can amaze you.

So, just as we see that some of the best creative ideas are hidden by the way we think about things, the ways we think about improving creativity can also hide great potential.