A community to help you wrestle your great ideas into outstanding creative work

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This is a wonderful short video about the power of creativity. It’s only two and a half minutes of your life and it’s great.

Video shown at the Night of the Unboring (2005), a benefit for the Ontario College of Art and Design.

In case you can’t see the video by E-Mail or RSS Reader, click here to see it.

This is a guest post by Sue Brown of The Identity Coach.  She is a writer, artist and coaching psychologist who specialises in creativity and change. Sue spent 15 years working in Marketing & PR in global IT companies, before spending the next 14 years as her own boss.  She blogs regularly at The Identity Coach’s blog.

As the Thoughtwrestling team suggests, thinking creatively is often a contest between the great ideas in your head and actually shipping, as Seth Godin calls it. Who is going to win? In the blue corner, we have fear and her ugly sister, resistance. Over in the red corner, we have creative ideas, products and services. Somewhere in the middle, there may be stuckness as the two contestants slug it out.

Coaching and managing people is all about helping people to unstickerate (in my world, it is a word). Facilitating people to find the inner resources they have but have temporarily forgotten how to access, is creative coaching at its best IMHO. Teaching coaches and managers these skills brings together my passions for coaching, psychology, words and pictures.

So how can we coach ourselves and others to break through the blocks to creativity to make things happen?

Get a different perspective

In an organisation, managers often imagine that putting their dream team together would mean a happy hardworking band of like-minded, focused individuals. Actually, the more creative answer is to assemble a group of very different personalities who bring multiple perspectives to the challenge at hand. (Hell to manage, yes, but highly creative.) The less the team drifts towards ‘groupthink’, the better the chance of a really innovative and well-thought out solution. (It will have been tested out from many angles within the team before it gets released into the wider world.)

Also, if team members come from many diverse backgrounds, the chances are that ideas from one world can be lifted and put into a new context. One of the nicest examples I heard of this kind of ‘borrowing’ was in hospitals, where DHL or UPS style barcode tracking of patients’ and their notes through the labyrinthine system of departments had been introduced.

Creative individuals can benefit from alternative perspectives too, either from a coach or from asking others (a child perhaps) how they might tackle a challenge. Hearing a view you’d never have thought of yourself can spark some amazing new directions in your thinking.

Create the right conditions

In the scramble for survival in a competitive market, companies these days want creativity and innovation. And they want it fast. Unfortunately, creating a climate in which creativity can flourish can take time if it’s not already built in to a workplace.

Setting a climate where everyone’s contribution is respected and valued involves managers getting to know and understand their team members’ preferred ways of thinking and working. Brainstorming sessions are not everyone’s cup of tea. In some workplaces where the process is badly managed, the session becomes a contest which the loudest voices and most extrovert personalities ‘win’. Giant egos and competitive point-scoring squelch the creative soul. Wherever ego flourishes, you can be pretty sure that creativity shrivels up and dies. Knowing that you won’t be laughed out of the room tends to encourage more ideas rather than fewer.

Building an environment in which everyone is really heard and respected takes a certain level of emotional maturity and self-awareness in a manager or coach. Dropping control in favour of assuming joint responsibility is a shock for some. S/he shouldn’t feel threatened by others’ brilliance. In fact, s/he should be delighted by it. Some managers and coaches come to learn about creativity, believing that they’ll just jot down a bunch of techniques to use with their team. Actually, they learn a lot about themselves and their defences: managers often have the most to lose when the status quo is challenged.

Adopt a non-judgemental attitude

This is critical trait for coaches and managers. We often spend most of the day in a kind of binary mode in our heads; is something good/bad, right/wrong, interesting/boring, etc.

To facilitate creative thinking, we need to switch off that urge to judge and evaluate everything. Instead, the aim is to be mindfully attentive and open. Such an attitude leads to a very different quality of conversation with others. Just the ‘simple’ act of listening to someone without interrupting (hard to do) is the biggest gift you can give someone to free up their imagination. It happens very rarely in everyday life. Daniel Pink quotes research on doctors’ consultations with their patients. On average they interrupted their patients after 23 seconds. In my early days as a coach, I asked a question of a client who then didn’t draw breath for 50 minutes. She definitely needed the uninterrupted space to think out loud.

Asking the right question to ignite someone’s thinking and then sitting back to really listen, without judging is a creativity catalyst:. People make sense of that swirl of stuff going round in their head in the process of speaking out loud. They discover the next step they need to take just by talking it through.

Curiosity + imagination = twin engines that drive creativity

Management guru Charles Handy wrote about the importance of love, trust and curiosity in organisations. Now, I might be wrong, but ‘love’ isn’t a word I’ve heard bandied about a lot in the corporate world.

What Handy means by ‘love’ in this context is the belief on the part of managers and coaches in the people they work with. It’s a kind of egoless style, which trusts that people have creative solutions. With a spirit of curiosity (what if?) that challenges the status quo, and a willingness to ‘play’ collaboratively to spark imagination, the manager gives up the need to control and micro-manage. Instead, by creating a climate of emotional safety, and midwiving ideas rather than defensively protecting his/her own turf, creative stuff happens.