Creativity Exercising

This week I spent a lot of time with creativity exercises.  They were not only fun; they also helped me realized that ideas are not hard to generate given the right environment and stimulation.  For example, in Dr. K's class, each group of 6 was given 15 minutes to come up with ideas to help the Kelley school using post-it notes.  My group wrote down a dozen of them, ranging from post-it art murals to color-coded mood indicators that you would post at the front of the room before class and after class.  Ideas truly are a dime a dozen as the saying goes… or are they?

            

Recently I have been immersed in watching Bones, a crime drama on TV.  Earlier this week, while reading the textbook for the class, I decided to do one of the creative exercises from the book (“Entrepreneurship: Theory/Process/Practice”, written by Dr. K).  The exercise calls for writing down all of the functions you can think of for a given list of items.  For each of the physical objects on the list (“A large pebble”, “an old hubcap”, “an old coat hanger”), I found myself thinking “murder weapon” as the first function that came to mind.  And for each of the people on the list (“An egotistical staff member”, “The office tightwad”), I found myself first thinking “potential suspect.”

Why did I first jump to crime-related functions for those objects and people?  I suspect the reason has to do with Phase 1 of the Creative Process: Background or Knowledge Accumulation. (The four/six phases of the creative process are documented throughout innovation research, but I won't delve into them here.)  Since I have been “educated” about crimes through watching Bones, I am likely to think of solutions to problems in the crime space.  However, what I believe is the most critical part of Background or Knowledge Accumulation is recency.  The more recent an experience has been had, the more likely it is to be the subject of ideas in creative exercises.  Put another way, the ideas generated in a creative exercise are most likely to come from recent knowledge-gathering activities or recent experiences.

This has important ramifications for innovation, particularly in a corporate situation.  Consider a team that has recently completed a big, important project, and now it is asked to have an “ideation” session where it is to brainstorm for 30 minutes on ideas for new products or product features for the company.  I’m willing to bet that most of the ideas would be small features to be added to the project that was recently completed.  In other words, you would get ideas for incremental innovations.  But what if you really need radical innovations?

In order to get ideas for radical innovations, you need to introduce variety and take advantage of the effect of recency.  Shortly before asking your employees to brainstorm, have them do things outside of activities related to the recent project.  Have them visit customers, read international news, go to the beach - anything that will help them get a different perspective than what they would have being heads-down on a project.  Social events are not just good at keeping employees happy on the job; they can also jumpstart creativity and, by extension, innovation.

This line of thinking has encouraged me to try to move Napkin Club to varying locations and varying days.  “Same time, same place” may make it easy to remember, but it can hurt creativity.