Creative solutions: how creativity can help with decision making and analysis

No matter how skilled you may be with creative (and lateral thinking) techniques, if your focus is weak, the results will be weak or even useless. In my experience, both focus fixing and harvesting are very poorly done, even when there is reasonable skill with the techniques.

If you have an obvious problem and do indeed have a solution, what is the need for creative thinking? There is a real need, because an adequate solution is not necessarily the best solution. Too often, the adequate blocks the best. Once we have an adequate solution, we stop any further thinking. Partly, we do this because further thinking effort would imply some doubts about our first solution, and we do not want such doubts.

Yet there may be a simpler solution. There may be a cheaper solution. There may be a solution which is easier to implement. It is not a matter of a school exercise book problem where there is only one right answer and you cannot be more right than right. It does require a great deal of discipline and confidence to go on looking for a possible better solution when you have one that would seem to work.

IMPROVEMENT

Improvement should be an obvious area for creative effort. Anything and everything can be improved. It is precisely this widespread application of improvement that makes it difficult to focus on one matter at a time. There is potential improvement in many directions. There are speed, simplicity and cost, cutting down on waste and wide application; and acceptance.

With improvement there are two competing needs. The first need is to have a clear idea of the ‘value’ that is being sought. If you are seeking to make an operation simpler, then the value of simplicity should be clearly kept in mind. At the same time, it is important to be very sensitive to other values, both positive and negative, that may be affected as you pursue simplicity.

Will the proposed simplification increase costs? Will the proposed simplification narrow the range of application or the flexibility of the process? My book Six Value Medals gives a scanning method for looking at the main values. Any proposed change has both negative and positive values apart from the ones that are consciously being pursued.

Almost everything can be simplified. Some years ago I wrote a book with the title Simplicity. In that book I asked why it was necessary to have passport control on leaving the United Kingdom. Three months after publication of the book, such passport control was abolished. I cannot prove a connection.

Over time there is a natural tendency for things to get ever more complicated. There is no natural pressure for simplicity. We need to apply such pressure consciously. How can this be made simpler? Sometimes the simplification just involves restructuring, clarifying values and throwing certain things out. Sometimes the existence of new technology (such as computers and interactive screens) allows things to be done in a simpler way: like checking in with an e-ticket at the airport.

Opportunity development requires creativity at several points. Creativity is needed to spot the opportunity in the first place. If you are following someone else with your own ‘me-too’ operation, then you need creativity to make your operation competitive. Once you have seen the opportunity, you then need creativity to design how you will develop the opportunity in a practical and rewarding way. Finally, you will need creativity to look ahead into the future to see what might happen. The field might get very crowded. What are the costs of entry?

FORECASTING

Looking ahead into the future almost always requires creativity. You can analyse trends and extrapolate those trends. That might give you some idea of the future. But you need to supplement such analyses with creative possibilities. You need to imagine how people and organisations will react to changes. There is no one ‘right’ scenario. You need to be able to construct and examine multiple scenarios. Some might be more likely than others. Some might be more obvious than others. Some might not be visible at all unless you use creative imagination.

Extrapolations continue existing trends into the future. But there will be reactions to the trends and reactions to the reactions. None of these reactions are visible in the data which give you the trends. If your creative imagination gives multiple possibilities, you then need ways of choosing between them. You also need to design your actions to be flexible so that they can be changed if your forecast was not correct. All this requires creativity.

DECISIONS AND ALTERNATIVES

A great deal of attention is paid to decision making, and this attention is needed. It is usually assumed, however, that the alternatives are obvious. It is as if we are travelling along a road and come to a junction. The possible roads ahead are clearly signposted. Which one do we choose? Unfortunately, real life is not like that at all. There may indeed be some obvious alternatives.

It may need creative thinking to discover these non-obvious alternatives. Such alternatives may not even be there unless we ‘design’ them. Designing possible ways forward is as much a part of decision making as assessing the values involved.

Too often the decision making process is shown as a list of fixed alternatives between which a decision has to be made. But where does that list come from? Because decision making and choosing between alternatives is hard enough, we do not want to make life even more difficult by creatively designing even further choices. Yet this may be necessary.

INTERPRETATION OF DATA

Usually data has an obvious interpretation. We use that interpretation to make decisions and design strategies. There is a considerable danger here. We are so motivated to look for the obvious meaning of the data that we overlook, and make no effort to find, alternative interpretations of the data. It is always worth making the effort to identify the obvious interpretation of the data and then to go further to find other possible explanations.

HABIT AND DISCIPLINE

The above list of occasions for the use of creative thinking is by no means comprehensive. You should be able to add many yourself. In the end you might say that it comes down to two questions:

1. How do we do what we want to do?

2. What do we want to do?

Creative thinking can become a habit of mind so that we are always looking for possibilities. We are not easily satisfied with the obvious. We multiply alternatives before choosing between them.

In addition to the ‘habit’ of creative thinking, there is also the discipline. This involves making a determined effort. We set out to use a creative technique in a deliberate fashion. We can do this to determine a focus.

We can do this to find a way of achieving a result. It is important to separate discipline from habit.

The danger is that those who have indeed acquired the habit of creativity make no effort to use the discipline because they feel that they do not need to. This is a mistake. The disciplined use of creative thinking often turns up ideas way beyond those that arise from the habit of creative thinking.