WE HAVE BEEN considering various important aspects of the nature, background, and need for creative thinking. These are all important points and not just academic reflections. If you set out to use the systematic techniques of lateral thinking as a bag of tools you will be far less effective as a creative person than if you pay attention to the background points as well.
If you understand the “logic” of perception, the difference between design and analysis and all the other points then your motivation becomes much stronger and you will acquire the idiom of creative thinking.
The considerations put forward in the book up to now can stay with you for the rest of your life or be supplanted by better ones. It has been necessary to cover these points because of the misunderstandings about the nature of creativity. It has been necessary to cover these points because of the sad neglect of creative thinking in our educational system, which is convinced of the sufficiency of information, analysis, and argument. The points have been necessary to provide a solid base for the use of the specific creative tools.
From this point onward we can start to look at the practical use of creative thinking. The first thing I want to do is to consider some of the major uses of creative thinking. These uses are set out in broad terms. This is only one way of looking at the uses of creativity. There can be other ways which are equally valid.
I shall also return to some of these points in the third part of the book which is devoted to the application of creative thinking.
In volume terms, “improvement” is by far the biggest use of creative thinking. Perhaps I should qualify this by saying it is the biggest “potential” use of creative thinking. We can seek to apply creative thinking to anything at all that we are now doing with the hope of making an improvement or finding a “better” way of doing something. The potential is enormous – but for reasons I shall consider later, we do not make much use of this potential. We are generally too satisfied with the way we now do things.
What do we mean by “improvement”? What do we mean by finding a “better” way to do things? What does “better” mean?
There is a need to have a clear idea of what we mean by better. Better can mean at a lower cost or in less time. Better can mean with fewer errors and faults. Better can mean with less energy or with less pollution. Better can mean in a more humanly satisfying way. Better can mean with less wastage or with cheaper materials. In the future one very important direction of “better” is going to be “simpler”. Simplicity has a very high value for users and consumers. Simplicity has a very high value for producers because it means that highly skilled workers are not essential.
It is very important to define the direction of improvement. There may, of course, be several directions that are important.
The Western notion of “improvement” has always been concerned with removing defects, overcoming problems, putting faults right. This is very much part of the general negative orientation of Western thinking. The Japanese are also concerned to remove faults – but this is only the beginning of improvement.
The Japanese, unlike Westerners, are able to look at something which seems perfect and then set about improving it. The Japanese notion of improvement is not limited to putting things right. It is just that the Japanese never had the negative culture of Western thinking (proving someone wrong, solving problems, correcting faults, and so on). The Toyota Motor Corporation gets something like 300 suggestions per year per employee. The figure in a normal Western company would be below 10.
It is perfectly true that today Western companies are seeking to adopt the Japanese approach with such programmes as “continuous improvement” and “total quality management”. Such programmes ask for improvement at all points – even when there are no faults to correct.
I know a large European company that has a successful suggestions scheme that has saved them millions of dollars (equivalent of local currency) but the company is not fond of the scheme. The difficulty is that no one has the time or wants to assess the suggestions. This is possibly because all suggestions move upward and centrally. The Japanese handle this problem by having councils at all levels that assess the suggestions at the level at which they arise. So there is no massive accumulation of suggestions at some central point. Setting up ways of dealing with suggestions is a vital part of any improvement programme.
The key point about improvement is to be able to look at any procedure or method and to suppose that there might be a better way of doing it. I know corporations that have gone back and looked at processes which they had perfected over the years and with which they were totally happy. Further improvements in these “perfected” processes led to savings of millions of dollars.
There is now a general acknowledgement of the value of seeking to improve procedures even when there is no problem and no pressure of cost saving. Even so, it is not easy. Theoretically it is necessary to look at everything with this “improving” frame of mind. Since this is clearly not feasible it is very comfortable to slip back into looking only at problems and faults.
The key point to remember is that the removal of faults is only a small part of the improvement process.
There are improvements that can be made on the basis of experience, new technology, new information, analysis, and logic. Creative thinking is not always necessary. When there are faults then logical problem-solving can often be enough to remove the faults. But when there are no faults, there is a greater need for creative thinking to open up new possibilities.
Problem solving has always been a traditional area for the use of creative thinking. If the standard approaches cannot provide a solution then there is a need to use creative thinking. Even when the standard approach can provide a solution there is some point in trying creative thinking in order to find an even better solution. There is nothing to say that the standard solution or the first solution to be found is necessarily the best solution.
I have discussed already the analysis approach to problem solving and the design approach. Obviously the design approach demands creative thinking. But even the analysis approach may need creative thinking in order to imagine alternative possibilities that can then be checked out.
A great deal of fuss is usually made about “problem definition”. Problem definition is very important: “What is the real problem here?” It has to be said, however, that the only time you can really find the best problem definition is after you have found the solution. That is not of much practical use. Nevertheless there needs to be an effort to consider alternative problem definitions, some broad and some narrow. The emphasis is not so much on the right problem definition but on alternative problem definitions. Sooner or later you will find a definition with which you are happy and that gives useful results.
A problem is like a headache or a stone in your shoe. You know it is there. A problem is provided by the world around you (government regulations, currency changes, disasters, ecological difficulties), by your competitors, or by a breakdown in your own systems (machinery, computers, labour relations). You do not have to go looking for problems.
But then there are the problems that you set for yourself. You could call this “problem finding” but I prefer the broader term of “task setting”. You set yourself a task and then set about carrying out the task. If the task can be achieved in a routine way then there is no problem. If there is no routine way then you have set yourself a problem and it may need creative thinking to solve the problem. The more confident you become about your creative thinking the more willing you will be to set “apparently impossible” tasks.
Many years ago I was sitting next to Professor Littlewood (a famous English mathematician) at dinner in Trinity College, Cambridge University. We were discussing the playing of chess on computers. Chess achieves difficulty through having many pieces with different moves. I said it would be interesting to invent a game in which each player has only one piece. This was a self-imposed challenge. I went away and invented the “L” game in which each player has only an L-shaped piece. The game can be learned in twenty seconds but is a real game and can be played with a high degree of skill. It may, possibly, be the simplest real game.
Any inventor behaves in exactly the same way. The inventor sets himself or herself a task and then sets out to achieve this task. The same thing applies to a design with the only difference being that with a design, some sort of output is usually possible, whereas within an invention, unless there is a “breakthrough” there may be nothing at all.
There is an unfortunate tendency in North American psychology to call all purposeful thinking problem solving. This fails to distinguish the thinking involved in extracting ourselves from a difficult situation with the thinking involved in achieving something new.
In the techniques section we shall see that there are techniques, like the “concept fan”, that are particularly suited to achievement thinking. With a problem or a self-imposed task we know where we want to go – we need to find a way of getting there. This is achievement thinking and it is broader than the “problem solving” heading that I have given to this subsection out of consideration for the normal usage of the term “problem”.
It is well known that “problem avoidance” is an important part of problem solving. Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place. This is a process of redesign. If people are always losing their keys you redesign the security system so that it does not use keys.
As competing organizations increase their competence, success and survival shift to what they can do with their core assets. The assets may be market position, qualified people, distribution systems, technical know-how (and patents), brand names, and so on. This third use of creative thinking is directly involved in adding value, in creating value, and in designing opportunities.
There was a time when efficiency and problem solving were enough, but today these just provide the baseline. What new products and services can we design? How can we position our products and services? How can we provide added value? What new markets and market segments might there be?
Earlier in the book I mentioned the need to switch from classic competition to the newer concept of sur/petition. I mentioned the importance of “integrated values” in providing the consumer with what is needed. These are all matters that are dealt with in detail in the book called Sur/petition.fn1
It is always possible to copy others, to devise me-too products and to take over innovative companies. These are valid strategies and seem to carry less risk than innovation. But why wait for other parties to do what you could have done first? In any competent and well-run corporation there are unused assets that only require creative thinking to be put to work.
Problems demand attention. Crises have to be survived. Improvement is often undertaken as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Unfortunately there is no simple spur that encourages people to look for opportunities. That requires entrepreneurial spirit. Where people are encouraged to be risk-averse there is little incentive to incur risk or extra hassle.
The design of opportunities requires creative thinking. The creation of new value requires new concepts. The “out of the blue” crafting of opportunities depends on someone making the effort to find them. If you simply wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd. If you put in some creative ability you can be ahead of the crowd. Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced. Organizations that are very good at producing things sometimes find it difficult to see the need to produce ideas.
Consideration of the future always requires thinking. We can never have full information about the future, and yet our actions are going to take place, and have consequences, in the future. So creative thinking can be required to foresee the consequences of action and to generate further alternatives for consideration.
Creativity is also required for laying out the possible future in which we may have to work. I have already mentioned how creativity is needed to produce the discontinuities that will not arise from the extrapolation of present trends.
Designing strategies, designing contingency, and fallback positions are all part of a creative design process. Information and logic set the framework. Creative design offers the possibilities. Information and logic assess the possibilities.
In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.
In my experience, strategy is too often seen solely as a reduction process in which various possibilities are reduced to a sensible course of action. There is a greater need for creativity in order to generate further possibilities and in order to devise ways of coping with multiple possibilities. A course of action that should be rejected by well-informed judgement can become a preferred strategy through a creative modification. Like a gold thread running the length of a garment, so creative thinking should continue as part of all thinking that is taking place about the future.
David Tanner, who used to run the Center for Creativity at DuPont, USA, tells me how the umbrella of “creativity” allows people to look at anything that they are doing with a view to rethinking it. Quite often this new attention turns up improvements that have depended more on logic than on creativity. But without the umbrella of creativity the new thinking would never have taken place.
Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting. Creativity provides a framework for working with others as a team.
All these motivating aspects of creativity are quite separate from the actual results of the creative effort.
The important thing is to encourage and to reward creative effort. If you wait to reward creative results you will get less effort. If you get lots of effort then you will, in time, get results.
I have considered here some of the main uses of creative thinking. It could have been simpler to say that wherever there is a need for thinking then there is also a need for creativity. This is not quite good enough, because there are occasions, as with improvement and opportunity design, where there is no apparent “need” for thinking unless we choose to set up that need. No one is forced to look for an opportunity until it is too late. No one is forced to make improvements until it is almost too late.
Fortunately, the thinking culture of business and some other organizations is now beginning to change. I was once told by the chief executive of a very large organization that he was very happy when there were no “problems” in any of his divisions. Today the mood is changing from purely reactive thinking to proactive thinking. This requires creativity.
fn1 HarperBusiness, New York, 1992.