5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 6: Keep at it

This is the next post looking at why the 5 principles of creativity work put forward but this blog as they do. This post examines the concept of 'keep at it', more commonly known as persistence. Edison himself said that success is "90% perspiration 10% inspiration".

Creative ideas being new have a high chance of failure or at least partial success. Persistence is the attribute that allows people to continue to apply creative thinking to overcome these initial obstacles. There are very few creative ideas that have becomes successful without some form of modification. Persistence is the factor that has allowed these ideas to overcome these initial hurdles and become the major break throughs that they are.

5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 5: Hedging Bets

This is the next post looking at why the 5 principles of creativity work as they do. This post examines hedging your bets.

What this is trying to say in the nicest possible teams is expect failure. What we tend to regard as the result of creative efforts is major innovations and changes, What we don't notice is those innovations that didn't quite have the same impact or those that failed. We may also fail to notice that what seems like one big change is actually the result of a series of small changes.

When being creative you need to expect that not all ideas will pan out. This is the major concept behind portfolio management in the field of new product development. Mix a number of low risk low return projects along with higher risk, higher return projects. Overall the portfolio should balance out and you have the possibility of some major payoff if some of the high risk projects are successful. The alternative (when trying to minimize risk) is a string of projects that are low risk but also now return and that lead to very little change.

For leaders and decision makers in organisations, this has to be the key lesson. Find a way to hedge bets so that you can take the odd risk on a creative idea. The alternative is at best a stable of creative ideas but no innovation or change as a result.

5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 4: Cross Domains

This is the next post looking at why the 5 principles of creativity proposed by this blog work as they do. This post examines cross domain thinking.

Of all the creativity techniques, getting use to cross domain thinking can be the most rewarding and can sometimes lead to quick results.  It can also make you look slightly crazy. In short if you are looking to increase your creative output in the shortest time, with the least effort, then cross domain thinking is the best way to do this - as long as you are comfortable coming up with some fairly 'left-field' ideas.

So why is cross-domain thinking so important.

First off is that much of creativity is about the recombination of ideas. There a very few ideas that are truly original. Asking someone to come up with a creative idea that has not been thought of before is an extremely difficult assignment. It's a lot easier, and a lot more productive to look around at ideas in use within other fields.

The second reason that cross domain thinking is so valuable is because chances are, the problem you are trying to deal with has already been solved somewhere else - and solved well. Someone somewhere HAS to get that little irritating problem that you would like to solve right. For example, if you have a quality issue, then look to the airline industry - where they NEED to get quality right. If you have a rapid response issue then look to law enforcement. Again, what may be a valuable need for you is essential for them. Cross domain thinking provides ready access to well understood and mature best-practice solutions.

The third reason is that cross domain thinking (once you get used to it) is a lot easier than delving deeper into one domain. The learning load of continuing to expand knowledge deeper into the crevices of a single discipline is high whereas a large amount of potentially useful concepts and information can be gathered from a different field in a very short period of time.

Finally with cross domain you are more likely to come up with a unique combination that hasn't been tried before. If you want an example of how combining apparently unrelated concepts can be hugely rewarding just think of mixing wizards with boarding school and the success of the Harry Potter franchise.

There appears to be a growing interest in the value that generalists can provide to an organisation and a slight stepping back from super specialists. The benefits of cross-domain thinking may in fact be behind this new found interest in generalists.

5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 3: Effort

This is the next post looking at why the 5 principles of creativity work as they do. This post examines the concept of learning the rules before you break them.

What this section of the post is actually talking about is effort.  Achieving a creative breakthrough is almost always the result of a lot of effort. History abounds with examples of creative individuals who put significant time and effort into an area to achieve a breakthrough.

Thomas Edison's workshop, when assigned a problem to solve, would spend considerable time and effort to go out and learn everything that they could about the problem area that they had been assigned before they attempted a solution. The reason that this is effective are:

1. it reduces the chance of simply attempting something that has already been tried before. In the modern world, there is a significant amount of prior history in most fields. For those new to a field or discipline, the chances that they could attempt to repeat something that has already been done are high.
2. unless you know the basic disciplines of a filed you won't know what is appropriate to break. For example if you were looking to innovate in the field of avionics, there is a required safety threshold (as well as regulatory expectations) that you would be required to meet. Ideas that breached these rules would have little value.
3. understanding a discipline ensures that you can best leverage any creative insights. The world is full of highly educated professionals and often the difference between good and great is less than 5%. If you know a field well, you will be able to understand if a creative idea is going to make that difference.

The issue of effort is often under-rated because hindsight makes ideas seem simpler to come up with than they really are. Given the busy nature of modern work environments, getting time for the deep and original thinking required to generate great creative ideas is a big ask.

5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 2: Define the Problem

This is a second post in the series that looks at the five principles of creativity to explain why these work. This post examines why failure to properly define and distill an issue is more problematic in large organizations.

Large organizations may struggle to be creative because the 'problem' is often couched in terms that make it difficult for employees to come up with creative solutions for. There is a disconnection between what the organization wants and how the employees can contribute.  For example asking individual employees to find creative solutions to 'increase shareholder value' is a poor problem statement - even though it may be a key outcome managers are trying to achieve. There are a number of reasons for this, as follows.

Firstly this type of problem statement is too open. This makes it difficult for employees to work out where to start. If it is unclear what the problem is, it increases the risk that the creative ideas miss the mark. In short it may be difficult for employees to find ways to directly connect what they do to this high level outcome.

Even if people can draw a connection between what they do and shareholder value, in most large organizations, individual employees may view that their individual actions only have a minor effect on shareholder value. Employees may struggle to see the point in being creative as the difference they make on the top line measure is small. It takes a lot of mental energy to be creative so there needs to be a meaningful reason for people to want to expend that energy.


The solution to this belongs with the manager. One of the roles of managers in a creative organisation (or any organization) is to bridge the gap between corporate strategy (the 'increasing shareholder value') statement and the work that individual employees do. For example in a service industry the managers may be better setting a specific objective of finding ways for customers to report that they feel more valued. Having customers report that they feel valued will add to shareholder value but is also specific enough for employees to work with. More importantly, it is something that they feel they can control and may be worthwhile putting the effort into.

In short managers need to be able to clearly direct the issues that they want employees to put their creative effort into.

5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 1: Define the Problem

The post 5 principles of creativity outlines a number of principles to be creative. This is the first in a series of posts that attempt to explain why these principles work to encourage creativity.

The first principle is to "define and distill the problem".

The reasons that defining and distilling a problem is so important for creativity is because of the underlying social nature to creativity. People are natural problem solvers. The problem for managers is that they will mostly focus on the problem that provides the greatest reward.The signals that an organization can send an employee may overwhelm what a manager wants the employees to focus on. As an example, organizations that continually load work onto employees will find that they have employees who are very creative at managing work volumes but have no creativity effort put into the quality of the service that they provide. Tightly defining a problem re-sets employees views of what is being asked of them.

Also, many employees who are perfectly creative when pursuing hobbies in their personal life may not be creative at work. Again, this is due to social factors - specifically the emotional risk (of ridicule) that people subject themselves to when they put forward creative ideas. Having a well defined and distilled problem reduces this risk as the ideas will be tightly focused and likely to be seen as off-the-wall or frivolous.It creates a 'safer' environment for people to put forward ideas.


The article above also explains that failure to define and distill an issue explains why brainstorming often fails - they are simply to unfocused. This is backed up by studies which, when examining the effectiveness of brainstorming have come to the conclusion that better results are obtained by asking people to come up with ideas individually (the exception to this is electronically facilitated brainstorming). 

The next post will look at why failure to define and distill a problem is particularly an issue for large organizations.