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.
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