Beyond Brainstorming: Beyond Creativity: State Department Paves Path for Increased Innovation

Article written for The Government Training News

by Bob Bookman

In May of 2000, the Department of State embarked on developing a creative problem solving workshop that would:

• Help participants challenge their own thinking boundaries and explore new horizons where better ideas, solutions and a framework for a winning future could be found.
• Turn fuzzy problem statements into highly focused problem-challenges that would greatly assist in leading to solutions.
• Use a variety of creative problem-solving tools and techniques, applied to real workplace problems.

The State Department training team did not want to just focus on conventional exercises like brainstorming or connecting nine dots with four straight lines. Instead, they wanted a practical course where participants would apply creative thinking tools to the thorniest of their workplace problems -- and truly think beyond the box.

Young children are not in a box when they are coming up with new ways of doing things because they are not encumbered with the filters of pre-set patterns that come from experience. It has been said that children enter schools as question marks and filled with wonder, and leave as periods and right answer machines. In essence, the brain is designed, through our experience, to set up perceptual patterns and to stick to them. To be creative, we need tools to break these embedded patterns -- and this is what the Creative Problem Solving Workshop was designed to do. To go beyond such simplistic tools as brainstorming, which, for example, does not help people identify and challenge premises that keep the status quo in place, and thus produces only slightly better answers to often the wrong question.

To get maximum benefit from the course, participants were asked to bring at least two operational problems from their current work situation. They were notified beforehand that the most appropriate problems for these exercises would be 1) work related (rather than personal); 2) operational or systemic (rather than interpersonal); and 3) within one's sphere of control or influence (rather than global).

Three key reasons the State Department embarked on developing a creative problem solving workshop at this important juncture:

• The arrival of a new administration in Washington always implies change for all federal agencies. This period of flux is a CTP when the ground may be especially fertile for any creative seeds that fall on it.
• A review of the Foreign Service Institute's curriculum showed that few of its courses addressed the key competency of creativity directly. Very few employees had been trained in how to think creatively.
• The fact was that change itself had changed! The old rules mandated changes of degree (not kind) that supported linear and incremental movement. In the past few years, old rules were failing because incremental change kept the old rules in place, thus allowing the status quo to continue its reign. New courses needed to be developed to assist people in getting beyond incremental change, and look at the possibilities of totally redefining problems and generating new and creative solutions.

One of the highlights of the course material was a metaphor on how the mind works in terms of creative output and "getting stuck." Here's how it works:

Think of your mind as a full container of ice cream. Imagine pouring hot water from a spoon on the flat top of the ice cream and then gently tipping the container so that the liquid runs off. After many repetitions of this process, the surface of the ice cream would be full of ruts. When information enters the mind, it flows, like water, into the preformed ruts. After a while, it takes only a small amount of information to activate an entire rut. This is the pattern-recognition and pattern-completion process of the brain.

Even if much of the information is out of the rut, the mind will automatically correct and complete the information to select and activate a pattern.

When we sit down and try to will new ideas or solutions, we tend to keep coming up with the same old ideas-perhaps with a bit of "creativity," but no real breakthroughs. Information is activating the same old ruts making the same old connections, producing the same old ideas over and over again. Or to put it another way, if you always think what you've always thought, you'll always get what you've always got.

Creativity occurs when we tilt the container of ice cream and force the water (information) out of the ruts and get it flowing in a new direction. You tilt the ice cream by combining information in different ways. These new combinations give you different ways to focus your attention, and different ways to interpret whatever you are focusing on. It is these different ways of focusing your attention and different ways of interpreting what you are focusing on that lead to new insight, original ideas, and creative solutions.

The workshop design featured engaging and relevant exercises that focused on the very latest tools in creative problem solving. These included Premise Inquiry, Lotus Blossom Method, and Morphological Forced Connections. In addition, the workshop provided realistic ways of "thinking big" and dreaming the impossible -- even when the work environment seemed to conspire to dull participants' inspiration and imagination.

The two-day workshop was piloted recently and received highly positive reviews. Bill Weech, the course manager at the Foreign Service Institute, reflected on the experience; "Although we did all of our needs assessment homework in advance of the pilot session, I was still a little nervous about how this new course would be received. I shouldn't have worried. The pilot offering was oversubscribed and we had to turn people away. Those who were lucky enough to get in to the pilot session rated the course very highly. In fact, 100% of the participants agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘Overall, the knowledge and skills I gained in this workshop are directly applicable to my job.' According to the ASTD Benchmarking Study, that particular statement is the best Level One predictor of behavior change on the job. So I definitely consider this program a winner and intend to continue it in the future."

Copyright 2002 Bookman Resources, Inc.