Roads to the land of creativity

Apart from understanding key principles and checking out your personal creative style, where can you go for inspiration and help in developing applied creativity? I would now like to briefly review four major threads in the world of applied creativity:

The Osborn-Parnes Process (or Creative Problem Solving: 'CPS')
Synectics
De Bono: 'lateral thinking' and the 'Six Hats' method
The Triz method

The Osborn-Parnes Process
The Osborn-Parnes Process (aka 'Creative Problem Solving' or 'CPS') was conceived by Alex Osborn (the O in the advertising agency BBDO) and Dr Sidney Parnes. Osborn is said to have coined the term 'brainstorming', a process he instituted in 1939 in response to the agency's financial and marketing problems. He set out to teach people to be more creative and his 'Applied Imagination', published in 1953, was the first creativity textbook.

Part of the value of CPS to qualitative researchers is that it was invented to be applied in a real business environment. The process, in its simplest form, has three components - the exploration of the challenge, the generation of ideas and the planning for action. It makes use of both divergent and convergent thinking tools in each component. It can be used to solve all types of problems, including the kinds of things that qualitative researchers are asked to tackle.

Useful ideas found within CPS include (divergent) techniques for fully exploring the context of a problem, like the '5W's and H' approach: 'who, what, where, when, why and how'. It's a way of systematically 'gathering data' on a problem from many directions. Another one I find useful is exploring an idea from the perspective of your favourite people - I might think about what David Bowie would think about this idea, or Nelson Mandela, or Princess Diana. The opposite also works - thinking about it from the perspective of someone you dislike. And so on.

To find out more, a good place to start would be Parnes (1992) - it has all you need to know to carry out structured problem solving using the CPS process.

Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono - probably the most familiar name in this field - created the method of 'lateral thinking' in the mid 60s. This is thinking that is neither linear nor rational, based not on analysis but on the use of a (random) 'provocation' - e.g. a word randomly chosen in a dictionary and used to generate associative ideas. It offers a way to divergent thinking that is conscious, methodical and organised. Its main aim is also to help us change how we perceive the world around us, and to help us change how we traditionally or habitually construct and refine concepts. Changed perceptions then sometimes lead to new solutions or ideas.

De Bono opposed other approaches to creative thinking that favour inspiration, intuition or the sub-conscious, believing instead in approaches to creative thinking governed by reason. He believed that creative thinking was a skill that could be taught directly and also supported individual creativity against collective creativity.

This theory contains many practical ideas. For example, the 'Six Hats' method is a way to code in an organised way the contributions made by each participant. Each of the 'six hats', each a different colour, is associated with a different intent, i.e. red for emotion or intuition, yellow for a positive and logical thought, green for a creative thought...etc. This idea can be used in different ways - for example by asking a group participant to think just from one 'hat' for a while, or to use one they habitually avoid. Again, this method represents a form of conscious control over the creative process, which De Bono generally advocated.

The best De Bono source to start with, of the many available, is probably the original and now classic 'Lateral Thinking' (1970).

Synectics

Synectics represents an approach to creativity mainly based on analogies and metaphors. It was developed by W. J. J. Gordon from 1943 and was mainly related to technological invention. Gordon's desire to identify and understand the underlying processes of 'creativity' led him to observe four patterns in creative thought:

the tendency to include the irrelevant or incongruous
the importance of a playful mindset
the use of metaphors
the experience of a pleasurable sense of excitement when reaching the initially set goal

The Synectic method is based on making the familiar odd and the odd familiar. Gordon suggested the use of different types of analogies. One useful technique is a six-stage process. First you need to define the problem, say there is a water shortage. Then you (perhaps with a group) develop direct analogies: 'it is like running out of blood supply for surgery and transfusion'. The next stage is to make the analogies personal: 'it feels like being starved of food'. Then you work on opposites: 'it is not like having to face an avalanche'. You return to direct analogies, building on what's gone before: 'now it's like running out of vaccines with the threat of an epidemic'. Finally, there is a stage of synthesis, where you review the process for key words and themes that you can take forward.

The best book I've found on Synectics is, sadly, only available in French at present (Aznar, 2005). But there is information on the approach to be found at www.mycoted.com.

The Triz Method

The Triz method (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is our fourth and final approach to creativity, presented in 1956 by its Russian creator, Altshuller (1990). Rather than study underlying psychological mechanisms to creativity, he decided to analyse 200,000 invention patents and looked for patterns in the inventing process itself. He deduced eight laws governing an evolution process in technical systems - mirroring the principle of human biological evolution - and twenty key principles leading to invention which are non-domain specific (i.e. of general use).

The Triz method tends to be ignored for general applications, although it is useful for solving technical or engineering problems. It is, however, recognised as one of the foundational pillars of creativity theory and might be worth looking at as an example of a quite different approach. It might even be directly useful to a research problem with a physical component such as retail or product design. To find out more about Triz, the site www.mazur.net/triz gives a full review of the approach.

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