Coloring Outside the Lines

One of the great perks of my job at WE is I get to step away from my day-to-day and devote time to learning. Not only do I get to organize some awesome sessions for our employees, but I get to attend as well. Case in point: recently a group of my WE colleagues and I devoted a day to Creative Problem Solving with Amy Frazier of Stages of Presence.

At WE, we like to “color outside the lines” as we say. Coming up with novel ideas to wow the client is what we do day in and day out.

In the workshop, we learned how each step of the creative process requires a mental skill: Clarify; Ideate; Develop; Implement. We had the chance to take a FourSight assessment to learn about our own individual preference(s) in each of those steps and to recognize – pay attention, this is important here – that these are thinking preferences, not thinking abilities.

Many of us fall into the trap of thinking we’re not creative enough if we struggle when brainstorming big ideas. But that’s not true. While one may not have a high preference in the Ideate stage of generating ideas, it’s the strengths from the other preference(s) that can aid in the entire creative process.

It’s a process after all. We first have to take time to Clarify the challenge or issue. Then, once we Ideate some sweet ideas, the final steps of Develop to refine the ideas and weigh options and Implement to carry the idea across the finish line are all critical pieces of the process. Does one of these steps give you more energy than the others? That step (it may be more than one) is your preference.

The key here as well is to not only be aware where our own preferences lie in the Creative Problem Solving process, but also think about the client or colleague you’re working with and what preference(s) he/she may have. How should that affect how you collaborate together?

Without getting too academic here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out the importance of deliberate thinking. Sometimes we need to think wide and big (“divergent thinking”) where other times we need to switch gears and narrow in our focus (“convergent thinking”). Be deliberate throughout the creative process about which one you’re using and where one may be more beneficial over the other.

At the end of the day we had gleaned new insights into our Creative Problem Solving preferences, practiced numerous tools in each stage of the process and walked away smarter, more aware and ready to grab our proverbial coloring books and color far outside the lines. #WELearnDev