Creative problem solving - an experience.

What is creativity and how can we use it in our daily life? How can we start to think out of the box? And how does group work affect creative thinking?

Last week, I joined a very inspiring workshop, where I learned a lot about all these questions. I'd like to share my key learnings with you. Maybe you can be inspired by it as well? It was fantastic to learn from my colleague Marin Zec and to see how many brilliant ideas can be developed by a few people in a very short time.

We started with an exercise that shows, what can make generating ideas so difficult. We found out that assumptions and rules can hold us back. But there is no right or wrong while working creative. Creativity is about challenging our rules and assumptions. This is something, anyone can learn - and creativity is a skill we are all able to develop! 

Especially in our culture, it is a habit to react to ideas with "yes, but…". This is caused by the way of convergent thinking we use a lot in our daily life. Convergent thinking aims for quality and is a useful measure to make ideas realistic and feasible. It's important to make fast decisions and to give "correct" answers to a standard question. In the workshop, we tried to leave the "but" aside at first and turn it into "Yes, and…". You automatically develop ideas further without destroying the origin. This is also called divergent thinking and helps to develop ideas in more quantity and without a "but" building a frame to think in. Creative thinking however, involves both. To come to a novel and useful conclusion, we need to iterate in cycles and use convergent and divergent thinking in separate phases.

 In my experience, the most common creativity method is brainstorming. I think nearly everyone knows it (…not everyone really follows the necessary rules, but however, the method itself is quite popular). We often practice it in teams. Made totally sense in my opinion. But I learned something new last week. What do you think, is the best size for a brainstorming group when you want to develop as many ideas as possible? - mindblowing answer: it is one. Due to different social effects like framing, social loafing, or the effect of preferring solutions proposed by the majority, we perform worse in groups than on our own when it comes to creativity. To get the most out of a brainstorming session, you should start with individual ideation before working collaboratively. 

To turn those lessons into action, we experienced some creativity methods first hand. We got information about a challenge which really exists in Celonis and tried to find ideas to deal with it. After first visualizing 3 ideas in 3 minutes on our own, we worked with the 6-3-5 method (6 rounds where you develop 3 ideas each in 5 minutes and you work based on the ideas of your colleagues). We came up with over 150 different ideas after 30 minutes!! This method clearly fostered divergent thinking. Which was great to get a huge amount of ideas. In the next step, we came back to convergent thinking and put the best ideas into a matrix and rated them in feasible/not (yet) feasible and common/original. 

I really liked the outcome of the workshop and will try to integrate more creative thinking in my daily work. Also the format colleagues learning from colleagues was fantastic. Maybe everyone of us could start to use a little more creativity - because it's fun, helpful and anyone can learn it!