💡“I’m not creative.”
That was one of the first things I heard during a recent cross-company training course on Developing Creativity.
The participants were executives from very different sectors: energy, education, food, healthcare, social protection and banking. Yet the same issue kept resurfacing: on the one hand, the real — or perceived — injunction to “think differently”; on the other, the pressure to find practical solutions to very real problems.
Here are three observations from the course.
Observation 1: “I’m not creative”
Whether or not someone is creative is deeply subjective. Who can truly define themselves by saying, “I am this” or “I am not that”?
Perhaps we should begin by replacing “being” with “doing”. Stop asking whether we are creative and start producing ideas — lots of them. We can sort through them later.
The writer Ray Bradbury advised people not to set out to write a good novel straight away, but to write one short story a week instead. After a year, among some fifty stories, there would probably be two or three genuinely interesting ideas worth developing.
Creativity works in much the same way: produce first, judge later.
Observation 2: A storm of sticky notes?
Is brainstorming simply a session where people freely write ideas on sticky notes?
Yes… and no.
Brainstorming produces genuinely interesting ideas only when every stage is clearly framed. First, the problem must be defined properly. Next, ideas are generated by challenging the initial assumptions. Finally, the group returns to a structuring phase to turn that raw material into solutions.
If you are already thinking about the solution while defining the problem, you destroy any real chance of breaking out of the box. The resulting ideas often fall flat.
Likewise, if someone starts discussing technical or commercial feasibility in the middle of the “storm of ideas”, there is little chance that anything genuinely new will emerge.
You therefore need a framework, a facilitator and strict rules.
Creativity, in fact, goes hand in hand with intellectual rigour. To think outside the box, you first need to build a solid box. Long live constraints, as the staunch advocates of Oulipo might say.
During the course, the group worked on a lateral-thinking exercise to create a new product for Moleskine. While defining the problem, one participant immediately introduced an initial solution.
Old biases die hard.
The facilitator must constantly intervene to ensure that the group stays within the right stage instead of anticipating the next one.
Observation 3: Sleep on it
End of day one. The group is tired. One participant shows signs of frustration as we unpack the lateral-thinking process.
The best thing to do? Stop.
We switch to a simpler exercise to end the day.
“Let’s let this technique settle. We’ll come back to it tomorrow morning.”
The next day, we begin with a short exercise session on the esplanade at La Défense. The weather is fine. A cool breeze blows between the towers.
We return to the training room.
The participant who had seemed unsettled by the lateral-thinking techniques the day before comes over to me:
“By the way, I get what we did yesterday now! I can see how it works.”
Sometimes, an idea needs us to stop working on it before it can begin to find its way.
These observations also helped shape the Off the Rails approach — Think Differently, Act Effectively: helping teams break out of their usual loops, seek ideas far beyond their own sector, and then bring them back down to earth as practical solutions.
To land spacecraft on Mars, engineers devised an airbag system capable of cushioning the impact with the ground.
What if the next solution to your problem already existed — but in a completely different world?
