Jumpstart Your Creativity (14 page)

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Looking at guidelines for using models, which ones do you sometimes
not
follow?

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When and where do you think you would use the RD
²
model?

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When and where do you think you would use the OP model?

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When and where do you think you would use the Six Thinking Hats model?

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PROCESS TOOLS

We cannot solve our problems with the
same thinking we used when we
created them
.

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

SIMILAR
to the people in
Chapter 6
who say “models of creativity” stifle their creativity, you may be thinking,
Process Tools? Eeeekkkk! I don't want to do a bunch of Six Sigma Quality Improvement fishbone diagrams and Pareto Charts!
We hear you and we definitely understand your concern. Our goal for you with this chapter is to share some of the process tools we have found to be helpful as part of the creative process. Again, there are hundreds of models available, many that blur the lines between types of creative thinking, problem solving, and decision making. We are focusing here on tools to help with the creative process.

Picture yourself walking toward a brand new grocery store that you have never seen. Now I meet you at the front door, and I take you on a quick tour of the grocery store, pointing out the layout and explaining the basics of each section.
“Here's the deli where they cut meat to your order, this is the seafood counter where you pick up fresh seafood including live lobsters, and over here is the bakery where all the fresh breads are baked daily. You'll find milk and juice in aisles 4 and 5,” and so on. Similar to this brief grocery store tour, we are going to take a tour of some process tools. You may choose not to use all of these tools and that's okay. We want you to know what is available to you.

In this chapter we highlight Framing Tools, Business Process Mapping, Cause Effect Diagrams and Sample Causes, Idea Webbing, and Creative Problem Solving processes.

The discomfort some people suffer with the ambiguity of the creative process comes from the lack of context, historical reference point, or simply a lack of a “conceptual anchor” when they approach the creative process. Framing or reframing helps you put your problem or opportunity in a context to which you can relate. Framing is a form of data gathering or uncovering, sometimes done as a series of questions or through a guided discussion. The framing tools we will share are Five Ws, Pillars, SWOT, Mad-Glad-Sad & Stop-Start-Continue, and “If you could change….”

The Five Ws are questions, and the answers are considered basic information gathering. They are a solid beginning formula for trying to capture “the whole story.” The Five Ws are:

• Who is it about?

• What happened?

• When did it take place?

• Where did it take place?

• Why did it happen?

• How did it happen? (bonus question)

Each question should have a factual answer, not simply yes or no.

Reflecting upon Jim Collins' books
Good to Great
and
Built to Last
, the quality of decisions made by executive teams at companies Collins studied were found to be far better when as many of the “pillars” as possible could be incorporated into the decision-making process. The pillars were identified as service, quality, cost, growth, and people. Since 1999, some companies have added pillars such as safety, efficiency, and productivity. The most successful companies in Collins' research made executive decisions based on two or three pillars, whereas less successful companies often made decisions based on only one pillar. Sadly, too often that one pillar was cost.

Creativity, the generation of original ideas that add value, impacts all of the pillars. Creativity impacts productivity, product and service offerings, quality of work life, profitability, expanding markets, and simply better ways to do things
than are being done today. The reason we include this tool here is that it prompts you to think about a variety of great topics that all need to be covered. When you are brainstorming or idea webbing, you can jog your memory with the list of pillars to make sure you are covering everything. We use the pillars as a memory jog in our RD
²
process as well.

First of all this has nothing to do with police work! That is SWAT. This is SWOT. SWOT analysis is a structured planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. A SWOT analysis can be carried out for a product, place, or person. Setting the objective should be done after the SWOT analysis has been performed. Strengths are the characteristics that give it an advantage over others. Weaknesses are characteristics that place the team at a disadvantage compared to others. Opportunities are things that the project could exploit to its advantage. Threats are items or issues in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or the project. Once gathered, the information can be used to determine if the objective is attainable; if not attainable, a different objective must be selected and the process repeated. The items identified during the SWOT analysis, similar to the pillars, provide more important information that will be extremely important at the evaluation step of the creative process.

Mad-Glad-Sad & Stop-Start-Continue is Steven's proven feedback solicitation process that is outlined in detail in
Steven's book,
Success from the Inside Out
. A skilled facilitator can simply collect the information for this process from a group of employees or team members, identifying which comments are the most common among the entire group and what issues need to be addressed first. The first half of the survey process deals with the question, “What are you mad about, glad about, and sad about working here?” Or it could be, “What are you mad about, glad about, and sad about in terms of how we take care of our customers?”

The second half of the survey process deals with the question, “What should we stop doing, start doing, or continue doing to take better care of our customers?” You can replace the “about working here?” or the “how we take care of our customers?” with any piece of information you want to learn from this group of people. After all the data is collected, themes are identified, allowing the management team or project team to process the data and look for trends, opportunities, and solutions.

If you could change any one thing immediately about how we take care of our customers, with no limit on resources to make it happen, what would you change? Again, you would change the wording of the question to fit your need.

Business process mapping refers to functions involved in defining exactly what a business does, who is responsible,
to what standard a process should be completed, and how the success of a business process can be measured. Once this is done, there can be no uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business process. The main purpose behind business process mapping is to assist organizations in becoming more efficient. A clear and detailed business process map or illustration allows outside firms to come in and look at whether or not improvements can be made to the current process.

The four big steps of process mapping:

1. Process identification—gaining a full understanding of all the steps of a process

2. Information gathering—identifying objectives, risks, and key controls in a process

3. Interviewing and mapping—the point of view of individuals and designing actual maps

4. Analysis—utilizing tools to make the process run more effectively

Ishikawa diagrams, also called fishbone diagrams, herringbone diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, or Fishikawa are causal diagrams created by Kaoru Ishikawa (1968) that show the causes of a specific event. Common uses of the Ishikawa diagram are product design and quality defect prevention, to identify potential factors causing an overall effect. Causes are usually grouped into major categories to identify these sources of variation. The categories typically include:

People:
Anyone involved with the process

Methods:
How the process is performed and the specific requirements for doing it

Machines:
Any equipment, computers, tools, etc. required to accomplish the job

Materials:
Raw materials, parts, pens, paper, etc. used to produce the final product

Measurements:
Data generated from the process that are used to evaluate quality

Environment:
Conditions—location, time, temperature, and culture in which the process operates

Causes in the diagram are often categorized, such as the 6 Ms in manufacturing, 7 Ps of marketing, or the 5 Ss of the service industry.

As mentioned in
Chapter 5
,
Idea Webbing
enables you to collect lots of information from your group quickly yet collect it in an organized way so participants can take ownership of a specific topic, research it, and bring their findings to the next meeting. In
Chapter 5
, the example was a group deciding whether or not to buy a pet dog for the office. First the group identified the following topics that required further research—cost of a backyard fence, whether the office complex allows dogs, the best breed of dog to buy, comparable information for cats instead of dogs, grooming requirements, where to keep the dog when no one is in the office for
extended periods of time, and so on. After the brainstorming is completed, individuals chose a topic they were willing to enthusiastically research and study to made recommendations to the group at the next meeting.

An example of idea webbing follows:

• Mom and Dad to purchase a dog.

• Do we buy a dog?

• All ideas

• Sub ideas related to one idea in bulleted list under main idea

• Color changes

• Connecting them makes the webbing

• Best for teams to divvy up the responsibilities