Becoming Optimal: Being Creative
/For years, I was the manager of a behavioral health program focused on adolescents for the military. We had counselors in overseas military locations with families and teens. The program started as a traditional mental health program with our counselors in clinics. We quickly realized we were not achieving the goal of working with individuals at risk. The adolescents and families were not coming to us, so we needed to go to them. We had to break the traditional counseling model to succeed.
We had to get creative.
When we think about being creative, the focus usually goes to art, music, or writing. But it leaves a gap in what is needed today to succeed. Most of us are familiar with the narrow definition of creativity: the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work, such as a painting. However, broader definitions expand creativity as a phenomenon where something new and valuable is formed. This includes intangible things such as music, a theory, a story, or an idea. Further, it includes tangible devices such as machines, shelter, transportation, or software.
Creativity is not just a born trait, like hair or eye color; nor is it the intelligence you were born with. Creativity is learned. The Innovators DNA by Clayton Christensen lists five behaviors that optimize your brain for discovery and creativity. These include:
Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields. Just think how many things developed for the military or NASA have found their way into everyone's day-to-day usage. This goes all the way from Velcro to the internet.
Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom. This is especially useful in marketing and proposal endeavors. Red Teams are another form of this type of activity.
Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of others. This includes other artists, customers, entrepreneurs, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things. We all need a little of Sherlock Holmes' skill sets here.
Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives. This broadens our thoughts and experiences. This is especially true when traveling to new and foreign lands, not just cafe hopping in Paris.
Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.
It will take learning and practice, but these behaviors are within the reach of all of us, regardless of our level of intelligence.
Beyond behavior, I believe other factors influence creativity. These include forming daily habits out of the following:
Using situational advantage to allow for an atmosphere for creative work. This starts in early childhood and carries through adulthood. Some like quiet for inspiration, while Jaws was written in a furnace factory.
Not growing up. You need to maintain a childlike ability to play. This is true intellectually as well as physically.
Being curious. Always.
Having a strong memory. Or having a solid notetaking system that allows one to go back and check on past thoughts and ideas. (Memory can be fleeting.)
Maintaining broad interests and vision. Viewing the world, not just what you see out your window.
Having the ability to switch between intense concentration and loose relaxation. This is key. Inspiration, thoughts, and insights come from using both of these skill sets.
For those of us who work as employees, we can look at creativity from a different vector. Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, defines work as either: (1) Algorithmic—doing the same thing over and over in a certain way, or (2) Heuristic—coming up with something new every time because there are no set instructions to follow. Being heuristic is being creative.
We had to be heuristic, or creative, for the teen/adolescent mental health program. We decided to move the counselors to the schools where the teens spent most of their day. To better identify those at risk, we focused on identification and referral. That meant establishing relationships and agreements with command, medical, military police, principals, teachers, etc., to refer teens who may be at high risk for substance abuse or other issues.
We became the central community program for adolescents. Prevention became proactive through early referrals. This resulted in no suicides, less early return of families to the states, which improved mission readiness, reduced incidents of criminal activity that impacted relations with these countries where we are a guest, higher graduation rates, and early warning to command and schools of new risks as they evolved. In addition, we formulated a method to quantitatively track results of each patient and counselor. This produced an accurate indicator of who was getting better, which forced counselors to take a hard look at their approach and results.
This creative approach turned traditional counseling sideways. It was initially met with resistance and apprehension by our counselors, but over time they saw that they were becoming better clinicians and were producing solid change to our patients.
Richard Branson of Virgin has a mantra called A B C D: always be connecting the dots. Thomas Disch, author of 334, states: “Creativeness is the ability of seeing relationships where none exist.” Today, to succeed in a career and obtain maximum rewards, you need to be heuristic or creative. Otherwise, you are a commodity doing commodity work and getting rewarded at a commodity rate.
You know that you are more creative than that.
Pat