Hack your Creativity to become more Innovative and Agile, E:10

When CEOs were asked, “What is the skill you most value in your people?”, they said creativity, the ability to solve problems, come up with new solutions, and use brainpower to figure things out. (source)  Learn how to tap into your creativity and run a brainstorming session the RIGHT WAY!

My guest today is Dagný Valgeirsdóttir (email is Dagný@neurocreativity.dk).  Dagný has a PhD in enhancing creativity.  Currently she is working at the Technical University of Denmark as a postdoctoral creativity researcher and facilitator who specializes in ways to enhance individual creativity through metacognitive creativity training. 

Well, thank you so much for being with us today. Really excited about your topic. It's one that's very top of mind today as we are a society that is moving so quickly and so rapidly that we need to be innovative as much as possible. So tell us about the topic that you're going to share with us today.

Thanks for having me first of all.  I am going to talk about a topic that I have been very enthusiastic about four years now and looking into in great depth, which is ways to enhance creativity and I see creativity as the raw material of innovation and of course, we know innovation is very important and that led me to think that will help. Can we actually enhance creativity?

Great. I like the way you talked about creativity being the raw material of innovation. So, what is the science behind that that helps you to understand how to be more creative?

Through my studies of individuals working in creative processes, I started to notice this tendency of especially experienced designers and engineers, that the more aware of their own processes, so their creative processes, and the more knowledgeable they were of the things that could actually influence their processes, the better they were at facilitating both their own process as well as their teams process. So, the main findings were this concept that I developed called process awareness, meaning that you actually have to know about the things / stuff that can cognitively influence you and your work, and the better you are at actually monitoring yourself and being aware and conscious of your work, the better you become at facilitating it.

Yeah, that's powerful. I work with leaders in coaching and focusing on self-awareness is so important. So, what are the things that you do to help these engineers and leaders to really become more aware of their process as it relates to creativity.

I actually developed a training program, so it's a one-and-a-half-day program. It's very condensed because, of course, I'm working with practitioners and they don't have a lot of time to spare, so it's a one and a half day training program where I educate them about the things that can affect them, like how they can manage constraints through their work and how they should be aware of how priming affects them and when they need a break and all these practical things that when you're educated about it, you kind of have an Aha moment. Like, Oh yeah, of course I should have known that, but if you don't have the word for those concepts, it's difficult for you to facilitate them. So first and foremost, it's about educating them and then I take them through specifically designed exercises where they actually applied those concepts.

They try them out firsthand so that they can recognize them when they are doing their work. So, they see, okay, so is how fixation feels for instance, and this is how it feels when I really need a break. And then finally after having educated them I let them try it out. I give them some advice on how to subsequently react to those situations, so that's the core of my program.  It is called the Know-Recognize-React model.

So, it has these three layers know, recognize, and react. You educate them, put them through the experiences, give the Aha moment, and then help them with ways that they can help improve their creativity based on that.

Exactly. Great. So, what is the tip or the hack that you want to share with us today based on your experience, what you've seen maybe something that's worked the most effectively with the people within your workshop or organizations that you work with?

The one thing that has been a huge eye opener for majority of the participants in my training program is the fact that you should not jump to a solution because there are actually these two concepts called problem space and solution space. People in the modern society today, we've become very narrow minded. We've gone through educational systems that don't really allow for a lot of creativity. We are always in demand of the right answer right now and also when we entered the job market. Then of course, it becomes even more intense because you have a lot of time constraints and so on, so you don't really allow yourself to actually explore the problem. Am I really working with the right problem? Of course. I know that this can be challenging in the real world, but just knowing about the fact that sometimes it's okay to challenge the problem that you're working with and say, okay, maybe I should spend 30 minutes just exploring is this actually the problem that I want to be solving or is it something else? This has been a huge eyeopener for my participants to stuff just jumping to solutions because we're so focused on producing results, but rather explore a little bit before you then start working on the solution and that's my hope. You end up with a much more creative solution then.

That's a great point. The conversation reminds me of an executive that I used to work with and this phrase he brought up always stuck with me. He'd say, “What is the problem we're trying to solve?” Because you would see people quickly trying to throw solutions and this really helped us step back and get clarity around that. So, what are the things that you've seen people do or worked with organizations where it's helped them step back into that problem space before they go into the solution space? What is a tip around that?

Well, I think first and foremost just to bring it up to people's attention because sometimes people aren't even aware of the fact that they maybe can or should explore the problem. So just for instance, in one of the sessions that I have with innovation practitioners was that they kind of felt that they were equipped with knowledge now that they could bring to their executives.

And then that's a conversation opener because a lot of the times there is kind of a misalignment between what the project level wants and what the executive level wants. So this misalignment sometimes ends up in an environment that's maybe not very supportive to creativity, but having this knowledge they felt a bit empowered and then they can at least start the conversation and figure out ways to use this knowledge to their advantage and to advocate for the fact that maybe it would be actually beneficial to explore a little bit before we start solving the problem.

And I think you hit on a very common area that I hear and work with executives with all the time as well in organizations where there is a misalignment between what different people believe the problem is or the communication between that. So, in your experience working with these organizations, do you have an experience of when some of these people that you've trained or worked with have helped to step back into that problem space?

Yeah, there was actually one very concrete example that I was given after I had done a training program with one of my participants and she actually wrote me afterwards telling me that she was mainly had two responsibilities towards clients.  And the clients might have some design requirements or some requirements for a project that they wanted to have solved and that just bringing this up and actually asking the client, well, would you mind if we actually explored and then having the right arguments for why that is important and that actually helped her to facilitate this discussion which ended up in them actually exploring the problem further. So again, it all comes down to having the right type of knowledge and being aware of how things can influence your process and then you can subsequently manage it a bit better.

Yeah, I think that's a great tip.  If we jumped too quickly to solve the problem, we might not be solving the right problem and taking the time to step back. And like you said, with fast paced organizations, it's really difficult to be able to do that at times or we feel like it's difficult to do that. Yeah. So how have you used this personally?

Obvious