Getting unstuck: Logical problems, meet creativity

Scientists and artists, though rarely thought of in the same breath, share a time-honoured process.

It's a process that starts with just an idea – a hypothesis that suggests, “if this, then that”. Having that idea, creating your hypothesis, testing it, and shifting it is what creates the meaningful progress, but it a portrait or an experiment. And your business strategy is no different.

Helen is one of our Lead Strategists and she cut her teeth at Great State working with the Royal Navy on a huge transformation programme called MyNavy.

Public Sector organisations are large, complex, often slow moving and swathed in rules and processes. So she's better placed than anyone to say that creativity, and creative thinking, can be the secret weapon to unlocking progress to those trickier, more 'logical' problems.

Over to Helen...

What is “creativity”?

California State University defines “creativity” as “the tendency to generate or recognise ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.”

Yet, for some, creativity, and creative skills are perceived by something ephemeral and fluffy. Or perhaps a talent or way of thinking only available to a select few? For better or for worse, creativity has a strong reputation. But it’s a limited one.

Creativity has always been the answer to our most dull and mundane problems. And the key to our most life-changing and innovative solutions. It’s, quite literally, the thing that’s kept humanity growing and learning. When it comes down to it, human beings are pros at problem-solving. And we do it by tapping into our creative thinking.

There are a couple of types of 'creativity' to know about, in fact there's a whole expansive field of academic research on the area. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on three of the most recognised types: divergent, convergent and lateral thinking.

• The goal of ideation is disruption – sparking lots of potential ideas that can then be validated and refined at a later date. This is known as divergent thinking.
• Convergent thinking tries to understand the blockers and enablers of a problem, usually with first-person participants, allowing us to prioritise possible solutions.
• Thinking outside the box is associated with lateral thinking, the problem-solving strategy that looks for indirect and creative solutions that aren’t always immediately obvious.

Overall, lateral and creative thinking encourages you to see the restrictions of earlier solutions and then seeks to cross those boundaries. In doing so, you disrupt existing patterns of behaviour.

Why bother with creative strategy?

There’s a famous quote credited to German military strategist, Helmuth von Moltke. It roughly translates to, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In short, the best laid plans often go awry.

In strategy and business, this is no less true. To counter it, you need a bit of creativity: starting with, but not limited to, flexibility with resources and rapid decision-making in the face of evolving circumstances. This approach to strategy will continue to reveal unexpected solutions and encourage innovation – in even those trickier, slower, stickier sectors and projects.

While having a plan is important, your very survival boils down to your ability to adapt at pace on the battlefield.

How do strategy and creativity come together?

Here's a good example. Great State was tasked with coming up with a new way for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to order their kit. Working with the Second Sealord, we were given 12 weeks to get to MVP.

The task was to reduce the frustration and time waste caused by the existing customer experience. For personnel, ordering kit was notoriously painful and discovery revealed many of those pain points: over-involved manual processes, confusion around sizing, and inconsistent experiences across the physical stores – to name a few.

For example, if you had new kit to collect, but also wanted to check on the availability of more stock, you would have to do this in two separate stores. Not to mention, opening hours for these stores weren’t readily available. The experience was stuck.

We spent time interviewing people from across the Service, to put years of their experience into context. And then we started thinking laterally – looking to see which existing processes, patterns of behaviour, and even Defence policy were ripe for disruption. We questioned everything until we found those self-imposed boundaries, the ones predicated on the idea that “we’ve always done it that way.”

In the end, the solution was simple: a click-and-collect service, accessible anywhere in the world from any personal device. It gave personnel the convenience to place an order to their preferred UK store, provided transparency around stock availability and store opening hours, and empowered their decision-making with a useful measurement and sizing tool.

Old habits and systems had fostered a tangled problem. Lateral thinking and creative problem-solving led us to the answer with the biggest impact.

How do you unleash your creative genius?

It can be really tricky to try and 'unstick' your thinking. Old habits die hard, if you solved a problem using one method before, it should work again... right?

Here are three different ideation methods we regularly use for strategic thinking at Great State that can unlock a whole load of progress.

Worst possible idea

Purposefully seek the worst solutions to the problem at hand. Start by brainstorming as many terrible ideas as possible, and then examine these ideas to identify suitable opposing solutions. By looking at what doesn’t work, you can often spark insight into what could.

Brain-writing

Brainstorming solutions, round-robin style. Instead of sharing ideas out loud, you ask participants to write down their own ideas. Then, they each take a turn to share. A collective and considered response takes shape as participants build on each other’s ideas.

Scamper

SCAMPER stands for: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put To Another Use, Eliminate, and Reverse. You’ll use these 7 different prompts to reimagine and understand how an existing product, service, concept, or more can be improved or innovated further.

Ready to get unstuck?

Hopefully this blog has given you a starter for ten, but a problem shared is a problem halved, so if you have a project or a problem weighing on your mind and you can do with a helping hand from the Strategy team at Great State. Send us an email at hello@greatstate.co.