More odd that 11 years on, the more I work with seemingly 'non-creative' industries (Government, Mining, Financial Services, Pharmaceutical Industries for example) the more creative I become - and can be.
These 11 years have been interesting - and while the following 'Ages' are not as crisply segmented as they sound - they are fairly close to what I now know about what creativity really means, and how that emerged.
Year One: The Age of Context. Coming from the creative industry everything was about the idea and its cleverness or the sheer awe of its production. It wasn't essential that it met every dimension and it could be argued (and was) that it didn't need to. I didn't agree. It irked me that I was responsible for solving the wrong problem really well. I needed to think bigger.
Context became a big part of my life. The first year of the business was all about mapping the context and building what is now the Discovery Framework, which was all about the surrounding context within which to think. It often shocked people and me that so much from one industry could be so relevant to another. Many people remarked on how rethinking their own context generated fresh thinking. Creativity. I thought I was onto something.
Year Two: The Age of Facilitation. In the early days I had great friends and colleagues who would facilitate while I sat quietly and built the content into the context of the framework. This was all about 'active-listening' - translating the conversations forced by the contextual frame. It occurred to me that creativity was about knowing where to hunt for the truffles. Where a fresh idea might be lurking - and how to trap and then skin an insight. It meant asking a question and then a better question and then…
I freely admit that I was happier butting in and I couldn't stay quiet. I know I was frustrated and I was frustrating others, but I needed to keep the questions digging deeper and deeper. I needed to actually step it up. The age of facilitation meant I had to move from sitting at a drawing pad in the corner to getting into the art of facilitation. Could I do both? Ask the questions and complete the framework?
Year Three: The Age of Collaborative Endeavour. By now I had been completely seduced by the power of context and the sheer effect a visual interpretation of the conversations was having. We were now beginning to see the importance of having the right people in the program. Inclusion and ownership – engagement and understanding.
We were observing how behaviours were altering in some situations and not others, how groups reacted differently when their leaders were present and how we could leverage these dynamics. At this time we had started to become much more structured and the context was being informed by better thinking ahead of time. We were working within more collaborative systems and architectures. We were growing.
Year Four: The Age Of Structured Thinking. Now it was all starting to make sense. We had become very much more capable of being prepared for the work that was coming along. Bigger and bigger issues, larger and larger enterprises. We could understand the context, we could appreciate the bigger picture. We realised that we knew nothing. That helped.
We seemed able, because of the frameworks and the discussions, to better 'think' about a smarter idea, a new scenario, a more deft turn of phrase or something completely new and fresh. To start to think like this requires this emergence, this journey. We were better able to work together to cause this ideation through the structured and visual surfacing of seemingly curious ideas that then became less curious.
We could analyse these things more objectively and now we started to create decision architectures. We had grown to respect far more what a well considered framework could produce. It didn't restrict creativity it made it happen. Whether we built them ahead of the sessions or during - these 'tools' formed the basis of what we now know why frameworks work to solve issues. We were also starting to be able to describe what we did.
Year Five: The Age of Sustainability. Solving the wrong problems well is a fools errand. It's also what many businesses and Government agencies seem to do repeatedly. In truth we are impartial about all the outcomes of our work as long as they can be sustained. This means putting the ownership and capability of the outcomes into the hands of those who must deliver.
We began to engage on many more levels. The people involved in the thinking process were now far more able to 'own' the process for themselves. This meant that we were able to give them more and more accountability for the outcomes. This work was never about us but enabling real creativity on the part of the team considering the 'exam question' we were debating. Creative problem solving is not an event it must live and be watered often once born. If we don't think sustainably then we solve an event. If we think sustainably we can transform everything.
Year Six: The Age Of Partnering. The approach to solving problems this way kicked off with being impartial to a given outcome. A more creative way to think. I was a client myself and deserved every lame solution I bought. With this business I never wanted us to be a solution that conveniently re-engineered the problem so that it looked valid. Whatever we did - we didn't want the curse of the 'expert' getting in the way of being as creative as we could be.
Around this time we realised that we needed to excel at partnering. We had always had an Expert Network to call on once we had identified the real problem. We needed to be able to leverage skills and resources that did have expertise only once we knew what the actual problem was. In finding excellence in our partners we added to the creativity, to the context and to the power of the whole.
Year Seven: The Age of Visualisation. So yes it's always been a visually biased approach but visual doesn't mean just pictures. Words, phrases, data - they are all visual. We are not a graphic recording or big pictures company. We like information design but we are not an infographic maker. In the late half of the first decade of the 21st Century the world became capable of developing high power, multi-media and fast tools for creativity. We also were given unlimited ability for expression - unlimited white–wall space using 'micro–film' electrostatic paper. This allowed scale and that created immersion and enabled a dramatically more interactive experience.
This era ushered in new 'everything' - Data modelling technology, 3D software for film, social media platforms. They all started to become things we could all master and afford. This changed everything. Creative thinking was possible over long distances, by many more contributors and of course visually! And all of this at such high quality that ideas and contributions could multiply with almost no limit. We could extend the known power of visual decision making and creativity beyond the realms of anything we had known. We did.
Year Eight: The Age of Comparative Patterns. As we started to analyse, archive and codify what we really had achieved we saw yet more clues in our 'story so far'. Not only had we managed to solve the frustrations of developing strategy and transformation for teams - we saw the importance of this kind of creativity for more dimensions than business.
We saw a 21st Century that needed more awareness of the systemic stupidity that caused social unrest and inequity and also the critical issues of climate change, ecological disasters and so on. We coined the phrase - 'ethical/social continuum' - meaning we would work with organisations to help them do better things with more moral outcomes. We became keen to enable others to get greater access to what we had learned and we saw that we had many peers for whom what we did would be familiar/complementary. Systems Thinking, Design Thinking and Value Networks for example.
Year Nine: The Age of Transferring Capability. So we had come a long way and we had proven the approach in over 2500 assignments/interventions. We could see that we could share the value. By now we had had over a hundred companies and individuals ask if they could also use the approach. We hadn't really developed it that way but we always knew we could.
This is still a big work in progress, codifying everything, but we were determined even then. We started to finesse the tools. We started to explain what we do differently and translated it all into English. We had always written about what we did but now we started in earnest making it understandable and less technical. We started to structure the objects and build a scalable architecture. It was a huge undertaking but it is coming to fruition.
Year Ten: The Age of Social Platforms. Our work is purely co-creative. That means it includes all and any input from multiple sources. All stakeholders can and should play. It is facilitative and interactive. It is highly visual and transports those involved to new places and greater value.
The advent of truly accessible global tools like social networks with multi-media rich platforms have revolutionised our ability to deploy all of our dimensions at least to some degree. As they continue to become more powerful and integrated they bring with them their own stimulus and structure for added creativity and input. This is one hell of a ride!
Year Eleven: The Age of Consciousness and Empathy. Standing as we often do between many powerful egos and ambitions we see amazing opportunities for additional value in all this. We are now both more subtle in the discussions and more urgent with the structures - forcing greater tension between the outcomes and the realities of what the enterprise seeks to achieve.
Each of the previous 'Ages' have stayed the course. They are all continuing to define creativity in our assignments. They are all the mainstays of how we create value, increase opportunity and deliver innovation to our chosen markets.
Who knows where next?
