My creative journeyWhen I think of coming up with creative and new ideas, I am instantly transported back to my Uni days. At the age of 26 years old, I was able to get into a “mature” adult program at a university in Sacramento, California. My bachelor’s degree was focused on Organizational Communications, which opened up a lot of doors for me. At the time, you could not major in education and to be honest that was the farthest thing from my mind. Being a child of an educator, I had a fixed mindset of what my life would look like in a small town for 30+ years. Little did I know at that time that I would not only follow in my mother’s footsteps, but I’d do most of it abroad. One of the courses in my degree program that stuck with me was creative problem-solving. From the lens of business organizations, this course examined all of the sacred cows (rules that are so successful that they become immune to criticism). They are accepted as fact and no matter how we try to present evidence otherwise, wider society does not accept it. The sacred cow is entrenched within the culture and underlying belief system. A tangible example is Hallmark movies. I love a good holiday romance that is light, frivolous, and takes less than two hours for the couple to get together. Each movie is predictable with the same outcome…the main characters fall in love. We know logically that real love takes hard work, isn’t always full of big romantic gestures, and requires a lot of compromise. Yet, we continue to watch these movies, because they are part of the construct of who we are. They are a sacred cow. To slay a sacred cow metaphorically, it requires a lot of empathy. We need to choose our words wisely, because you are unraveling an idea that means alot to many people within your organization. When we define the problem or issue to be solved, it must be clear how the sacred cow is stopping the organization from moving forward. Once the team recognizes and concedes to this fact, it’s at this point that we can move forward to ideate. It’s really important that we do this process slowly and full of empathy. You may be asking a group of educators and school leaders to give up practices that are at the heart of who they are. In the design thinking process, we recognize that the issue we have defined has not been previously dealt with correctly. We may have tried to solve the problem by examining the superficial symptoms, rather than getting to the root issue. When we ideate, we have to think out-of-the-box, so we can find alternative solutions that may seem farfetched in order to move our organization forward. An influential text from my university course was, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative by Robert von Oech. This book examines how we can be more creative in our decision making, which is a huge part of ideate. Twenty years later, I still have a copy of the book, because it’s timeless message of creative problem-solving still resonates with me today. Why be creative?Von Oech asks, “Why be creative? Why challenge the rules? Why run the risk of falling and looking foolish? I can think of two good reasons. The first is change. When things change and new information comes into existence, it’s no longer possible to solve current problems with yesterday’s solutions…A second reason for generating ideas is that it’s a lot of fun.” When was the last time you cleared time in your schedule to come up with new ideas just for the heck of it? Carl Ally, an advertising legend once stated, ”The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He/She wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. He/She never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But a creative person has faith it will happen.” With this in mind, we ideate to creatively solve problems and do not limit our ideas, because they sound silly, improbable, or impractical. I’m sure the creators of Airbnb faced resistance to their ideas about renting out a portion or entire living spaces for a profit, rather than renting a hotel. Meanwhile, we get into a stranger’s car everyday as we catch an Uber or Lyft to get to the airport without thinking about it. These innovators were probably scared when they pitched their revolutionary ideas to business partners, but they knew it would fill a niche. We must think like these innovators to creatively solve our problems or we will never truly ideate. Many of us will face “mental locks” as we begin this process. Van Oech purports, “Most of us have certain attitudes that lock our thinking into the status quo and keep us thinking “more of the same.” Here are some mental locks that we face everyday.
What does it mean to ideate?To ideate, we need to get past these mental locks, so we can truly see ourselves as problem-solvers. It’s at this moment, you are free to ideate and innovate. So how do we open these mental locks? We must forget what we know, give up the ready-made answers of the status quo, and begin asking open-ended questions. The Question Formulation Technique (QFT)One way that I begin the process of ideate is using the Question Formulation Technique or QFT by the Right Question Institute. Kimberly L. Mitchell, the author of Experience Inquiry: 5 Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences frequently uses the QFT to get educators to ask a variety of open and closed questions. You can see the process in action from this blog post by Harvard University.
Ultimately, the QFT goes through this process in response to a prompt or solving a problem. This may help you to ideate some unique solutions. Teachers design a question focus (statement, visual, auditory, etc.) Students produce questions Students improve their questions Students prioritize their questions Students and teachers decide on the next steps Students reflect on what they have learned Now that we have delved into what it means to ideate, go over to episode 82 to participate in the challenge using Misty Paterson’s 4A’s from her book Pop-Up Studio: Responsive Teaching for Today’s Learners.
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