#innovative behavior

Creative Professionals

First of all, innovation is about people, their mindset and abilities: how they see the world, how they feel the world, and how they respond to the world around them. I have found that all creative professionals possess three main abilities. The first ability is to question everything through being truly curious with respect to their audience. Designers aren’t afraid to show that they don’t know something. They understand that they are at a point to reach, to discover, and to strive to understand because the answer depends on different perspectives. That’s why it’s important to challenge supposed prior knowledge with the expectation of being surprised. Moreover, a number of questions fosters creativity. According to the work  from the Center for Design Research at Stanford (Eris 2002), good team performance is 40 questions an hour, including both deep reasoning and generative questions.

To illustrate this characteristic, let us take as an example a creative professional of a particular type – an educator. Imagine you are a creative English teacher and you want to create an inspired experience of learning English, you might ask yourself the following questions:

How can we help students develop a feeling for the language? How can we improve lessons? How do we provide less passive and more active lessons? How would it be if we worked by standing before a high table? How would it be if students did more role-playing creating situations where they could use their new grammar? Know that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” how could we visualize the grammar? How do children learn their first language? What can we learn from them? How does the brain work to remember things?

The questions asked would shape not only the lessons, but the learning experience on the whole – of both the student and of the teacher. A set of questions, then, helps us to find interesting ideas, to go forward, and to learn something new, but keep in mind that the answers uncovered depend on the questions asked, know that “if we ask a wrong question, we'll get a wrong solution.” Whenever we have a situation in our design projects, if we slightly change the question for exploration, the direction of the project could lead to entirely different area.

The second ability of creative people is to be able to create an experiment and to gain new knowledge. They are aware of taking risks, creating something new, and reflecting on learning. For instance, if you were the same creative English teacher, you would create a new lesson and would reflect on the created experience and what was learned through asking your students:

What do you like in the new lesson? What don’t you like? How could we improve? Are there any ideas for the next time? Do you have any questions you want to find answers to?

Consequently, reflection is better than a survey because through it you explore what you don’t know you don’t know. Surely, you will arrive at something unexpected and find new ideas for improvement.

In order to approach the experimentation ability in our projects, we consider all workshops or products as prototypes because thinking so fosters a culture of innovation. Furthermore, an experiment helps to define what doesn't work quickly and go forward faster.

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

New ideas and insights, then, keep the innovation process driven and positive.

The last main ability of creative professionals is to think holistically from different angles or views. It’s like a “concept of powers of ten” released in the documentary film by Ray and Charles Eames in 1977. They considered one aspect over increasing and decreasing magnitudes of context. Referring back to our creative English teacher, it’s possible to consider the new lesson in terms of the participant's point of view, in terms of the teacher’s point of view, as well as in terms of the school’s point of view: How are these perspectives different? Often in our projects we consider a perspective of “being in the situation” while at the same time having a perspective of “being outside the situation.” It helps us to see the problem from the top in order define more important things and prioritize them, ultimately avoiding spending time on unnecessary things. Thus, it is a great ability of creative people to see things from different perspective levels and to think holistically. 

As Marcel Proust noticed, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

In doing and working in an innovative way, creative professionals gain a new way of viewing the problem and the world around them. 

Roadmap for Innovation

The second main finding is about design process. There is no roadmap for innovation: it depends on creative professionals themselves, their personal abilities and experience. However, each successful design project (like brand development, product design, communication design, or business design) includes three main parts: building empathy, sensemaking, and prototyping. First, designers develop a sense of empathy (a feeling) toward the people they are designing for to understand their world and to think about how we can help them in their everyday lives. The next step is sensemaking - a process whereby designers extract the meaning of people’s behaviors, places, events etc. in order to anticipate their trajectories and trends. Commonly, sensemaking takes the form of an answer to the questions of Why? Why do they do that in that way? or Why do they need to? The sensemaking process thus helps creative people effectively act and create something with both sense and meaning. Finally, to develop an idea is a way of prototyping. In order to define a right solution for customers, the creation process of designers starts from scratch and continues with thousands of prototypes answering such questions as

How should the solution work? How should the solution look like? What do users feel by engaging with the solution?

And how does this process relate to creative people themselves? As first mentioned by IDEO, 21st-century workers are T-shaped people. The vertical line of these workers is for in-depth knowledge of one or two professional fields like engineering, biology, business, sociology, or philosophy. Their horizontal line is for an innovative behavior like questioning everything, empathy development, prototyping etc. It is the line of breadth which reaches out, and through creative processes, expands and connects them. So, who are creative people? They are designers, teachers, founders, entrepreneurs, and all of them are curious, holistic thinkers and doers.

Further Thoughts

From my personal observations working with children in a kindergarten, I have found that all children are born with an innovative behavior, but parents and our education system kill these creative abilities. There is a great TED talk about how schools kill creativity by Ken Robinson. I now wonder: How do parents kill children's creativity? This is a new question for discovery and a topic for another day.

Please feel free to share any other points of view about creativity and innovative behavior in the comments below.

On a related topic, a new book from two brothers David and Tom Kelley, “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All,” is soon to be released. I’m impatiently waiting to learn their point of view.