Using the Creative Process to Tap Into New Insights
The Challenge:
The knowledge society, the global economy and the digital revolution emerging in the last two decades have resulted in a business environment with levels of complexity, uncertainty and change unlike anything we have experienced before. What better time than now, to get proactive and ready yourself for the next wave of growth? Are you challenging your mind to access the hidden possibilities that lie beneath the surface of your awareness? Increasing access to information and rapid social networking systems contribute to the hyper-competition of today’s workplace and can serve to provide a plethora of distractions that can take your attention off of your true priorities. All of us can identify with the sudden dawning awareness that we have just spent four hours surfing the internet and answering our social networking inbox, with almost no regard for what we had intended the day to entail. Where is the time going? To your relationship with your electronic tools, that’s where. We’d be sleeping with them, if they were a little more cuddly!
The Solution Unfolds:
Recently one of the Tilt coaches I am mentoring had to coach me on something for her practice session. I presented this problem to her to see what she might do with it. She had recently taken a course in her graduate program about creativity so I was expecting some interesting ideas that would creatively help me to master this mounting challenge that has only increased in my life as I now juggle leading a new start-up business that serves coaches, along with my coaching practice. What I learned from her coaching process with me was simple, as all remarkable answers are. She helped me discover that the freedom I so desired can only come from what I seem to dislike most….self-discipline! An utter paradox!
Self-Concept as the Starting Point:
I consider myself a highly creative person and therefore I consistently value an unstructured approach to almost everything! Sure, I am disciplined about many things, especially those things that drive my businesses forward, but I had not thought about putting discipline together with creativity until this budding young coach cornered me so elegantly! She said, “Well, I wonder what might happen if you were to reshape the way you think about the freedom you want, by partnering it with discipline?” WHAT? I thought to myself..how could that be?
My current paradigm of creativity required unparalleled freedom and white space. But, somewhere inside I knew she had me. As a person who values the idea of polarities, I immediately knew she had struck gold. We agreed that I would adopt a mantra of “Discipline for Freedom” with regard to structuring my time.. which would be so valuable over the next three months as I completed the culmination of my research, thesis and the book I am currently writing for publication. I had to go underground, start saying no to everything except those three priorities and make some effort to build specific disciplines around how I spend my time. Bingo.
The Plan: Discipline for Freedom (A polarity!)
The workday plan I set forth would be organized by priorities:
1. Clients & Income Activities.
2. Writing the book and thesis.
3. Exercise to break those up, since they are sedentary activities.
4. Creative time for what I love: Collaboration with my business partner and other people in our startup. (This builds our future!)
The first step I took was to set up an appointment system in a product called Genbook, so that my clients would know when I am available for coaching time and so that I would not have to play email tag to set up appointments with prospects or clients. The second thing I did, was place blocks in my calendar for writing time for both my book and thesis. The third thing was to add exercise slots, so that all of this computer time would not bog me down physically. I added small incremental blocks of time, three times a day for dog walking, Cybex aerobic, and yoga practice. Then I added my collaboration time to give me fun time that would keep my creative juices flowing. Then lastly, I gave myself permission to give EVERYTHING ELSE AWAY. So, the last step was to find other capable people to move the other responsibilities to for the next few months. My business partner and others were only too happy to take them on when I told them what I was up to. YIPPEE.
Sometimes its the Obvious, That Isn’t Obvious!
My husband and I went sailing a few weeks after I set this process up and I took along a book I had been wanting to read called Creativity, by Mihaly Csikszenthihalyi. I should not have been surprised to learn about the polarities that exist in creative people and systems! Upon reading about his qualitative research project in the 90s, I learned that creative people possess personality traits that extend in polar opposite directions in ten groups of traits that were identified in the interviews of 97 supremely creative people. Because this matches the theory we have put forth in the products we sell at Tilt, I was thrilled to discover that I wasn’t the only creative thinker who refused to put themselves in personality boxes. I simply cannot say whether I am extroverted or introverted, because I know I am both. Likewise, I am both an open-minded person and a person of objectivity. As I read the results of the study narrated in this book, I almost jumped out of my skin in joy, as I felt understood for the first time in my life!!! And strangely enough, I had created a leadership model that contained twelve polarities that I determined are required for the greatest leaders. Indeed, this is what I was writing my thesis about. The idea that a Transcendent Leader must develop polar perspectives in order to create the environment for creativity is the topic of my thesis! Shazam.
Mihaly’s Creative Process:
So, as I read this delightful book, I learned about the creative process according to some of the great thinkers on the subject and decided that it has tremendous implications for the coaching profession and process. After presenting them here, I will share my thoughts to stimulate a discourse of conversation in our practice.
The Creative Process..
Step One: A period of preparation, becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.
Step Two: A period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness. It is during this time that unusual connections are likely to be made where unexpected combinations may be made. (Conscious decisions are usually made employing logic, but this linear avenue can actually impede creative insights).
Step Three: The Insight, the Aha, the Eureka moment occurs when the pieces of the puzzle come together. These can come in one big insight or multiple insights.
Step Four: Evaluation is the next necessary step when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing. This step is emotionally trying and the time when the person may feel the most insecure. Here is the time when we must look at the idea in light of the domain of work. Is it truly novel or it is obvious? This is when others in the domain will be exposed to it and react to it so it is a period for self-criticism and soul-searching and is very personal.
Step Five: The last component of the process is elaboration. This is perhaps the hardest and most labor intensive part of the process involving hard work and long periods of time. This period can take, months, years or a lifetime to complete and whether the work will ever be deemed truly successful depends upon whether it is ultimately accepted by the domain or field of work as a contribution. For this reason, one must employ a systems approach to considering the potential for contribution. Many times, a creative person may bring something forward that the environment is not ready for, so centuries can pass before the novel discovery is adopted as an idea that contributes to society in some fundamental way.
This period can be constantly interrupted by periods of incubation and small epiphanies along the way, before being adopted by society.
Creativity…It’s No Wonder!
After reading about the lengthy and sometimes unrewarding aspects of the creative process, its no wonder that many do not possess the patience and steadfastness required to bring novel ideas into reality for widespread adoption. Yet, never before in history has there been so great a system of acceptance for new ideas, than NOW. The positive aspects of the knowledge and digital age is that when new ideas come out, they can be widely spread rapidly, multiplying many times over the possibility for adoption. The trick is to know which ideas to pursue and which to abandon, because someone else has already done them better. This requires a high degree of self awareness and higher levels of intelligent consciousness that require us to know the difference between an ego that is driven by conscious awareness or unconscious rigidity.
The Contribution of the Coaching Profession!
As I have learned about the precious process of creativity I am more and more adamant that the human right to err is a right we must strongly claim and advocate if we are to move through the tenacious process required to bring novel concepts to the world. After all, what if Thomas Edison had given up after the thousands of trials and the ridicule of colleagues who scoffed at his vision. Creativity is not for babies, or for the nonchalant at heart. And thankfully, I find myself right at home with the professionals I meet in the coaching industry. We are the ones who support and challenge our clients to unfold this process within themselves. We are the facilitators of creation. We get the awesome and sublime experience of joining in the journey to surface the unconscious potential in our brilliant clients. And in the joining, we are transformed ourselves. Even by those who are just joining our profession. Like, the coach I was mentoring who stimulated a whole new development in my creative process with one powerful question.
Pam Boney, PCC
Founder and CEO of Tilt, Inc
Copyright September 2009