There are many ways to use a single spoon to feed a hundred people. It could be a solid gold spoon, which you sell, taking them for a meal with the proceeds. It could be a huge edible spoon made out of pizza. It could be a restaurant in the shape of a spoon. And so on. Think this is cheating? Yes, but it’s practical cheating. These are legitimate solutions, making different assumptions about the spoon.

This example isn’t a fully-fledged creativity technique. Normally they remove the self-imposed barriers, then return to normality to provide a practical outcome. Nevertheless, the spoon is a handy reminder of how easy it is to try to solve a problem with incomplete information. I never said that the spoon was normal sized and stainless steel. What I can’t do in this short space is teach you creativity, but I can strongly recommend that you get a good book on the subject.

Probably the best known name in creativity is Edward de Bono. Try his Serious Creativity for a detailed look at creativity techniques and their application. For a very different approach, there’s Imagination Engineering (Birch and Clegg, Pitman Publishing), which I co-wrote with Paul Birch, one-time Corporate Jester at British Airways. Paul and I felt that an underlying structure and focus on implementation was very important to help pull the crazy techniques into line with solving real problems, but equally, we wanted to keep originality and fun in the process. What emerged was that the techniques themselves were only a small part of the process of becoming more creative, and the nature of the book itself moved away from a conventional textbook. We included short stories - fiction can often stimulate new ideas as it moves your thoughts off in a different direction. And the butterfly nature of multimedia products and the World Wide Web encouraged the growth of a skein of tangential marginalia around the main text.

This isn’t the last word on creativity. What had become a fairly stolid discipline in the 1980s has taken on a new life. Imagination engineering is here to stay.

Feel free to go back to our creativity page now - or go on to read about developing an Innovation Agenda in your organization.

Copyright © Creativity Unleashed Limited 2006
Last update 13 September 2006

Originally published in the BT online magazine Business Connections.

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