How Creative Are You?

Dennis was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and is a Sloan Fellow, with distinction, of the London Business School. He was for 12 years a consulting partner in Deloitte Haskins + Sells, and after their merger in the UK, Coopers & Lybrand; subsequently, he was an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and a Vice President of SRI Consulting. He now runs the Silver Bullet Machine.

Is creativity born or made? And, if it’s born, were you born with it? And if you weren’t, does that consign you to the dustbin of ‘uncreative’ people, doomed to spend your life in the doldrums of repetitive work, drudging away following other people’s orders?

These questions are in many people’s minds, and particularly in the minds of those who are The Big Boss, and who have decided that their organisations must be more ‘creative’. They then instruct their HR department to ‘recruit creative people’, and the HR department, duly complying with The Big Boss’s latest whim, decide that what they need is the appropriate psychometric test. So they appoint as consultants the leading academics in the field. These academics have been researching creativity all their working lives, and, for the appropriate fee, they will provide a range of tests like this:

Below are five every-day objects. Think of as many uses as you can for each.

A barrel
A paper clip
A tin of boot polish
A brick
A blanket

Let me at this point assure you that this example is real. It is from a conference presentation given recently by one of the world’s leading academic psychologists (whose name I shall not reveal so as to avoid a law suit), and it is one of several similar questions which comprise his how-to-diagnose-creative-people pack.

Let me add one more item to this list – a rolling-pin. How many uses for a rolling-pin can you think of in the next 60 seconds or so? If your list comprises more that 20 items, go to the top of the class; if fewer, well, I’m sorry, but the dunce’s cap is for you.

Top of my list for the rolling-pin is to use it as a blunt instrument with which to beat our learned academic about the head for suggesting that a test like this has any validity. Why am I (uncharacteristically!!) motivated to such violence? Because, in this brief article, I wish to show you a very simple technique which you can use to solve problems like this – a technique so easy to use, that you will wonder why you were never taught it at school. And the technique is not just one to use on party games like the test our psychologist is goading you with: it underpins all creativity.

Let’s take our rolling-pin as an example.

When faced with the challenge of thinking of uses for a rolling-pin, my minds tend to think of a rolling-pin in its conventional use as a mechanism of making a ball of bread dough (or maybe, these days, pizza dough) nice and flat. This primary use tends to constrain my thinking, making it very hard for me to imagine uses other than making a ball of plasticine flat, or perhaps chewing gum. Then I’m stuck.

Well, the way to unstick things is to approach the problem in a different way. Rather than trying to think, immediately, of an alternative use for a rolling-pin, what you should do is think – as perceptively as you can – of everything that you know about the rolling-pin itself. So, imagine you were writing an email to a Martian, describing a rolling-pin as fully as you can. Do this as a series of bullet points, so that, when the Martian lands, he can immediately identify the rolling-pin, and distinguish it from any other household object he might come across – such as a television, an ironing board, a bread knife, whatever.

What might such a list look like? Here are some of my thoughts:

the rolling part is made of wood
it’s about eighteen inches long
there’s a handle on each end
it’s made of two parts: a cylinder which rotates about a central bit that extends to form the handles
it weighs around a pound or so (I guess)
the handles might be metal
the handles might have rubber grips
the rolling part is smooth
the cylinder is about three inches in diameter
you can buy them in shops
they cost a few pounds...

I’m sure your list is different, and probably longer: which is interesting, in that both you and I started with the same trigger – “rolling-pin” – but maybe we see the same concept rather differently.

What this list does is to ‘disaggregate’ the concept ‘rolling-pin’ into a number of constituent elements. And once this is done, it is far, far easier to think of alternative uses. As an example, just take the very first item, the fact that the rotating cylinder is made of wood. What else can I use wood for? A host of things, such as:

as a source of fuel, from lighting a domestic fire, to providing the motive power for a steam engine; from making into matches, to being the source of energy for a city’s power station
as a material for making anything from a wooden egg-cup, to furniture, to the framework of a house
as a material that is a rather poor conductor of electricity - and so to provide electrical insulation...
...and also a rather poor conductor of heat – and so provide thermal insulation
as the raw material for products derived from wood, such as paper or cardboard, and all the products made from these...

In principle, a rolling-pin can be used for all of these purposes, and many more besides – for these are all uses of the wood from which the cylinder of a rolling-pin is made.

Let’s take another feature – a rather different one this time – say, the fact that the cylinder is about three inches in diameter. What uses can we think of for something that is three inches wide? How about...

as a measuring device
as a ruler, or template for marking out the same distance repeatedly
as a support or wedge for anything that needs to be propped up by about three inches (for example, as might be needed to raise the image of a projector)
as a ‘sleeping policeman’ bump in a road, to slow traffic down (maybe as required, say, in a school to encourage the children to get off their bicycles)
as a template for making corrugated cardboard
as the base shape for making moulds for cylinders, such as toilet rolls, tubes or pipes...
as the spindle for winding – such as cotton thread, wire or string...

And just one more, the fact that rolling pin costs money to buy, and so has an intrinsic economic value:

as the prize in a raffle
as barter for something else
as a unit of currency
as a store of speculative value (some people hoard gold as a hedge against inflation, I happen to hoard rolling pins...)
as a gift
as a bribe...

As you can see, all the individual features of a rolling-pin – its material, its width, its value, whatever – have all sorts of uses in their own right, and as soon as you start thinking about questions such as “One attribute of a rolling-pin is its weight – what uses can I think of for something which has weight?”, it becomes very easy to generate long lists of how this particular feature can be used. And since each feature is a subset of the bundle of features we call a “rolling-pin”, then the rolling-pin itself can be used in all these different ways.

Although I have described this process in relation to what is really just a party game, exactly the same process can be used to great effect to solve real problems, and to generate new ideas is very practical situations.

The generalised structure of the process is this:

Firstly: define an area of interest, which might be “I need to solve the problem of discovering new ways of using a rolling-pin”, or, more realistically, “how can we develop a new product to grow our bottled water business?”.
Secondly: don’t start trying to solve the problem – rather, write down, as a series of bullet points, as much as you possibly can to describe what happens now (a rolling-pin is made of wood, it’s about eighteen inches long...; the main use for bottled water is for drinking...)
Then: take each individual feature and ask a question such as “What else might I use this for?”, or “What if this were different?” – and the ideas will flow and flow...So, what else could we do with wood? Or if we didn’t drink water – what else might we do with it?

I call this process InnovAction!TM, and you can find out a lot more about it in one of my books, Smart Things to Know about Innovation and Creativity, published by Capstone in 2002. It really works – as you will see from the many case studies in Smart Innovation, where, amongst many other things, you will find a host of ideas for what else you might do with bottled water!

So, you too can be a creative genius – as can we all, for all human beings are curious and enquiring. All you have to do is to observe, very carefully, what happens now, and than ask, of each feature, a question like “How might this be different?”.

And next time I meet that erudite academic psychologist, who uses his ‘research’ to pigeon-hole people into ‘creatives’ and ‘dullards’, I know of a particular use for my rolling-pin.

How Creative Are You?

Dennis Sherwood