On Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:24:26 -0400, "Tom Gardner"
wrote:

On one of my recent posts, you kind people pointed out that there are many
ways of doing something. Simple observations are often the most profound.
I'm not a master at being able to see a problem from different angles and
visualize different solutions. It seems that some parts of one idea affect
another so the ideas are not independent, not "clean" and compartmentalized.
I met with my guys today and discussed if we could figure out how to think
about different ways of doing things we are developing. I want multiple
solutions presented and thinking out of the box. It seems there is always a
brute-force method of doing something yet the "other" idea, the one that
springs into existence at the odd hour, is often better, cheaper and more
elegant. How do you attract those "other" ideas?

Is there a method or exercises to develop creative thinking?

There are a bunch of methods. Consultants make big bucks devising and
presenting various silver-bullet schemes. They're all pretty much
uncommon sense but managers who never had an original idea in their
lives are easy marks for these pitchmen.

I think a very good way to do this is to identify someone who is
naturally good at it, however irritating they might be, and try to
learn a bit how they do it by observing them. Hurt yer head a bit,
have damage containment measures thought out in advance.

A key trick is not to suppress creativity. Really! If you have a
strong need to be viewed as "The Leader" or "The Mind", you'll
suppress some very creative but non-assertive folks. You've said
before that you enjoy arguments. Some don't, particularly with the
boss. Based on stuff you've written before, You might need to
subordinate self to mission to achieve what you say you'd like to
achieve, and you might have a bit of difficulty doing that. Stick
your ego in a drawer and lock it. Then be patient because smart folks
are suspicious of changes in behavior. Give it at least months.
Study how small children approach problems. There is nobody more
creative than a child. I'm not kidding! You need to adapt of course,
but little kids naturally think out of the box because they've not yet
been indoctrinated into paradigm paralysis.

Avoid PhD's. I've known a couple of very creative PhD's but most of
them had all the creativity beat out of them by the educational
process. Winning a PhD is often more a matter of endurance than
brilliance, albeit with some very notable exceptions.

Warning: creative people tend to be "wierd", and they can be hugely
irritating to some.

How do I know this? I ran a skunk works for 15 years. I picked up
talent off the layoff list, people that were regarded as
"unmanagable". My own personnel folder had a flag saying
"unmanagable". Everyone in my little band of mavericks won at
least one patent, most had several. Two of them won the corp's
highest awards for technical achievement though neither of them had
engineering degrees at the time.

I won a bunch of patents, domestic and foreign. Coupla dozen I guess.
I deliberately avoided filing any disclosures during the 15 years I
ran the skunkworks because I wanted it very clear that I was not in
competition with my teammates. I diverted my creativity toward
defending my team from bureaucratic bull****. That was fun!

I irritated the hell out ofsome folks, not intentionally but ****
happens. They chose to be irritated. Having fun was high on the
priority list for my little band of mavericks.

None of us got rich. None of us cared. Our next reunion is
scheduled to happen in a couple of weeks. Khanh Vu is coordinating.

I wasn't supposed to hire Khanh, she was a check-the-box minority
interview. I got yelled at by H.R. for actually hiring her. She
didn't speak English as well as most applicants. She'd been in
charge of a lot of stuff in Saigon, was on the last plane out with a
50,000 piaster price on her head. I liked her attitude: "no
probrem!" "OK, but how will you accomplish your assignment?" "I
don't know yet, no probrem." (You're hired!) She became a
teammate very quickly.