We already had agreed:

• the principles underpinning the way we’d be working – i.e. as cleanly as possible

• some great ideas for drawing participants’ attention to various aspects of creativity, and their own beliefs in relation to these
• a basic structure for the two days
  • find out what people would like to have happen (in relation to creativity)
  • work though the various activities, creating opportunities for new insights and change
  • bring all this information together and consider what difference it will make when back in ‘real life’

Now the activities we had dreamed up needed to be worked up in more detail, practised, and documented. We needed to think up some more activities. And the structure needed more fleshing out. And while we were considering this, we had a great opportunity to model a creative moment as it happened…  Phil was saying that on his way to the meeting (at my house), he’d been thinking about the realisation that he had had quite recently… that creativity is not just the ‘aha’ moment, and a precursor to production, but a change process, the whole process of producing something from initial ideas to finished product. He said he’d like other people to be able to appreciate this and that one way of achieving that would be for participants to have an opportunity to create something – from start to finish – over the weekend. This didn’t fit in with my ideas about what we were doing. I thought we had already agreed the basics (listed above) and that this would change the fundamental nature of the workshop. I started listing my concerns… 

• People on the course will have similar skill sets – and different ideas about what creativity is. So some people may find the ‘something’ easy to create, others may find it difficult. Either way, people could be disappointed.
• People are interested in different fields of endeavour. They may come to the workshop wanting to be more creative in a particular field or medium… and if we set the workshop up so they spent their time doing something else, they may feel they have wasted their time. The workshop is not about any particular field or medium, but about modelling creativity (in whatever field).
• If participants were to choose a medium to work in, the chances of us being able to provide the appropriate materials for everyone were low. It’d be OK if someone wanted to write more creative stories, but if someone was interested in creating an oil painting, we’d come unstuck.
• We have only got a weekend, and the chances of someone producing something they are proud of in that time are quite low – given that we have many aspects of creativity that we are planning for them to model as well.

As I was reeling these off, I began to realise that I was blocking Phil’s idea.

Phil:
Yes I felt blocked. Well, not me personally, I mean the beginnings of an idea that I was musing about had just been tripped up. My personal feelings were more ones of mild surprise.At the time I remember thinking that Marian couldn’t be blocking my own idea because it was very new, barely formed and really quite badly described! I was surprised at her response and wondered what was going on. I couldn’t quite recognise my thought in what she was saying (see below). I had realised that for me the creative process is way more than just the creative ‘spark’, I wanted participants on the course to have the opportunity to notice that too and one way might be to produce a complete piece of work.I know that one of my patterns in collaborative creativity is to share ideas I have instantly, kind of raw, before developing them, and they are often very unclear in me and thus in my description of them. Yet I am surprised when someone ‘blocks’ them because I am not exactly proposing them – for me it’s more like an interesting possibility has occurred to me and I’m mentioning it to see whether it adds anything creative to the mix.   I think I don’t make this clear enough – I am unembarrassed about offering newly-formed ideas and maybe I do it so confidently that people think I have decided something?  I don’t know. I actually hold them lightly and can let them go if they don’t seem right after a while, except under ‘attack’ (see below).In the wider context, I suspect blocking too soon (before an idea has had time to gel or dissolve of its own accord) happens a lot to creative ideas.  Disney knew about this maybe with his Dreamer-Realist-Critic approach? What would have worked better for me would have been to be asked questions about the idea before a judgment was made – something, by the way, that I do not pretend I can always do myself! 

Marian:
As we were taping our conversation, I can report the next thing I said, verbatim: “Where are these thoughts coming from that are inhibiting that idea?  This was swiftly followed by the realisation that if people could become aware of what they were doing – in real time, during the workshop – that was the kind of experience that I wanted them to have. And of course, it may be possible for people to have both kinds of experience (a sense of creativity as a whole process of producing something from beginning to end AND being able to notice and change their own thinking in relation to creativity as it happens). We talked a bit more. On the surface, Phil was still gunning for his idea of a whole production, and I was going for lots of ‘creative’ moments.  

Phil:
In retrospect I think, rather than ‘gunning for’, I was by now in the role of defending my raw idea and realising there was a misunderstanding of it – not surprising because I didn’t understand it yet myself.  So perhaps it was more a defending of the space and time for the idea to exist in, to evolve in, to grow or wither in.    Ah, now, even more real to me is the possibility that I was defending the idea because of a perceived ‘attack’ on it, and not because I felt the idea had massive value!  I wonder if the attack/defend pattern is common too – a perceived ‘attack’ on (an idea/a territory) is often followed by a ‘defence’, even if the ‘defender’ is not particularly attached to the idea or territory – because the defence is in response to the perceived attack.   How often does this pattern stifle creativity?  Authors and other artists are sometimes advised not to show their unfinished work to anyone, partly to avoid unfinished ideas being ‘attacked’, partly to prevent the creative urge to express the work being frittered away in explanation rather than creation. In collaborative creativity, this is often not practical so I agree with Marian that trust plays a vital role here. 

Marian:

But now I was listening more carefully, not making as many assumptions. And Phil was recognising that his idea hadn’t been particularly clear. Now he introduced the idea that it could be a fairly simple production, and began to accept that it might not be achieved during the weekend.  And while I was still busy arguing against the idea, I became aware that in the back of my mind somewhere, I was busy working away at a new problem: how could we achieve both our outcomes? Here’s the next bit of the recording: Marian:  Here is an idea that is coming to me now. What if every person started with a big sheet of paper and drew an outline of a person, and over the two days, what they create is “My Creative Self”?Phil:  Umm. That’s nice. 

Marian:  They go home with that. And put all learnings on it. Over the course of 2 days, if they create things they can put them on there like a collage. Then they can put it on the wall when they get home.

Phil:  I like that. It is what – metaphorically – I was trying to say. And it fits the title of the workshop. 

Marian:  I was thinking that whatever people produce, it has to be achievable and meaningful. Having this would be proof that they have a creative self. In spare moments they can be working on this. “What else do you know about this creative self?”  

Phil:
Notice the verbatim phrase that Marian used: “…whatever people produce …” She had clearly accepted the idea of people producing something and having done so was able to come up with an elegant blended idea.  This is what we mean by taking a “Yes AND” approach, rather than a “Yes BUT (= NO)”

Marian:
A little later on we were talking about internal dialogue and how it could inhibit creativity and we realised that my initial thoughts about Phil’s idea could have blocked it completely.  So what happened? 

• To start with, I made a big assumption about the kind of something Phil was imagining people would produce. And I reacted to that assumption as though it were true. It would have been a lot more productive to have asked some Clean Language questions and discovered more about what he meant!
• However, because we know one another well, and have a high level of trust, Phil trusted that I wasn’t trying to sabotage his idea – and I began to realise that I wasn’t giving it a chance.
• Phil began to get clearer about what he meant and we both started to think about how we could satisfy both outcomes.
• When an idea came to me, we could both recognise that it was ‘right’. It was a good fit with both outcomes – and with the workshop title.

So the conditions for this particular bit of collaborative creativity to emerge could be summed up as: 
1      A high level of trust between us – taking the personal investment in being ‘right’ out of the equation
2      Getting clear about what we wanted to achieve, individually then cooperatively
3     Recognising that the workshop itself is a creative production, and noticing when objections were blocking the process
4      Going for a ‘Yes, AND…’ solution rather than ‘Yes, BUT…’
5     Recognising when an idea that emerged was ‘right’.
6  Giving things time to evolve – why should answers be immediate?
7  Being okay with ‘not knowing’ personally and in others

There are, I suppose, many models of change – one that I am familiar with is known to me as ‘The Stages of Change’. James Prochaska, John Norcross and Carlo DiClemente developed this model, identifying 6 stages of changing fully described in their book Changing For Good. Many people find this a useful roadmap in evaluating where they are in the process of making changes. Have a look at this website to get a potted description of the model (though personally I would not pay much attention to the advice offered – but then I rarely do…):
http://www.proactive-coach.com/resolutions/theory/index.htm

I decided to play a game: assume that creativity is a change process – how might it map on to the Stages of Change model? This is the result so far:

It’s not a serious attempt to create a model of creativity (it’s too conceptual). However what it gave me was the sense that:

Creativity is not just about a ‘eureka!’ moment, it’s about developing that idea and doing something with it.

Much of creativity withers on the vine because we don’t follow through on that great idea that occurred to us.

Creativity is a skill that can be learned.

Once the creative process has been followed through, something has changed.

Any comments gratefully received.

Phil

And yet, even though they were ‘desperate to get another album together’, it took them almost a year to create their latest album, Yours Truly – eight months to write the songs and seven weeks to record them. when they are not writing they are busy playing and rehearsing.  

Key components of the Kaiser Chiefs’ creative process seem to be:

• the flashes of inspiration
• being able to tell when what they are doing is working (i.e. it sounds like the Kaiser Chiefs) and when it is not working, which in turn implies that band members have a ‘Kaiser Chiefs sound’ in mind and that they somehow judge their new work against this sound

The process seems to have been motivated on this occasion by the ‘desperation’, which came from having to play ‘b side’ songs in their concerts in order to fill the time.

It would be interesting to know where thoseflashes of inspiration come from, wouldn’t it? And to understand more about how the band members recognise a Kaiser Chiefs sound, when it is also a new sound.

My own ‘flashes of inspiration’ tend to come when I have been mulling a problem or puzzle over in my mind. Suddenly I have a solution or an idea. I have no way of knowing in advance when this will arrive – and sometimes I only recognise that I have been ‘mulling’ when I look back. It seems like all this goes on in the back of my mind while I’m busy with other things. More and more, I’ve come to trust that solutions to problems WILL turn up – as long as I don’t try to rush them!

Posted by Marian

What about you? Where do your flashes of inspiration come from? And what do you call these moments?

And when you are developing YOUR ideas, do you look for a good fit between the new idea and a pre-existing template or model, like the Kaiser Chiefs? Or do you have another way of judging whether something is working or not?

As I’ve been doing all the technical bits, I’ve been wondering whether other people would describe this whole process I’ve been going through as ‘creative’. I am a fan of Robert Fritz, author of “Creating” and “The Path of Least Resistance” – and I know that he would definitely consider this to have been a creative process. He describes the need to have a purpose (i.e. in this case, I wanted a website about ‘modelling creativity’) and to set up a tension between that purpose and current reality. To illustrate this, he uses the metaphor of an elastic band stretched between the two and suggests that the creative process is all about reducing that tension, so you gradually make it towards your goal.

But not everyone thinks this way. As part of this whole modelling project, I worked with Cherry Douglas (a coach from London who sees herself as ‘not creative’). She made a list of words she associated with being creative and not creative. And the top two words on the ‘not creative’ side of her page? “Purpose” and “Tension”. For her, creativity is about freedom, excitement, flexibility and madness. Her metaphors for creativity include ‘rambling rose’, ‘head in the clouds’ and ‘life on the ocean wave’.

Here’s her list: Creative / Not Creative

Posted by Marian

What about you? What is creativity like for you? What words do you associate with creativity? What would your list look like? Please join in the discussion!