Leading through COVID: 5 - Embrace and encourage creativity

Welcome to this 5-minute 'deep dive' on the fifth of 8 recommendations for those leading through these challenging times. If you've come straight here, without seeing the summary of all eight, you'll find it here.

Depending on where you're at with your own response to COVID, you might choose to focus more on some recommendations than others. That's fine. They're all connected, but they're designed as standalone 'modules'. Huge thanks to Claire Davey at CD-Performance for her contributions and support.

Many of these 8 recommendations are interconnected, but if there's one recommendation that touches them all, it's the call to embrace and encourage creativity. Being creative boosts our mood, generates energy and helps us maintain our own and others' well-being. It opens up new opportunities when working virtually and remotely, and helps us overcome the challenges of working from home. It shows us ways to 'get our house in order' and gives us fresh insights when it comes to looking at the longer term and bigger picture, and going beyond our usual 'borders'.

The people and organisations that thrive in challenging times are those that find creative ways forward. They're the ones that see opportunities where others see threats. The ones that are prepared to challenge their existing assumptions and ways of working.

You and your people are probably already looking for different ways to approach your finances. You're probably already asking if there are different services you can offer, or different ways of delivering what you're already doing.

Hopefully, you're managing to do so without seeming like an 'ambulance chaser', so you're not tarnishing your reputation for the longer term. One company I feel did that well was TripIt. Just as the virus was taking hold in Italy, they emailed me saying: 'In response to increasing schedule changes and cancellations stemming from COVID-19, we want to do our part to help you stay as informed as possible when you travel.' I could switch on their 'Pro' features for free, they said. The thing that made this feel genuine was that those Pro features would stay enabled for six months, then they would automatically switch them off. I wouldn't need to switch it off myself to avoid a paid subscription. Sure, it's good marketing for them, but it felt like they were offering genuine value for nothing, so that felt fair enough.

It's not the most creative approach, for sure. More creative was Chinese cosmetics company Lin Qingxuan. When it was forced to close 40% of its stores during the crisis, including all of its locations in Wuhan, Lin Qingxuan's leadership chose to make its 100+ in-store beauty advisors as online influencers. This earned them a 200% uplift in sales in Wuhan alone, compared with the previous year. 

And then there are the Formula One teams who are not only helping get ventilators in place quicker than ever before, but they're upgrading the way those ventilators work in ways we might not otherwise have seen in a decade.

There are tons of books on creativity. Here are the four techniques we and our clients have found most helpful. To get maximum value from them right now, and help them stick for you, think of a challenge you're facing right now and run it through at least one of these techniques.

1. Lateral thinking

Edward de Bono quite literally invented the term 'lateral thinking', so anything you can get by him will be a source of inspiration. One beautifully simple tool is to take a random noun and ask (ideally of a group of people) 'In what ways is the challenge we're looking at like that word, or in what ways could it be like that word?' Then you generate as many answers to that question as possible - the whackier, the better. The more people laugh, the more creative you're being. Often it's the silliest, most way-out ideas that yield most fruit. You often just need to bring them a little bit closer to the current reality.

Imagine if this was 50 years ago and the 'challenge' you were facing was finding ways to innovate television. You opened a book or magazine and picked the first noun you saw: 'cheese'. In what ways is TV like cheese, or in what ways could it be like cheese?

• Some cheeses have holes in them. What does a hole in a TV look like? Maybe it means having multiple windows showing different channels at once, or different perspectives on the same event - a common occurrence today that wasn't a thing in 1970.
• Cheese smells. How could TV smell? Smellavision? Maybe there are other senses we could stimulate, other than sound and vision? Touch, perhaps. Getting people to touch the screen? Or get actively involved with the TV in some way? Voting, phone-ins, integrating film into fairground rides, and so on.

2. Busting assumptions

The starting point here is to make a list of all the assumptions you're making about a given situation. The closer you get to ten assumptions, the closer you're getting to the assumptions you don't even know you're making. If you're doing it as a team, then you may need to push closer to twenty.

Then take each of those assumptions and give it a kicking, using at least two of the following:

• What's the evidence that this assumption is true?
• What evidence do we have that contradicts or at least challenges this assumption?
• What could we change about our approach that would render the assumption false, if not always false then at least false in some circumstances?
• What if we held the opposite assumption? What would that change about our approach?

Simply doing that should generate a number of creative ideas.

3. Six questions

Similar to 'busting assumptions', we can use six simple question words to challenge the status quo. Each of this is a potential source of creativity:

• Who? - e.g. What are we assuming about 'who' does this? What do and don't we know about them that we could draw on to come up with a different approach? Who else could do it instead?
• What? - e.g. What things could we stop, start and continue doing? What have we always wished we could do (or stop doing)?
• How? - e.g. What's the most radical change we could make to how we do this? If we were starting from scratch, how would we do this differently? How would a 5-year-old do this, or a startup, or a company with infinite time and budget?
• Where? - e.g. Where else could this happen? Where else is it already working better? If we were doing this in a totally different context or location, what would we change?
• When? - e.g. What could we change about the timings? How might we change the sequence of events?
• Why? - e.g. Why did we decide to do this the way we are? What's changed since then that makes that decision less valid today? What's the higher purpose of what we're doing and how else could we fulfil that purpose?

4. Future back

Take a trip to the future and ask yourself the following questions:

• If we looked back on this from 2, 10 or 100 years in the future, what would we wish we'd changed now?
• What do we already know now that we'll wish we'd given more time, energy and attention?
• What can we see, coming over the horizon, that we need to start preparing for?
• Who do we want to be in 2, 5 or 10 years' time and who does that mean we need to be now?

In summary, then, we've offered 4 tools to help you embrace and encourage creativity:

1. Lateral thinking - Edward de Bono and the random word challenge
2. Busting assumptions - listing at least 10 assumptions and giving each of them a kicking
3. Six questions - Who? What? How? Where? When? Why?
4. Future back - visiting the future and asking questions about the present

Thanks for investing the time in taking a more creative approach when it's so tempting to just keep doing what we've always done. The world needs more of that.

If you'd like to explore our 8 recommendations further:

You'll find links to each of the other 5-minute 'deep dives' below, and the original summary of all 8 recommendations here.

1. Be mindful and make conscious choices: five steps to keep your wits about you and steer clear of the palpable panic that's gripped many leaders and their organisations who are already making well-meaning but highly questionable decisions
2. Manage your own and others’ well-being: the best practical tips we could find, plus insight into the ways different kinds of people will experience the coming weeks - and how things will change over time
3. Use ‘virtual’ really, really well: we cover the 9 essential ingredients for getting maximum value when bringing people together on video. We're all already adapting quickly on this front, so this isn't 'Zoom for beginners'
4. Do remote working really, really well: Three Core Disciplines for leadership and team performance, expanded and applied to the world of remote working
5. Embrace and encourage creativity: four highly impactful and easy-to-apply techniques - one idea from one of these saved one organisation over £1m
6. Get your house in order: how best to invest for payoffs in the short, medium and longer term
7. Balance short-term and longer-term thinking: including managing those tensions with the help of a crisis management framework from Cranfield, and Three Horizon Thinking
8. Go beyond your normal ‘borders: including tips, benefits, mutually-sustainable virtual circles, and sources of inspiration