Applied imagination
Remember when brainstorming was pioneering thinking?
Thursday, September 03 2009 || Innovation || BY Ed Bernacki
Parnes’s story starts in the 1950s. About that time, Alex Osborn was the director of the Buffalo office of advertising agency BBDO. For 20 years Osborn managed teams (all men in those days) creating ideas for advertising assignments for clients. He noticed that teams generated relatively weak ideas over time and began experimenting with techniques to prompt people to create more effective solutions to clients’ problems. Since I discovered his book Applied Imagination (1953), two of his techniques have proven useful.
One is creative problem solving, the essence of which is a deeper exploration of the problem to ensure that all issues are raised and all opportunities are noticed. It involves two processes: divergence and convergence.
According to Osborn, divergence means broadening the range of possible ways to solve a problem. This exploration is crucial as it helps to avoid a typical failure: we jump quickly to a solution without looking beyond the easy and obvious ideas.
Convergence means reviewing the full range of possible ideas and then converging on the solution that offers the best potential for success. This two-step process is the essence of effective problem solving, and Osborn spent 277 pages of his 300-page book outlining tools for divergence and convergence.
The second idea I found useful is one everyone knows — brainstorming. In the final pages of his book (and, remember, this was first published in 1953), Osborn offers this process to help teams to solve problems more effectively, describing it as “using the brains of people to storm a creative problem with each ‘stormer’ audaciously attacking the same objective”.
In the early 1950s, Osborn, who was on the board of trustees at the University of Buffalo, recruited Parnes, then an academic at the University of Pittsburgh. Parnes had quickly realised the value of creative thinking and decided to study it, writing research papers and speaking often on the topic. He considered it a legitimate area of study at tertiary level and later proposed a two-year Masters programme at Buffalo State College. It was soundly rejected by the board.
In true innovationalist fashion, he discovered that he could appeal the ruling at a special meeting, and lobbied each voting member in person. He said what sustained him was “a belief in the creative problem-solving process and seeing it work over and over again”. This was the first of many battles he fought to bring the study of creativity into the mainstream and his efforts paid off: five of his first students of creativity were in attendance at this tribute conference.
His work inspired many modern thinkers on creativity and management. Opening the tribute conference, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile credited Parnes for “democratising creativity by taking it away as the exclusive property of the creative elite to make it accessible and useful for everyone in everyday settings”.
In 1954 Alex Osborn formed the Creative Education Foundation and hired Parnes to become its director, concurrent with his role at the university. The insight and foresight of Sid Parnes and Alex Osborn truly capture the essence of the innovationalist. Each made long-term contributions to the field and inspired many people through a relentless focus on communication: teaching, lobbying, publishing and holding thousands of conversations.
New Zealand has had its share of inventors and innovationalists. The initiative and intuition of many Kiwis over many years shows up in our ‘number eight wire’ attitude, which reflects creativity in its most practical sense: solving everyday problems. But what made us successful in the past may not take us forward. Perhaps it is time to focus more on creativity education — the need to foster creativity in management at all levels is obvious in the knowledge economy.
Creative problem solving is a platform from which people can use their insights, and stretch for more and bigger ideas. That’s the secret to innovation: focus on creating the quality of ideas that move us forward. As the cliché suggests, change is a constant. How we deal with change will either push us forward or leave us in the shadows of those who do it right.
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