This article is adapted from the book “Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results” (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2004) by two professors, Gerald Nadler and William J. Chandom – president and vice president of the Center for Breakthrough Thinking.
The importance of creativity continues to increase every year in all segments of society as a response to life in a dynamic world and business environment. People are called upon to be creative. Businesses seek new product innovations and creative marketing campaigns; governments seek creative ways to implement technological solutions; and communities and families seek creative ways to live together in harmony.
Unfortunately, these calls for creativity are often blanket exhortations to come up with “big” ideas (thinking outside the box), and are framed within a normative problem-solving approach that requires creativity to be just one step in the approach.
Our theme is to seek creativity at all stages of planning, design, problem solving, development, and implementation. Of course, “great ideas” will vary from stage to stage. However, with the least amount of time and resources, creativity is essential at each stage to achieve a significantly improved and more effective solution with greater feasibility. Consider the following real-life case:
A large national company supplies products with relatively short shelf lives. One of its 24 warehouses nationwide was experiencing high costs, large overages, poor shipping records, and product quality deterioration at the loading stage. The warehouse manager and supervisor decided to commission an engineer to determine how to solve these problems.
The commissioned engineer, Eliot, was faced with the question: “How can we solve the problems in loading?” After two weeks of collecting data on traffic, costs, damage, and errors in loading and putting it into process models, Eliot believed he had identified most of the causes of the problem – such as: misplaced order documents, double- or triple-use cartons, disorganized absenteeism, etc. He kept thinking about how to solve the problem creatively, and finally decided to automate the loading process.
Eliot and the warehouse supervisor were surprised when Eliot's analysis showed that the $60,000 cost of installing the automation equipment would be repaid in eight months from operating cost savings. As the two of them discussed this dramatic improvement, they decided to make the change at all 24 warehouses.
The senior manager and the distribution director approved the proposed cost of $1.5 million at 24 warehouses. Paul, the general vice president of operations, looked at the proposal and said to Cliff, one of his assistants, “Look at this proposal and let me know in about a week whether I should approve it or not.” Cliff read the report and his first reaction was that the proposal was very good. (What would happen if you, and most people in Cliff’s position, told your superiors that you should approve the proposal after doing some calculations and estimating the costs?)
Cliff considered members of his co-workers and other employees in the company to collaborate with him in reviewing the proposal. He asked Bob, Terry, and George to work on it because they were mostly familiar with the warehouse work and the one-week deadline did not allow him time to work on it with the others.
Cliff opened the first meeting by saying, “Let’s start by asking what the purpose of the loading dock is that the problem is identified as originating from. Let’s think about those purposes in as many ways as possible.”
(To be continued … )
