More than any other situation Change is about cooperation and collaboration. No matter if your company is in serious trouble or just wants to find a new way to line itself up – it always needs people to initiate, moderate, steer, coordinate and live that Change.
So what? The problem is that often people simply don´t know how to cooperate. Of course people cooperate on a daily base, but this is mostly routine, it´s like a form of vegetative state. Change causes different needs and different needs urges people to modify their behavior.
Over years I have collected several “Creativity Techniques” to support Cooperation between people – not only in times of Change. It is always better to be prepared than surprised…
What are Creativity Techniques?
Creativity techniques are heuristic methods to facilitate creativity in a person or a group of people. They are most often used in creative problem solving.
Generally, most creativity techniques use associations between the goal (or the problem), the current state (which may be an imperfect solution to the problem), and some stimulus (possibly selected randomly). There is an analogy between many creativity techniques and methods of evolutionary computation.
In problem-solving contexts, the random word creativity technique is perhaps the simplest such method. A person confronted with a problem is presented with a randomly generated word, in the hopes of a solution arising from any associations between the word and the problem. A random image, sound, or article can be used instead of a random word as a kind of creativity goad or provocation.
Clarification
The things that people actually say are often rather different from what they mean, equally parts of their story may be missing without them realising it.
The clarification technique helps communication to others and will often release problems and help the problem owner as well. The material below shows how important language analyses are, on the left are some common forms of language fuzziness, and on the right are some question for clarifying them.
Specific answers are requested in the questions, not only for clarifying the speaker’s own thoughts, but also preventing questioners imposing their own (possibly incorrect) interpretations on it.
Notice that these are powerful questions, and used insensitively they can feel like interrogation rather than help!
Deletion: Where material has been completely omitted from the sentence
- ‘I’m inadequate’. To do what?
- ‘My thinking is better’. About what? Better than what
Referential index deletion: A Place, person or thing is brought into the sentence but not specified
- ‘Thing get me down’. What things?
- ‘Something should be done about it? What should be done about what?
Unspecified verbs: The verb is introduced but is not clarified
- ‘I can deal with it’. How, specifically?
- ‘I’m stuck’. How are you stuck?
Nominalizations: Abstract nouns like ‘pride’, ‘respect’, ‘love’, ‘confidence’, are introduced.Though apparently important to the speaker, they do not have fixed, clear meanings
- ‘There is no respect here’. Who is not respecting whom? Respecting in what way?
- ‘Knowledge is most important’. Who knows what and in what way?
Modal operators: Use of limiting words like ‘cant’, and ‘must’
- ‘I cant do anything right’. What prevents you?
- ‘You must go’. What might happen if I don’t?
Lost perfomatives: A ‘should’ or ‘must’ statement that doesn’t state where its authority come from – e.g.‘People should know better’ (Who, exactly, says they should?)
Generalisations and Universal quantifiers: Associating a whole class of experience with same meaning, e.g. ‘Staplers never work!’, ‘Ill never accept another sales trip again!’, ‘Everyone hats me!’.
Presuppositions: Parts of a statement that must have some existence for the statement to be true or valid, e.g. ‘The manager tried to lie to me again’ presupposes a manager and past lying (Exactly when and in what circumstances did the manager lie to you in the past?).
Causal modelling: Any cause-effect statement that will link two or more situations in a cause-effect fashion, e.g. ‘The printer breakdown was the reason for me being late with the draft’. (Is this the only possible explanation?)
Mind reading: The speaker alleges to be privy to the internal states of others, e.g. ‘I know what you are thinking’, ‘and I think he is doing that because he wants the contract’. (What is the person actually thinking or wanting?)
ChangeCom 