Removing Barriers to Creativty

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Removing barriers to creativity

Successful creative thinking requires you to be aware of the barriers which may weaken your creativity, and prevent you from coming up with innovative ideas and finding great new solutions to problems. One of the most common barriers to creativity is fear of failure. This barrier might stop you putting ideas out there, in case someone laughs at them or even ridicules you for coming up with such crazy thoughts.

Another common barrier to creativity is relying too much on old ideas and established ways of thinking. This might be due to simple laziness on your part, or it could be that you are operating in an environment that puts too much emphasis on maintaining the status quo. To overcome these kinds of barriers, it is essential that you begin to ‘think outside the box’, travel down roads you are not used to, move out of your comfort zone, and abandon familiar practices. Luckily, there are tactics you can use to help you eliminate the typical barriers to creativity you may encounter.

Tactics to remove barriers

Tactic 1: Challenge your biases and preconceptions

A bias is an inclination towards one way of thinking. Having a bias means you lean in a certain direction from the outset. You tend to believe what you want to believe, and are reluctant to take other people’s opinions into consideration. This can obviously have a negative impact on your creative thinking.

To overcome this barrier, it is important to examine any problems you are faced with from many angles. To begin, assume your understanding of the problem is correct. Now, assume your understanding is incorrect – what does this mean? Then, view the problem from the perspective of a third party; how would someone else view the problem? When you do this, you may find that the nature of the problem you are trying to solve has changed – opening up the possibility of many different solutions.

Tactic 2: Use different thought processes to generate ideas and solutions

Avoid over-using the same old thought process you have always used. A thought process is the way ideas suggest other ideas to you in a sequence. First, get familiar with the thought process you typically use yourself. It may be that you are a highly analytical thinker, or perhaps you are more instinctual or intuitive.

When you have figured out how you naturally tend to think, start to observe how other people think. Choose a suitable third party whose thinking you are familiar with, and apply their thought process to your task or problem. Ask how would that person tackle this problem or what would they do in this situation? This frees you up to think like someone else, which can help you explore new lines of enquiry on a particular problem and come up with innovative solutions. Using this approach, you can also develop scenarios for how your idea might be received by different stakeholders down the line, and prepare responses that drive towards a suitable solution.

Tactic 3: Avoid ‘Functional Fixity’

‘Functional Fixity’ is the inability to look beyond how an object works or is designed to function. With this way of thinking, spoons can only be used to stir or drink liquids – but never to spread butter; or paperclips can only be used to fix sheets of paper together – but not to collect magnets or open locks. By being aware of ‘Functional Fixity’, and the danger this approach holds for creative thinkers, it can open your mind to new ways of looking at, and using, objects. This can have a positive impact on your creative mind, and can drive you further in your quest for creative solutions.

Overcoming rejection

Remember, rejection is never easy. So when an idea is rejected, the first thing you should do is stop and pause. Don’t react rashly or quickly. Don’t run from the room. And don’t sigh audibly. Instead, compose yourself by lightly exhaling. Take a drink of water to help reduce stress and defensiveness. Above all, remain calm.

As well as giving you time to compose yourself, pausing in this way also gives space to the person who rejected your idea to offer more information or explain why they don’t want to proceed with your idea. As the focus now moves away from you and towards the rejector, they may feel obliged to justify their skepticism. This can help you refocus your thinking and come up with alternative solutions.

Try to see the objections as requests for clarity or for more information. So, for example, if someone says, “I don’t like that advertising tag line you’ve come up with”, you could reframe this objection as, “Can you help me see how our audience might connect with this phrase?” By reframing the objection in this way, you may find that you are able to offer additional information and clarifications that satisfy the concerns raised.

It is also a good idea to try to empathize with the person who rejected your idea. Try saying something like, “I understand why you might feel that way.” This allows you to put yourself in the rejector’s place and see your idea as they do. This approach also has the added benefit of helping to ease any strain that the rejection may have wrought on your relationship with that person. Moreover, you can then adapt your idea to their viewpoint, if the viewpoint is valid.

Listen to any objection that is raised and verify the objector's expertise on the subject by inquiring about their assumptions. When you respond to the objection, use facts and hard data, but don’t rely on emotion. Avoid using unfounded opinions to verify your position. As Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape once said, "If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

If you feel the expertise of the objector is questionable, or that they are not seeing the full picture, explain your reasoning using the word ‘because’. For example, you could say, “I believe this campaign will engage our audience and drive sales because…” or, “Team efficiency and job satisfaction will improve with these changes because…” By providing valid reasons and sound arguments for your approach, you may find that you are able to win the objector over to your way of thinking.

Finally, be sure to wrap up the discussion with a motivated response to find a solution. Try asking a question like, “How do you think this idea could be improved?” Or say, “Thanks for your time and the feedback. I’ll see what else I can come up with”. In this way, you are ending the discussion on a positive note, and are in the right frame of mind to refine your original idea or come up with a new solution that is acceptable to all stakeholders.

When an idea is rejected, you may find that you just need to make a couple of small tweaks to your original solution to get back on track; or it might mean going back to the drawing board and starting over. Either way, by using all your powers of creative thinking, it should be possible to find a great solution that solves your original problem and is acceptable to everyone – and to come out of the whole process with your working relationships still intact.