CREATIVITY: TIP SHEET

9 TIPS FOR BUILDING A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY

IRE 6.27.2014

Leticia Britos Cavagnaro | britos@stanford.edu

COLLABORATE RADICALLY

Don’t put together a team of just reporters or just photographers or just editors to solve a problem. Put together a group of all different types of people and personalities. They’ll each bring a different perspective.

It’s a *good* thing if someone has no experience in the issue you’re grappling with. They’ll come without any assumptions or biases. They’ll come with fresh ideas and questions.

RECRUIT PEOPLE WHO AREN’T LIKE YOU

A diverse team will come up with different perspectives. Finding talent should begin way before you are posting your openings so keep your eyes open in unlikely places - and post on places that no one else does or where you never have before. You’ll be surprised at kinds of talented people who show up.

INCENTIVIZE THE PROCESS, NOT JUST OUTCOMES

Reward processes instead of just the outcomes. For example, if you’re brainstorming solutions to a problem, reward the greatest number of ideas instead of just the one best idea. Sometimes the best ideas are inspired by the weirdest ones. Any one idea can pop up from time to time, but the right processes can ensure constant creativity.

KNOW WHEN TO OWN (AND NOT TO OWN) YOUR IDEAS

This could go in both directions: If you don’t feel any ownership, then you won’t act on them. But if you’re too attached to your idea, then you won’t let it go even when it’s not a good idea.

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have” -- Emile Chartier, French philosopher/journalist.

SEPARATE IDEA GENERATION FROM IDEA JUDGEMENT

The quickest way to kill a great brainstorm is to shut down ideas proposed by others. It’s also a way to make you seem like the smartest person in the room. Resist that urge. It’s easy to say why something won’t work. The real challenge is figuring out why it will work.

So draw clear lines around what you’re doing. First, spend the time coming up with as many ideas as you can, suspending judgement, and with everyone building on each other’s ideas. Then, later on you can figure out which of those ideas you want to go with and which you want to kill. But make them clearly two different activities.

This way you’re going for volume: 50 ideas instead of three. Bonus tip for the idea generation: build off someone else’s idea by saying “Yes, and …” never “Yes, but…”

LOWER THE BAR TO PUBLISHING

Yes, you need to dot every i and cross every t on a major investigation and in the facts of every story. But what about everything else? Why spend months and months and go through rounds and rounds of editors to vet every idea without knowing if your readers or viewers will love it?

Create simple paths for your staff to get rough prototypes of ideas in front of readers before you invest too much time in them. And then ask those readers what they thought. Take their feedback and quickly decide whether to continue with the idea and how to adapt it. (Check out The Pretotyping Manifesto on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4AqxNekecY) for further inspiration and resources.)

If something’s too sensitive to publish publicly, draw in a small sample of test users through callouts in newsletters or social media. Or just test with other people in the organization who aren’t involved.

HAVE A BIAS TOWARD ACTION

When in doubt, don’t form committees or think. Just do. Start building something. When organizations grapple with a tough decision, it’s easy for everyone to constantly ask the question and talk about how hard it is instead of actually solving it.

Go!

ARE YOU ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION?

Often the solution is already embedded in the question you are asking, and that will limit the range of possibilities -- leaving you with only the most obvious answers. For example, you ask: “What kind of map should this story have?” You’ve already limited yourself to a map. Instead, ask: “What’s the most compelling way possible to tell this story visually?”

Spend some time thinking about the goal you are pursuing. Then reframe it to get at the real problem that it’s worth solving. Maybe you really aren’t trying to solve the problem of getting a small number of responses in the comments section of your website. Instead, your goal may be articulated as trying to solve a bigger question about reader engagement. (Here’s a great link (http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/why-how-laddering.pdf) for a method that can be used for problem (re)framing.)

EMPOWER PEOPLE TO RECREATE SYSTEMS

If your staff is unhappy about how something works, empower them to change it. In other words, set expectations that will get them to go from just complaining about a problem, to bringing up the problem along with proposed solutions.