Working on Creativity

Hi Angeline, I have used a few ways to promote creativity - usually in managers of large institutions like The Home Office (UK Gov) but the techniques can be used with anyone in any context.

NLP - this is a cognitive based technique which can be used to remove fear of failure and reframe learning. The presupposition that there is no failure only feedback.

Lateral thinking - Edward DdBono's river jumping - the idea here is that if you are used to having one thought and continue to practice it you are more likely to do what ever it is in that particular way in the future. A good way of getting out of that rut is to ask youself two quesitons:

"What is this an example of?" and "What is another example of this?"

(or could be asked as "What is same-same but different?")

eg rib is an example of knitting, another example of knitting is moss stitch. All knitting is good.

You could ask the Get Ready! Girls to make samplers, each time a change is required, help them by asking these questions, and ask each girl for a different answer! - within reason depending on how many stitch patterns they have learnt - although if they get into the groove they will be inventing their own! Of course, lots of positive reinforcement of doing things in a different an unique way through praise will also degrade the fear of failure......

There are some other techniques which are often used by creative agencies in designing new products:

Re-expression: eg use different words or tell me about it as if you were talking to a small child. This was behind the toothpaste advertising campaign of liquid teeth - very succesful in East Africa 

Related worlds: look at patterns in nature, or other products, or food or anything to get ideas of what you can do in your craft

Revolution: use something different to do the same thing eg knit with strips of old plastic shopping bags...

Quite a long response but I hope some of this may be useful! - I would be very happy to chat about it! You can find me on skype (UK time)

 

Hi Liz,

Your comments made me realise something. That creativity should start from the trainer themselves. The trainer needs to be trained in positive reinforcement and most importantly be willing to think out of the box themselves before the girls can be asked to be more creative.

So creativity workshops shouldnt be only be for the students but for the trainers as well. And we'll have to ensure somehow that the trainers are using the new methods learnt in teaching the girls or else the time and effort spent on training well be quite useless.

gosh... that's quite a bit to think about. Give me some time to look through and google about some of the stuff you mentioned and we'll see how things go.

Any other ideas?

Yes! you are right ;-)) The other thing is that the trainers need to believe that all their students can be creative and the creativity is there, just waiting to be unlocked (this is called the Pigmalion effect in psychology). This attitude alone will make amazing differences!