7 Developing Creativity, Intuition and Innovation in Schools

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Developing Creativity, Intuition and Innovation in Schools

CREATIVITY – THE STARTING POINT Highly effective school leaders encourage the creativity of staff to find better solutions to school problems. The creative process starts with incubation, which allows alternatives to be considered subconsciously. The creative moment may follow when there is a sudden insight, a mental leap to a new solution. This can occur for both individuals and teams. The arbitrary or accidental is often significant in this process. Serendipity, associated with creativity, is the facility for encountering unexpected good luck as a result of accident, wisdom or exploratory behaviour. The development of professionalism has traditionally concentrated on left-brain skills, with an excessive respect for logic, reason and rationality. Creative staff have a curiosity to consider issues from different perspectives and a capacity to connect concepts from different contexts. Schools are increasingly developing a positive belief in the importance of creative talent and the capacity to identify and develop it. Though some staff may be less creative because of earlier life and professional experience, all can develop and grow. This inner creative resource is however often obscured by fear of the judgements of others.

SCHOOL CULTURE AND CREATIVITY Some characteristics of a school culture enhance and others inhibit the development of creativity. When the school is creative, the rules and conventions will inevitably be challenged. A creative individual or team leader changes the school’s cultural norms, which otherwise can only provide acceptable or traditional solutions. Creativity always involves a novel response which is adaptive to the current unique reality in the school. This creative process involves a new evaluation of ideas, an elaboration of the original insight, a sustaining and developing of it to the full, and then applying it successfully. Creative ideas are ready for implementation. Innovation is a complementary process, involving planning and implementing, making the creative idea lead to school improvement (Fryer, 1996). Imagination is more important to creativity than knowledge. To find new problems, to search for new possibilities and to reassess old problems from a new perspective requires creative imagination and can mark a real advance in problem-solving capacity.

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What role does creativity play in your school’s leadership and management?

School leaders in this context need to develop and encourage initiative and flexibility in teams, and may need to learn this skill working in teams themselves. Flexible multidisciplinary teams are the key to structural change. All staff need to be engaged in decision-making and empowered to make improvements. The key to reaching the highest level of creativity is to integrate creative and judgemental thinking at the individual, team and school levels. The illusions of art are to serve the purpose of a closer and truer relationship with reality. Conceptual creativity is the basis for changing and enhancing the current reality in school. One of the most impressive Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) publications (1999) which explores creativity, culture and education, makes profound links across these issues:

Teaching with creativity and teaching for creativity include all the characteristics of good teaching. These include strong motivation, high expectations, the ability to communicate and listen and the ability to interest and to inspire. Creative teachers need expertise in their particular fields ... but creative teachers need more than this. They need techniques that stimulate curiosity and raise self-esteem and confidence. They must recognise when encouragement is needed and confidence threatened, they must balance structured learning with opportunities for self-direction. (DfEE, 1999, para. 175, p. 95)

Brainstorming (Osborn, 1963), mind-mapping (Buzan, 1993), storyboarding (Disney) and synectics (Gordon, 1961) are different techniques for developing creativity which can be explored.

MIND MAPS Mind maps, for example, use images that are often more evocative than words, and more precise and potent in triggering a wide range of associations and thinking. The techniques used include: emphasis – a clear central image and links with the key concepts, colours, spacing; association – arrows, codes, geometrical shapes; clarity – build on the one key word, make the images clear, the words should be on lines and connected to other lines indicating their relative importance; develop a unique personal style. Taking notes, thinking of new ideas, summarizing information is best done using the association of keywords and not in a written linear form. Using mind maps the links between key concepts can be immediately recognized, so recall and review is more effective and rapid. The addition of new information is easy. The more creatively open-ended nature enables the brain to make new connections.

DEVELOPING A CREATIVE CULTURE Instant judgement is the opposite of creativity. Creativity and structure are complementary as in art. The creative spirit flourishes best in a climate in which ideas and concepts are all-important, a school which is a learning organization where all school leaders publicly develop their own creativity, encourage staff to learn

about and improve their own creative processes, and reward those who risk being creative even when they fail. A technique which can be used is imagining life at each extreme of a dilemma, or deliberately creating uncertainty so that complexity is not seen as a challenge to analysis but a signal to engage and trust intuition and emotional awareness. In such techniques it is important to acknowledge and value differences, to allow two conflicting requirements to swirl around and interact. This can transform both and lead to a new way forward.

Eraut (1994) discusses the development of expertise in school management and teaching. The lowest-level skill is acquiring and interpreting information. The next, skilled behaviours require a combination of tacit knowledge and intuitive decision-making. Deliberative processes require propositional knowledge, situational knowledge and professional judgement. The central features of the highest-level skill, meta-processes, is about self-knowledge and self-management. This is the level at which creativity is encouraged. Habits are ways of behaving, which, because they are skilled and unthinking, may prevent people from thinking creatively. To challenge habitual thinking is to deliberately ask awkward questions, to revisit ideas and to think in new ways, to practice being creative.

From the discussion so far, is creativity encouraged in your school outside the curriculum?

INNOVATIVE SCHOOLS If schools are innovative they demonstrate seven characteristics (Higgins, 1995):

1)A stated and working strategy of innovation – staff should question the school’s cultural norms. Questioning orthodoxy allows new understandings to emerge. The leader should visibly develop her/his creativity skills. 2)Forming teams – which know they are required to question current assumptions and seek new solutions. 3)Rewarding creativity and innovation – schools traditionally reward responsibility or classroom performance. The achievement of explicit creativity goals for tasks, projects and whole-school issues should be rewarded. 4)Allowing mistakes – the Relative Advantage Principle of Creativity shows that people undertake creative actions if they expect them to confer advantages relative to alternative approaches. 5)Training in creativity – in-service training to develop skills in creative techniques. Those who have limiting beliefs in their creative capability are challenged. 6)Managing the organizational culture – so it is responsive to innovations.

Ambiguity provides opportunities for new thinking but may lead to anxiety.

Creativity is served by dispelling fears and engendering positive emotions. 7)Creating new opportunities proactively – not simply futures thinking, but creating the future. The school should concentrate their creative acts on the key evaluative domains focusing on the priorities of children and parents.

Using this definition is your school innovative?

CREATIVE ACTION-TAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS Ford and Gioia (1995) present in detail a number of observations, guidelines, rationales and consequential interventions. The preliminary observations and guidelines are presented here.

1)People create certainty by imposing familiar interpretations on ambiguous or unfamiliar situations. Guideline: Doubt what you think you know. 2)Creative actions occur mainly as a response to ambiguity. Guideline: Treat ambiguity as opportunity. 3)Creative actions in organizational settings are usually judged according to the standards of multiple social domains. Guideline: Tailor creative acts and products to key evaluative domains. 4)Goals for creativity are rarely articulated in organizations. Guideline:

Establish explicit creativity goals for tasks, projects and programmes. 5)People often have fragile beliefs in their own creative capacity because of inexperience with creative action in organizationally relevant domains. Guideline:

Enhance creative capability beliefs with a small-wins strategy 6)Confidently held beliefs that the organization (or other domain) is receptive to creative actions are key. Negative beliefs strongly favour familiar actions over creative actions. Guideline: Remember the Relative Advantage Principle of

Creativity: people undertake creative actions only to the extent that they expect them to confer advantages relative to other behavioural options. 7)Negative emotions favour habitual action; positive emotions favour, and are favoured by, creative action. Guideline: Ambiguity leads to anxiety as well as creativity. Creativity is served by dispelling fears and engendering positive emotions. 8)Talent matters, but knowledge and skills can be developed that facilitate creative action. Guideline:Creativity is trainable, to the extent that creativity training is domain-relevant. 9)Creative actions produce meaning out of ambiguity. Guideline: Don’t just sit there thinking ... Do something creative!

If you are planning creative action-taking follow the guidelines.

KIRTON ADAPTION–INVENTION INVENTORY A psychometric instrument which reliably provides some analysis of creativity is the Kirton Adaption-Innovation (KAI) Inventory which measures the preferred thinking style in respect of problem-solving, creativity and decision-making. Kirton (1991) posits that everyone can be located on a continuum from the highly adaptive to the highly innovative. Adaption is the preference for improving existing practice. Innovation represents a preference for exploring new problems and offering solutions that may challenge accepted practice.

Adaptors Innovators

Do it better Do it differently

Work within existing frameworks Challenge, reframe

Fewer, more acceptable solutions Many solutions

Prefer well established situations Set new policy, structure

Essential for ongoing function Essential in times of change The KAI Inventory is a short 32-item inventory designed to assess the adaption–innovation preference. A score of 140 (the maximum) does not make you a better innovator than someone with 110. It means there is a stronger preference for working in the Innovative way as defined by Kirton. The total score is made up to three subscale scores: SO for sufficiency of originality style (number of ideas), E for efficiency (level of attention to details) and R for role and group conformity style (working with, as opposed to challenging, the status quo). The evidence suggests that you are not likely to change your preferred style much over the years, though you may become better at adopting a persona to fit in with an environment. Though there is a large range within each profession you may wish to know that the averages are 80 for civil servants, 95 for teachers and 105 for marketing managers.

Intuition, related to creativity and innovation, is a basis for decision-making, when there is uncertainty or no precedent. When the variables are not scientifically predictable, when the facts do not clearly point the way to solutions, when analytical data is of little use, when several plausible solutions exist and when time is limited, intuitive decisions have to be made. Relaxation and silence allows for an honest reflection and the time to recognise the possibility of self-deception. It is important to be able trust yourself and be open to inner and outer new experiences. The acceptance of non-judgemental attitudes, finding an intrinsic satisfaction from expanded consciousness, and being willing to accept things, all combine to provide a basis for letting intuitive and creative decisions emerge.

Is developing your creativity a professional priority?

CREATIVE STRATEGY The current and emerging problems and concerns of all stakeholders in the school community provide the raw material for strategic advantage. Strategy is the cyclical iterative process for continuous improvement. There may be breakthroughs and creative loops but the process is continuous. A capability for learning and innovation is integral to school strategy development. The connections between strategy and daily school life stimulate new ideas. Creative schools focus on innovative ways to create unprecedented customer (that is, pupils and parents) educational value not on beating competitors. Creative strategy is achieved through internal innovative new ways of working, but also by seeing competitors as useful sources of learning. Creative swiping is learning from other schools and, more challengingly, other organizations outside education, using benchmarking imaginatively. Innovative thinking can be the key to short-term competitive advantage as well as long-term growth

Creative advantage schools demonstrate a number of characteristics (Williams and Knight, 1994). They welcome the impossible as an opportunity. They make no false promises to achieve the impossible but enjoy attempting to do so, using external influences and opportunities to increase their own learning. Recognizing the power of dilemmas, they improve their internal skills in identifying and working with them. Such schools have an ability to forget, and think afresh about ideas and issues in new teams. They value challenge and support as part of the internal culture, and cannot tolerate complacency. They believe in ‘good enough’ solutions to avoid perfectionism and detail which slows down strategic commitment. They think strategy development is for the whole school, and strive for strategies where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. A capability for learning and innovation is key. The links between the day-to-day and the strategic provides connections to stimulate new ideas.

Does your school have a creative strategy? Is it a creative advantage school?

DE BONO De Bono has been concerned with serious creativity for many years (De Bono, 1970). He sees his work as designing software for the brain. Lateral thinking is for changing concepts and perceptions, to provide an escape route from standard patterns of thinking. Premature judgement prevents playfulness and creativity. The right side of the brain represents innocence which plays a role in creativity, particularly in artistic expression. De Bono developed the Six Thinking Hats System, a form of parallel thinking, which is designed to introduce random concepts and provocative ideas: 1)White Hat Data gathering – facts, figures, information needs and gaps. 2)Red Hat Intuition and emotions – feelings. 3)Black Hat Judgement and caution – the logical negative. 4)Yellow Hat Benefits and why it will work – the logical positive, looking forward to results, but also for value in what has happened. 5)Green Hat Provocations, alternatives and creativity – proposals, provocations and changes. 6)Blue Hat Overview and process control – thinking about the subject, meta-cognition. One team member can her/himself or ask another person, or the whole team, to adopt or take off a particular colour of hat. The hats provide an opportunity to switch thinking. Sometimes it is possible to follow a sequence of hats to structure group thinking. The Six Thinking Hats process can make space and time for creativity.

CREATIVITY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE Arguably, the book which best presents the range of implications of creativity for those wishing to develop as a leader in the management of change is Rickards (1999). The book concentrates on what creativity can contribute to management.

The challenge Rickards presents offers a broad understanding of management, and the significance of the many contributors to thinking, with chapters on creativity – the slumbering giant of organizational studies – and innovation. However, he also makes clear the links to many other issues dealt with in this book – on marketing and strategy, decision-making, culture and climate issues, leadership and managerialism and the management of change. The penultimate chapter presents postmodernism, a jolt to the system, with a ‘bluffer’s guide’ to postmodern terms. The chapter on creativity provides an outstanding short history of the development of the concept.

THINKING LIKE A GENIUS Michalko (1998) examined the thinking strategies of geniuses and sees as central their ability to think productively not reproductively, because they have the capacity not to be skewed by the prism of past experience. Geniuses reconceptualize problems in many different ways, making their thoughts visible, using unique combinations of verbal, visual and spatial abilities. Most importantly they produce constantly. Geniuses generate a rich diversity of novel and unpredictable alternatives, constantly combining and recombining ideas, images and thoughts in their conscious and unconscious minds, forcing relationships out of juxtapositions between dissimilar subjects. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble freely from the mind. Geniuses tolerate ambivalence in opposites and the apparently incompatible, think metaphorically and prepare themselves for chance serendipitous, occurrences.

Could you practise the skills of a genius?

Imaginization (Morgan, 1993) is a managerial skill which aids the development and understanding of individual creative potential and the finding of innovative solutions. The strategic termites, whose nests are products of random self-organizing activity where structures emerge in a haphazard and unplanned way, provide a metaphor and inspiration for developing coherent approaches to strategic management and change. The spider plant provides another metaphor for an organization. Futureblock as conceived here may relate very directly to education, that is: change, change, change with, nevertheless, all kinds of factors in the current situation reinforcing the status quo. The exploration of such metaphors can be particularly useful in breaking free of immobilizing patterns.

Create a metaphor to describe your school as an organization.

Visionizing (Parnes, 1992) and VanGrundy (1992) is the breaking of habitual mental associations and the forming of new ones. Visionizing is the deliberate development of creativity. The Creative Problem Solving (CPS) cycle is elaborated fully and is explored as a training and facilitation process. The starting point may be a conforming person who relies totally on past experience to programme her/himself to continuously plod ahead in known proven ways. The second stage is the cre-

ative–adaptive person who is sensitive to problems and challenges, and creatively solves them by modifying or adapting behaviours. The creative–innovative person, the Visionizer, deliberately dreams, envisions and uses creative problem-solving techniques to turn these images into the best reality it is possible to achieve. Parnes (1992) provides a rigorous training programme for creative professional development.

BLOCKS TO CREATIVITY The blocks to creativity, perceptual, intellectual, emotional in the individual, and cultural and environmental within the school can be challenged.

Perceptual blocks

● Difficulty in isolating the problem. ● Tendency to delimit the problem area too closely. ● Inability to see the problem from various viewpoints. ● Seeing what you expect to see – stereotyping. ● Saturation. ● Failure to use all sensory inputs.

Emotional blocks

● Fear to make a mistake, to fail, to risk. ● Inability to tolerate ambiguity; overriding desires for security, order; no appetite for chaos. ● Preference for judging ideas, rather than generating them. ● Inability to relax, incubate, and ‘sleep on it’. ● Lack of challenge; problems fail to engage interest. ● Excessive zeal; overmotivation to succeed quickly. ● Lack of access to areas of imagination. ● Lack of imaginative control. ● Inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

Intellectual blocks

● Solving problems using an incorrect language (verbal, mathematical, visual) as in trying to solve a problem mathematically when it can more easily be accomplished visually. ● Inflexible or inadequate use of intellectual problem-solving strategies. ● Lack of, or incorrect, information. ● Inadequate language skill to express and record ideas (verbally, musically, visually).

Cultural blocks

● Fantasy and reflection are a waste of time, lazy even crazy. ● Playfulness is for children only.

● Problem-solving is a serious business and humour is out of place. ● Reason, logic, numbers, utility, practicality are good; feeling, intuition, qualitative judgements, pleasure are bad. ● Tradition is preferable to change. ● Any problem can be solved by scientific thinking and lots of money. ● Inspiration is taboo.

Environmental blocks

● Lack of co-operation and trust among colleagues. ● Autocratic manager who values only her/his ideas; does not reward others. ● Distractions – phone, easy intrusions. ● Lack of support to bring ideas into action.

MEASURING CREATIVITY There is a diagnostic instrument (unknown source) which allows the measurement of creativity using 14 dimensions:

1)A fear of failure results in staff drawing back and not taking risks, settling for less in order to avoid anxiety or the shame of failure. 2)A reluctance to play results in a literal, overserious problem-solving style, and not ‘playing around’ with ideas. This fear is of seeming foolish or silly by experimenting with the unusual. 3)Resource myopia is the failure to see one’s own strengths and appreciate the resources, people and things, in the environment. 4)Overcertainty is a rigidity in problem-solving responses using stereotypical reactions; persisting in behaviour that is no longer functional and not challenging current assumptions. 5)Frustration avoidance is giving up too soon when faced with obstacles, avoiding the pain or discomfort often associated with change or novel solutions to problems. 6)Being custom-bound results in an overemphasis on traditional ways of doing things, with too much reverence for the past and a tendency to conform when it is not necessary or useful. 7)An impoverished fantasy life results in the mistrusting, ignoring or demeaning the inner images and visualizations of the self and others. The overvaluing of the so-called objective world shows a lack of imagination. 8)A fear of the unknown results in avoiding situations which lack clarity or which have uncertain probability of success. This results in the overvaluing of what is known against what is not known, with an excessive need to know the future before moving forward. 9)Those with a need for balance have an inability to tolerate disorder, confusion or ambiguity. An excessive need for balance and symmetry results in a dislike of complexity. 10)A reluctance to exert influence may come from a fear of seeming too aggres-

sive or pushy in influencing others. There may be a hesitancy to stand up for what one believes or ineffectiveness in making oneself heard. 11)A reluctance to let go is trying too hard to push through solutions to problems, with insufficient ability to let things incubate or to let things happen naturally. This may be from a lack of trust in human capacities. 12)An impoverished emotional life results in a failure to appreciate the motivational power of emotion. This results in a lack of awareness of the importance of feelings in achieving commitment to individual and group effort. 13)An unintegrated yin–yang is not using sufficient ways of getting at the essence of things, and polarizing things into opposites rather than knowing how to integrate the best of the apparently contradictory. Without integration there is no unified perception of the wholeness of the universe. 14)Sensory dullness is not adequately using one’s primary senses as a way of knowing; making only partial contact with self and the environment. The capacity to feel and explore atrophy and there is limited sensitivity. Would you seek to overcome blocks to your personal creativity?

HOW TO DEVELOP CREATIVITY 1) Capture spontaneous ideas. Be ready to capture ideas that flash into your consciousness at the oddest moments. Have a notebook ready day and night to write them down. One word is enough to avoid losing the inspiration – but if possible capture and start to develop the idea there and then. 2) Develop ideas. As soon as you can, work at developing your idea – by yourself or bounce it off someone else. Two subconscious brains are better than one. Do not be afraid to look a fool. If the idea is a good one, the kudos from its success is far greater than the embarrassment of suggesting a non-starter. 3) Make space. If your conscious brain is full of worries and work there is no room for inspiration. To encourage creativity set aside time and space to welcome ideas. Relax – somewhere warm, comfortable, calm, and quiet – let your mind wander over the length and breadth of your life. Capture the ideas that come to you. 4) Seek inspiration. The donkey plodding in steady circles around the well may have time and space for creative thinking but lacks inspiration. If you are tired and drained by your daily work, you will need to make a special effort to move beyond your normal routine into an environment which sparks creativity. 5) Push out the boundaries. Seeking inspiration or confronting a problem, think widely around your topic. View it from different angles, from above or below.

Take a bird’s eye view. Adjust the time – in a month? Next year? Play around with size – if it were smaller? If there were more? Change the colour, texture, structure. 6) Avoid straight lines. Write your ideas about how your brain works – in three dimensions. Start in the middle of the page and capture ideas like branches of a tree. Write in a straight line only if a train of thought follows a straight line.

When random thoughts occur, jot them anywhere – but jot them all. 7) Be positive. Expect to get good ideas. Expect your brain to work for you all the time. Expect to be the person others turn to for inspiration. Encourage them

when they bounce an idea off you. Expect them to encourage you. Create a positive atmosphere in which everyone thrives on creative interaction.

Will you start on this process now?

REFERENCES

Buzan, T. (1993) The Mind Map Book, London: Penguin. De Bono, E. (1970) Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, New York, NY: Harper and

Row. Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1999) All Our Futures: Creativity,

Culture and Education, London: DfEE. Eraut, M. (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer. Ford, C.M. and Gioia, D.A. (eds), (1995) ‘Guidelines for creative action taking in organizations’, in Creative Action in Organizations: Ivory Tower Visions & Real World Voices (pp. 355–67), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fryer, M. (1996) Creative Teaching and Learning, London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Gordon, W.J.J. (1961) Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity, New York, NY:

Harper and Row. Higgins, J.A. (1995) ‘Innovate or evaporate: seven secrets of innovative corporations’, The

Futurist, September–October pp. 42–8. Kirton, M.J. (1991) ‘Adaptors and innovators’, in J. Henry (ed.), Creative Management,

London: Sage Publications. Michalko, M. (1998) ‘Thinking like a genius’, The Futurist, May, pp. 21–5. Morgan, G. (1993) Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing and Managing,

London: Sage. Osborn, A.F. (1963) Applied Imagination, New York, NY: Scribner’s. Parnes, S.J. (1992) Visionizing: State-of-the-Art processes for Encouraging Innovative

Intelligence, Buffalo, NY: Creative Education Foundation. Rickards, T. (1999) Creativity and the Management of Change, Oxford: Blackwell

Business. VanGrundy, A.B. (1992) Idea Power: Techniques & Resources to Unleash the Creativity in Your Organization, New York, NY: American Management Association. Williams, C. and Knight, A. (1994) ‘Achieving creative advantage’, Ashridge Journal,

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