Distortion: Individuals
and teams can benefit
from this technique – 10-20 minutes
Most
problems have clear dimensions. They might be spatial, numerical or time
oriented. For example, if we wanted to improve a supermarket's
checkouts, dimensions might include number of counters, number of staff,
number of customers, size of checkout and times the checkout was open.
In this
exercise, you will take a key dimension of your problem and distort it.
Make it much bigger, or much smaller, than it currently is. In the
checkout example, you might look at the implications of having one
checkout or 1000. Having one customer or a million. Having checkouts the
size of a matchbox or the size of a warehouse. Opening a checkout for
one second or one year at a time. Don't try to cover everything — choose
one dimension and stick with it.
When you
have noted down the implications of the distortion, look back at the
real world. For example, if you had chosen a matchbox checkout, you
could use a direct output from the distortion — smaller checkouts just
for baskets, making more space. Or you can look at an implication like
having tiny staff. In the real world, tiny staff would mean lots of room
behind the checkout. Is the space given to the employee getting in the
way of giving good service? Could a change in space improve things? And
so on.
With some
problems, usually the very people-oriented, it is difficult to find an
appropriate dimension. If so, try another technique. It is also possible
that the dimension chosen doesn't work very well. Choose another, but
make sure you have really examined the possibilities first — don't skip
around just because the distortion seems uncomfortable; it is supposed
to.
When this
technique works well, it works very well, because the dimension
selected was a major restraint in your thinking. Resist the inclination
to handle multiple distortions in a single group, but with multiple
teams it is well worth parcelling out the distortions to get a wider
range of suggestions.
Reversal:
is the extreme case of Distortion
Teams and
individuals can use this technique – 10-20 minutes
Here,
instead of taking an aspect of the problem and distorting it, we turn
the problem inside out to reverse actually what we are trying to do. For
example, if the requirement were to improve the company's position in a
published league table, reversal would be to think `what could we do to
make our position in the league table worse.
Spend five
minutes brainstorming ideas to actively negate your `how to' statement.
Then look at the implications of the ideas you have generated.
Worryingly often, these will be practices that are actually undertaken
in your company. A classic example is the problem `how to improve
communications within our company'.
Many of the
suggestions for `how to make communications fail in our company' seem
already to be underway in many large companies. One outcome, therefore,
is to modify or stop these existing practices. Other deductions will be
more indirect, looking at the implications of the negative suggestions.
For example, fitting a muzzle (to stop communications) may make you
think of someone holding a mobile phone to their face.
Make sure
that you are prepared to go beyond the obvious, both in the negative
suggestions and how these are applied back to the real problem. It's
easy to simply list the obvious positive ideas in reverse, then turn
them around again. But you are looking for something more than the
obvious when using creativity techniques.
This is not
a good technique for new product development, but it is great for
overcoming obstacles and other aspects of dealing with general problems.
With a
group you can split the team into `bad guys', looking to make the
proposition fail, and `good guys' looking to reverse the bad guys' ideas
and convert them into something useful. This can be made into a
challenge — try to find something so negative that the 'good guys' can't
use it.
Creativity
requires spending time "doing nothing" - workaholism guarantees its
death
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