Random Wisdom (or DUH)

Part of a having a creative mindset, is thinking about your task in terms of What and How. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the desired result? How can you get those results?

Creativity can be used particularly well in the How. Many times when we prepare tasks for ourselves or others, we fix the What and the How, thereby cutting off any creativity. Sometimes the How even becomes a goal in itself. 

When I worked as an IT consultant, I regularly got the task to make a sales presentation, which would always be a Powerpoint presentation. We’d take the beamer with us to the client and do our presentation. For sure, the client would see the same kinds of presentations from different suppliers. There was little room for creativity. 

Now what if we had separated the What from the How? What were we trying to accomplish? We wanted to gain the trust of the client in our abilities and our solutions. How could we do that? Well, a Powerpoint presentation is just one of the possibilities. We could have taken them to have lunch with one of our current clients. We could have used rollplaying, to help them experience how we do projects and how we handle incidents, for example.We could have found many different ways to accomplish our goal. We could have been creative.

I’m not saying that the suggestions are better than a Powerpoint presentation. Just be open to other possibilities.

If you use the distinction between What and How in your communication, you will inspire others to adopt a creative mindset.