Curiosity eats creativity for breakfast

The reason we struggle to come up with original ideas is not because of a lack of creativity but a lack of curiosity.

“Every year we go into the same room with the same information and the same questions .. what do you think happens? Every year we come out with the same ideas” — frustrated workshop participant

I assume this scenario is quite common. We overestimate creativity's value as a means to solve our problems because we miss its greatest weakness:

Creativity is limited to what we already know, it is only the re-combination of available information and experiences. Creativity is not magic, it doesn’t produce ideas out of thin air.

Now, also add to this the following insight: most companies think the same way, because they use the same methods, models (customer journeys anyone .. ) and questions to find the same insights and understand the market in the same way.

How to win?

We won't outperform our competition by being the most creative. We win by asking and answering questions nobody else is.

"We win by seeing something nobody else can"

The current trend is that "data will save us": to apply a lot of data to calculate our way out of our humdrum*-problem (*lacking excitement or variety). Hoping that the machine will magically see connections our human brains can’t.

But machines are only reflections of our own values, ideas and biases (1 ). If we are staring down one rabbit hole the machine will only help us dig deeper.

One opportunity therefore and a low hanging fruit for most organizations is to simply rethink and redesign their creative processes to curiosity processes. From today's common creative format of combining participant and pre-read information into new ideas, to exploring questions we need to ask and information we don’t have.

Explore new questions we need to ask and insights we do not have ("what we don't know we don't know" - D.Rumsfeld)

My recommended approach is using Riskiest Assumptions Testing [RAT] (2) combined with experimentation (4).

A. Riskiest Assumptions Testing

With Riskiest Assumptions Testing [workshop] participants simply ask: “what has to be true for x to be true” (3), where x is your strategy, an existing product, something you are already doing .. anything.

"what has to be true for x to be true?"

This introduces a wealth of important assumptions that the team can prioritize. From this prioritization they identify which assumptions are unknown and risky enough to be tested.

The selected assumptions get put forward into experimentation.

B. Experimentation

One of the most productive ways to learn something new is experimentation.

The purpose of an experiment is not to confirm that you are correct (sometimes it is), but it should most often be used to surprise you (8).

The main purpose of an experiment should be to help you learn something you didn’t already know-to surprise you

And the way to do that is to reduce the cost of an experiment to almost zero (because if experiments are expensive the organization is more likely to prioritize experiments that only confirm their existing knowledge).

"The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours" — Thomas Alva Edison

With cheap and fast experiments the company can explore assumptions they never tested before, learn new things, capture new insights, venture into new areas.

And then the team can use their creativity to find solutions to opportunities nobody else is aware of.

In short:

We only know what we know, and we know very little.

We need to shift our focus from creativity to curiosity and from certainty to uncertainty.

"Researchers suggest it is uncertainty, or when you think you know something then discover you don’t, that leads to curiosity and learning outcomes". — Celeste Kidd, assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, Neurosciencenews.com

Riskiest Assumptions Testing and Experimentation are low hanging fruits and a fast track approaches we can use to see and solve opportunities nobody else knows exist.

Recommended places to start your experimentation journey:

(1). Models are opinions reflected in mathematics, Cathy O'Neil

(2). The MVP is dead. Long live the RAT, Rik Higham

(3). What would have to be true, Roger L. Martin

(4). Experimentation works, Stefan H. Thomke

(5). How managers can build a culture of experimentation, Frank V. Cespedes and Neil Hoyne

(6). Why Business Schools Need to Teach Experimentation, by Elizabeth R. Tenney, Elaine Costa, and Ruchi M. Watson

(7). Get Comfortable Breaking Your Product, Rik Higham

(8). What good experimentation looks like