Out of the Box: how can I help myself and others to be more creative?

Everyone wants to be a creative thinker, but day-to-day routines, a constant “to do” list and, sometimes, our formal training and education channel our thoughts in a prescribed direction. How to help your brain consider all options and possibilities freely and imaginatively is a million-dollar question. Can we learn creativity? And, perhaps more importantly, can we unlearn the barriers that prevent us from being creative?

Bias and barriers

Over the past few years, we have all become more aware of the ways in which our brains are inherently biased and the effects that this bias can have on our working lives – in particular, in the areas of diversity and inclusion, culture and recruitment. You can now be trained to recognise bias and to think about how to implement processes to reduce it.

Fewer people, however, focus on the effect of bias on creativity. Thought habits and the stultifying effects of a dominant accepted wisdom are common in all professions and workplaces – and internal audit is not immune. Internal auditors are told to exercise professional scepticism, but this is far easier to do when you are viewing another person’s working practices than when you consider your own, and your close colleagues’, thoughts.

Professional training teaches you how to think like an internal auditor. But how do you spot when this becomes a problem, rather than a solution? As a society, we applaud the idea of people who think freely and off the accepted tracks, but generally sideline them as, at best, amusingly provocative, and, at worst, dangerous.

When someone comes up with a genuinely counter-cultural idea, we try to pigeonhole it – is it left or right wing, repressive or progressive? The answer often tells you more about the person listening than it does about the idea itself.

It is risky asking people to be creative. No one wants to throw good practices out with bad on an ideological whim. Many whacky ideas are just whacky. There is safety and sense in much received wisdom. If you want to be more creative yourself, and inspire more imagination from others around you, you need to create a space where these ideas can be discussed and biases recognised alongside well-grounded reservations or caveats.

However, you must also convince people that there is a chance their ideas will be acted upon. There must be an incentive to encourage people to put their thoughts out for general criticism.

Many people have got to their current position by being good at fitting in, doing the “right” thing and behaving the way their parents, teachers and employers tell them to. If you ask them to think differently you need to listen to their thoughts – and you need to convince them that their reputations won’t suffer.

Furthermore, the ones who shout loudest when encouraged to do so are not necessarily the ones with the best ideas. Once you have created space and opportunities to express ideas, you need to help people to come up with productive ideas that are genuinely useful and mechanisms to sort the wheat from the chaff – it may be useful to refer to our technical guidance on psychological safety.

Seek help

One crucial element of productive creativity is information. Creative ideas often involve asking people to do things differently or with unfamiliar tools.  This is a barrier. It’s easier to do lots of things that you are familiar with and where you clearly understand your role than to enter new territory. Admitting that you don’t fully understand the details is tough and lack of comprehension tends to increase suspicion – is the information correct and does someone have an agenda that you are unaware of?

This is particularly true when it comes to technology, which is surrounded by technical jargon and where there are a host of providers competing to sell you something when what you really want is simple, neutral advice.

One solution could be to attend a course or a session at one of the Chartered IIA’s conferences, forums or working groups (for example, the Data Analytics Working Group) to help you explore the basics or more advanced ideas in a safe, supportive setting. It could also introduce you to people who can talk through options and share experiences with no further agenda.

Another tactic is to test the information you have by asking someone to play the child in the room and question everything the team does and is planning to do: “Why do we do it this way?” “Why do you say that?” “Why is this important?” If you can’t find an adequate answer, you could try brainstorming for alternatives.

Foresight and insight

To think creatively and productively, you need to stay up to date with global events and use a wide range of sources. Some may not seem to be directly relevant to your business, but the geopolitical tensions and volatile risks we are seeing at the moment can mean that things change fast. Foresight saves time in the long run.

There are limits to what any organisation can do to prevent an emerging risk escalating into a crisis, but thinking creatively about a wide range of “what ifs” could at least prevent people from panicking and ensure that you have responses in place. A crisis involving an energy black-out or a collapsed supply chain may need an instant response when it is too late to think about the options.

Helping other people in your team and organisation also to read widely and look further afield for inspiration isn’t easy when everyone is busy. However, many eyes are better than a single pair and many imaginations are likely to spot more potential threats or opportunities.

One solution is to provide people with relevant links or documents (and time to read them), but you can’t assume they have thought deeply about these. It’s therefore important to find ways to encourage others to engage and think – for example, by allocating documents to specific people and asking them to present their thoughts, or by asking people to become “experts” in particular regions or business areas and bring this knowledge to meetings or brainstorming sessions. Rotating the information sources you send to different members of the team can also help to broaden perspectives.

In the right conditions, most people can be creative and imaginative. “Teaching” creativity should be less important than removing the barriers to it. If you find ways to stimulate curiosity, access a broader range of information and, vitally, share ideas constructively, you may be surprised by the results. And then please share your successes with the rest of us. 

This article was published in January 2023.