Coaching & Creativity
Coaching & Creativity
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Helping Coachees Be Creative
Creativity is not only important in the arts. Solving any new problem takes creativity. New ways of thinking and acting have to be discovered.
Creativity is essential to good engineering, good teaching, and good customer service. It helps in both our personal and our professional lives. The organisations that flourish most are those where creativity is a core component of the company’s culture. So, of course, many coachees would like their coaching to help them become more creative.
Furthermore, creativity is an essential part of most coaching sessions. We aim to help coachees solve problems right there in the room with us. So part of our role is to facilitate creativity.
Understanding Creativity
During the Enlightenment, achievement in the arts was seen as the product of reason and learned technique. It wasn’t till the Romantic period (the late 18th and early 19th Century) that creativity began to be seen as something mysterious and special. People started to think of creativity as the province of individuals of genius. By freeing up their emotions and their imagination, inspired individuals would tap into elemental forces that defied rational understanding.
Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;
In the 20th century, the pendulum swung back towards science and reason. Psychologists began to study the creative process systematically, with Wallas’s 1926 model being particularly influential. He broke the creative process down into 4 phases.
- Preparation (defining the issue, making observations, and studying).
- Incubation (laying the issue aside for a time).
- Illumination (the moment when a new idea finally emerges).
- Verification (checking that the new idea works).
Going Beyond Wallas
Subsequent models of creativity usually follow a fairly similar pattern to Wallas’s while breaking the steps down differently. Rossman’s model, for instance, describes five processes that can occur before the illumination phase — observing the problem, analysing the need, surveying the information available, formulating the existing solutions, and critically analysing those solutions.
Alex Osborn, the creator of brainstorming, picked out the same incubation phase as Wallas but defined four steps leading up to the incubation — orientation (pointing out the problem), preparation ****(gathering pertinent data), analysis (breaking down the relevant material into its components), and ideation (piling up alternative ideas).
What is striking is not the differences between the various models of creativity, but that they have so much in common. They all start with a preparatory phase where the issue is investigated thoroughly, often with some research and some analysis. But the analytical state of mind that’s best for research isn’t the optimum state of mind for coming up with original ideas. People who work in a wide range of disciplines have all found that inspiration is most likely to strike when they’ve stopped actively seeking solutions and their minds relax. A new idea will often then appear fully formed in their head.
And all the models agree that the creative process doesn’t come to an end at the moment of insight. There needs to be another phase of diligent work in which what’s seen in the illumination phase is thought through and implemented.
The Hole Model
My favourite model of creativity is my own — the hole model©. I like it because, rather than using abstract language to capture the steps of the process, it uses a visual metaphor. The need for a new solution is seen as a hole in the current fabric of reality, while creativity is seen as finding a solution that fills this hole.
As with Wallas’s model, there are 4 phases. In the first, focusing, a person or team of people become aware of the hole. They might perceive a need, or an opportunity. One way or another, they realise that there is a deficit in the current order of things that might be addressed and they focus their attention upon that deficit.
In the second phase, exploring, the person or team gets a feel for the hole. What this looks like will be different for engineers, for poets, and for people wrestling with relationship problems. It might involve research, or analysis, or just quietly mulling things over. But however they go about it, people need to get an accurate sense of what surrounds the hole. The more their exploration is driven by curiosity and feeds curiosity, the better. A good exploration will bring new perspectives and it is these perspectives that make it possible, in the next phase, to see new solutions.
In the third phase, discovering, something appears inside the hole. This is the leap of understanding where something never thought of before is discovered. This phase usually requires a state of mind where the person isn’t goal oriented — where they aren’t trying to do anything in particular; where they’re just letting their imagination play.
In the final phase, implementing, the hole vanishes. The person or team develops their ideas, knitting their discoveries together with the surrounding fabric until the new material has become just another normal part of reality.
Coaching & Mending Holes
Discovering holes is an essential part of the coaching process. Coachees often arrive at a session with an existing sense of a problem that they’d like to solve. If not, we investigate what’s at the back of their mind until they come across something that that’s been frustrating them and that is worth exploring further.
We then use the normal tools of coaching — open questions, semi-open questions, attentive listening, reflecting, summarising, etc. — to help the coachee explore a particular hole. We prompt them to talk about all that’s important about a problem until they have everything top of mind. This makes it easier for them to make connections.
Coachees always need a change of mindset for the discovering phase. They need to stop analysing the problem and starting thinking playfully, without worrying if what they say is sensible or practical. We want them to explore possibilities for the intrinsic interest of the possibilities themselves. Daft questions can help, like asking them what they would do if they had a magic wand.
For the final phase, we need to encourage the coachee to become serious again and to assess the ideas they’ve come up with critically, then work them into plans that, by the end of the session, they can commit to implementing. It is only when those plans are implemented that the hole will definitively vanish.
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