Pixie Dust, anyone?

There's been a lot of talk around of late concerning the use, by companies and organisations, of Pixie Dust.

Integrating Pixie Dust into systems; the primacy of Pixie Dust in the successful market-shapers of the future; the issues and complexities of managing Pixie Dust in working processes. It's all very exciting.

Sorry, I wrote "Pixie Dust": I meant to write "creativity". No excuse really, as one is a phenomenon of myth and magic we hardly expect to encounter in the workplace and the other is a dust Peter Pan used to make children fly.

I was talking with some people recently about training matters. I uttered a phrase like "using my creativity" and one of them had the temerity to ask me what I meant by "creativity". My response was less than enlightening, as I am creative person and have never had to think about it. Codswallop - exactly.

I looked back over recent articles in People Management, the magazine of the CIPD, which have been very expansive on just about every aspect of "creativity" in the workplace with the exception of what "creativity" actually means in this context. So let's have a go, shall we...?

Well, it isn't tacking drama, music, movement or painting onto an activity. The arts can be a great resource for training and development, but their use doesn't immediately render a session creative in itself. "Doing it with drama" might be a creative approach to a problem, but it doesn't guarantee that the delivery itself will be creative.

I know of one company who deliver corporate and training events. They draw on a massive range of arts and media approaches at their disposal, using talented specialists and resourceful generalists. However, when it comes to the actual event, their actual creativity - as I see it - is hobbled by the need of the customer organisation to have everything prescriptive and pre-scripted, with no deviation from The Plan unless pretty full consultation takes place. So, what's the point of bringing in creative people to devise creative work that because of their non-creative client they will have to deliver in a singularly uncreative way?

Which isn't to say creativity is all about making it up as we go along; but there has to be some flexibility to allow room for creativity.

Look at the tools you are using for training, from the session plan to the PowerPoint slides: can you be flexible in their use? Suppose you have a series of informative slides for a session, but it becomes very clear very quickly that - despite the briefing you received - the group know more about the subject than is contained on the slides. Are the slides now useless? (one solution I used was to put up a slide and have the group create arguments to dispute the facts contained, to challenge their own preconceptions about their own work).
If your slides are that far below their level, chances are that your whole session plan is full of holes; they know more about the subject than you or your fleabitten slides. Do you cling to the wreckage of your carefully laid plan regardless? Or maybe you divide them into two teams, each devising 5 questions for the other team with only 2 allowed (or 1 when working with decision makers) to need yes/no answers: they test each other, with areas of debate or disagreement creating opportunities for problem solving exercises.

Whatever your line of work, you use tools to shape materials according to ideas, whether that is using lathes to shape steel into engine components or using flipcharts to shape staff into more focused staff. It's what work is. Creativity in working is shifting one of those elements in some way:

The Material ~ The whole modernist age of the 20th Century was about finding new materials and new ways to use existing materials. Think Teflon®, think ceramic heart valves: then think how often training is seen as a solution to low quality or badly deployed staff. Do we need to look again at our starting material? Put crudely: I'd rather plait poo than try to train sense into stupid people.

The Tools ~ bad amateur mechanics usually end up reaching for the screwdriver and the hammer, while a skilled mechanic can do almost anything with - that's right - a screwdriver and a hammer. Understanding our tools, the principles by which they work, allows us to employ them in more varied ways, or to substitute other tools that will achieve the same outcomes from the same materials.

The Idea/Final product/Learning Outcome ~ is it still right? Does there need to be a shift in focus, or perhaps a change in use? How often do we realise we're asking the wrong question, "solving" the wrong problem? And for a perfect example in the world of material production, if you don't know the legend of how Post-Its were invented, Google it.

As a rule, if you change more than one of the three elements, then you are actually starting a new process, rather than being creative around the present process. There's more formulating to be done around these elements, but I'll leave that for another day.