Creativity Step 10

Outcomes

To achieve Step 10, individuals will show that they can actively seek out and consider different perspectives. 

In recent steps, the focus has been on how to develop ideas – going beyond just creating them to exploring them further through mind mapping and other tools, and then interrogating them through questioning. This next step introduces the importance of looking at ideas from different perspectives to improve them further.

Learners need to be able to:

• What different perspectives are, and how to seek them out 

• How to make sense of different perspectives and use them to improve ideas

Introduction

• A perspective is a point of view that someone has of something.

• When we develop ideas, we do it mainly from our perspective. You can find different perspectives in a variety of ways, by thinking about these questions: 

  • Who else might end up using your idea?

  • Do they have different needs or success criteria? 

  • What changes might other people suggest to your idea, and why? 

• These questions should give you a view of who your different stakeholders are – stakeholders are those groups of individuals who might share a common perspective on your idea.

Teach & Apply

• It is one thing to gather lots of different perspectives, but it is quite another to try to make sense of the results. This brings us on to the critical concept of trade-offs to reconcile different perspectives.

• For example, someone with shorter legs may find lower ceilings are worthwhile because they lower heating costs. For a taller person, they may want higher ceilings so that they don’t feel constrained. 

  • In this case, compromise becomes important – what is the ceiling height that achieves the best trade-off of being high enough so that even tall people can feel comfortable, but as low as possible to be energy efficient. 

• For someone with shorter legs, they will be pleased that their seat price is lower as a result of the airline being more efficiently filled with paying passengers. The individual with longer legs would probably pay more to be less uncomfortable. 

  • In this case differentiation might be possible – that is, having different options for different passengers. This is why some airlines have seats available with more leg space at an extra cost – only those passengers who need the space would be willing to pay the extra, which means that everyone gets closer to what they are looking for.

• The final point is that sometimes you need to prioritise. Perhaps ultimately your idea can’t be for everyone, and you have to choose what the most important priority is. To be able to prioritise, you need to have a clear view of what your focus and success criteria are.

Reflection & Assessment

Embed these strategies across your teaching and coaching to help learners apply what they’ve learnt.

• Include the idea of trade-offs that have to be made in selecting players for a match. For example, how teams try to compromise, differentiate and prioritise.

Use these ideas for ways of assessing this skill step to help you check learners’ understanding and confidence.

• This step is best assessed through a structured challenge. Give learners an idea as a starting point and then asking them to bring different perspectives to that idea, and then to reach some way of reconciling or making sense of those perspectives.

• Ask learners these key reflection questions:

  • What do we mean by perspectives? 

  • Why might there be very different perspectives on the same idea? 

  • Can you incorporate every perspective? If not, how do you prioritise them?