TAPE # and time code

Audio

B17

Tim Switalski

17:00:48:12

17:01:54:25

[ Would you just begin by introducing yourself …?]

My name is Tim Switalski. I’ve been at this business for about 25 years and the business being facilitating, learning and working with adults and kids around the area of creativity and their ongoing development both personal and professional development and I spent about 17 years, working for the office of mental health in NY state as a training director and that job had me involved in all kinds of stuff,  creating new projects, services...whatever…and then about 3 years ago, I got very involved in practicing and consulting in the area so it’s been about 3 years of intense applied creativity and I’ve been on my own for close to that long as a consultant.

17:01:56:25

17:03:04:10

[Would you define creativity?]

It’s a hard one to define; there are some classic definitions out there. The one that is used most often in the field actually involves two elements…there needs to be novelty or something new if something is to be creative, there needs to be a newness or a freshness in anything that is creative, but it also has to have some utility, it has to have value and it has to have usefulness, novelty and usefulness is a classic definition that’s tossed around a lot and I use it a lot and I guess I tend to live by it a lot. The other thing about the definition is that it brings together pretty much the two elements that go on when we work in creative process, we try to get people to stretch their thinking so that’s the novelty. We also try to get people to resolve that novelty so that it is useful… so that it has.. so that it is doable, so it can be applied to the situation, so I like that definition, so I tend to use it.

17:03:05:00-17:04:41:01

[What are the challenges that you see for teaching people the creative process?]

The first one is that some people who participate in events like this for example like CPSI, come here with a preconceived notion of what they are going to get and some of them what a shortcut, they want a quick answer, they want , give me the short version – something I can learn real quick -something I can use to lead people, do this in my job – for example. and it really takes, you got to pretty much experience it, and you can’t do that, and there is no shortcut to learn that…so those folks who are nervous about spending the time, that’s a challenge, getting those people to invest the time and open their minds to the learning. Another challenge I see is people that think creativity is a soft area, that’s its fuzzy and touchy feely, that its something that people do when they want to explore, lets say in the fine arts, say dance or music field,  and that it has no place in the business world. Trying to get people to see that it does have value, is often a challenge as well.

17:04:41:00-17:06:12:11

[How is the group you’re working with this year at the conference. How are they developing?] …We just had a very good day today, we’ve been together since Sunday afternoon, and to answer that I’ll give you two sort of dimensions, …the group first of all is the team that is leading this session…we go through our own development process. You start off thinking you know what you want to do and you have a game plan and then suddenly different styles emerge in the leadership group, somebody wants to do it one way, somebody else says no, it should go this way, so the dynamics among the team go through a development process and it’s been very interesting this year, and that’s been great. Yesterday we had some differences of opinion, today it just soared, and we have been very happy and confident in the way things are going, that gets reflected in the group and the group will pick up on whether there’s confusion or differences of opinion and then that gives them an opening to say – well I don’t know if I believe these guys - the group yesterday…it was a tough challenge, today they have it internalized and they are playing with these concepts, for their own situation, there own concerns, so it was a great day. No one wanted to leave today. That’s always a good sign. So I am looking forward to tomorrow, tomorrow we are going to celebrate, there will be some learning, but most of it will be celebration.

17:06:13:11-17:07:43:15

[…could you define and describe the objective finding stage?]

Objective finding stage… that most people refer to as the first stage of the process even though the process is kind of open-ended, you can start and end anywhere when you really use it, so it is not really a linear process, but when you teach it to someone usually you have to show the process in a linear fashion, so it comes off as sequential, but it isn’t always used the way. The objective finding phase really has to do with trying to get a general sense of a challenge or a goal or a wish that you might have…that you want to work on, but like any goal, it is stated more broadly, more generally and often times, it is poorly defined, and going into that phase, It used to be called the mess finding stage and mess was a great word because you couldn’t really get your arms around it. Objective-finding is for some really easy to understand and for others they get very confused, they get very confused with the more global stage, verses the more refined stages that you go through later on, so it’s the most challenging stage for many to understand.

17:07:44:05-17:08:51:17

[Do you have any good examples of going through this phase that you could share with us?]

We had one today, this was a real one that people struggled with, there was a gentleman in our group, who has a real challenge with a group he is going to work with, as a consultant, a group that has a very, his way of describing it was to say, this is a group these are people who really hate each other, his challenge is how do I get this team to become an effective, high production team when they basically hate each other and they hate their leadership and they don’t want to go to the session he’s running…so his global mess is how do I have this teambuilding session be successful…it sounds like it is something that is clearly defined, but once we got into looking at it we saw there were many, many, many examples within that global challenge.

17:08:52:12-17:10:14:23

[The next step is fact finding, can you define and describe fact finding?]

Fact finding is like forging around for all the key information. Once you have…a challenge that is laid or a goal that has been established or defined  you really have to look at it from as many angles as possible…I think fact finding is misleading for people sometimes because it’s not just facts, its not just what you know, as a factual thing, it’s also perspectives, of everyone that might be involved in the situation, it’s emotions and attitudes, its a lot of things that are no where near facts, but are important background information that you have to gather and collect if you are going to define what you are working on, it is also a stage that many many people get lost in because they start asking questions and in the process of asking questions about background information, they start wanting to solve the problem and you have to hold people back, the nice thing about this model is that you have specific times and places to perform certain steps of the process, fact finding is often where people start trying to solve the problem, but its an important stage

17:10:14:27-17:11:09:20

If you like, I can tie in the example from the example from the previous goal

[Please do]

…to use fact finding with this gentleman’s problem with having a teambuilding session that is going to be successful, we got into finding out who are the other people involved, what’s the background of the company, what’s the relationship between these people and their supervisors, what kind’s of individuals are they, what are there career backgrounds, how do they make decisions, we found more information about the team…so when we sat down to try to resolve this problem, all the people who were working on it had a real, clear sense of not only what was going on, but on what type of ideas they could offer. It was very useful for involving everyone in the process.

17:11:18:11-17:12:48:16

[Interviewer asks about comments Tim made about the process may not be linear…could you elaborate on that?]

Sure, when I think of liner I think of it like looking at a game board, or sometimes I will say this is not the Milton Bradley version of a process model. We don’t start here and go through the steps. The way it really works is you enter where the client has a concern. The client may have a clearly defined problem, so you would not need to spend alot of time there if that problem is clearly defined, and what they are looking for is ideas, so in that case you can start in the middle of the model, or they might have great ideas and they’re looking for ways to get them off the paper, and really get them implemented, get them to be really operational, so in that case you are not going to be defining the general problem or the goal, you know the goal, you are not going to define the problem, or even look for ideas because you have good ideas, so you enter the model at that stage, at the planning stage so in that sense it is client driven rather than process driven. Its not like the model is a prescription rather descriptive of where one can enter or exit in order to do the creative work.

17:12:49:11-17:14:09:25

[Interviewer asks to go now back to the problem finding step…]

In problem finding, you have a refinement of where you started off…so in the case of the gentleman with the teambuilding problem what it really boiled down to was how could he basically prepare an effective teambuilding session and he focused exclusively, on what he could do prior to the session to make this the best possible experience for the people who were attending so the way that we got to that was to list out the 10 , 8 to 10 aspects of his challenge or his goal and he chose the one he had the most energy, where he knew he wanted to go and work on something right away, and so he went there, and from that place, we isolated that definition that statement and then he was ready to generate some ideas for what to do. And that is generally what you want as an outcome in a problem finding stage is to get the owner of the problem, the client usually, to state it in clear, refined terms so that he and everyone else, understands and agrees that now we are all ready to generate some  ideas,  to come up with some answers.

17:14:10:03-17:15:34:16

[…You talked about ownership, do you own your idea, do you own your problem?]

Yeah, Let me give you a little bit of detail on types of ownership in this process. There’s a client…usually the person who has the problem, who is experiencing the problem, who is responsible for seeing that something gets done and we usually refer to the client as the person who owns the problem. You also have other roles in this process, you have a facilitator, such as myself, who would manage the process, he or she doesn’t own the problem, but we are invested in having the client solve the problem, so there is ownership on the part of the facilitator to provide the best possible service to the client. Then there’s a third role and that’s the resource team the other people who are involved in the session, and those folks have a very specific role too and in a sense they own a part of the problem too because they are providing all the perspective, they are asking  questions, they are providing the ideas, and they are helping make the decisions, so the ownership is really spread around, the client really owns it as much or more then anyone else, but its not solely his or her ownership, it is shared.

17:15:34:20-17:16:08:16

[What about the solution, who owns that?]

The client owns the solution, I think the facilitator takes pride in achieving the solution and getting there. One of the goals is to make sure the client gets what he or she wants, and also the resource group has some stake in this because they are helping to move forward by generating the best possible options or ideas but the solutions are clearly the take away for the client. And that individual has to do something with implementing the solution.

17:16:09:05-17:17:10:11

[Let’s step back, idea finding]

Yeah, I knew that was where you where going, [laugh] Idea finding is probably the part of the process that everybody knows, or most people know when they hear about this model, they usually equate it with brainstorming, and most people,  when they think of brainstorming , lets just think up a whole bunch of stuff,  which is not really what brainstorming is, its about generating all kinds of approaches or possibilities, but also refining those so that you move forward with the best ones the most likely ideas or the ones with the most potential, sometimes there are two or three and sometimes,  are a variety of them, but the ultimate goal around idea generation or idea finding as it is listed in the model is to really stretch and to come up with the most possible options and then to select and screen and choose the ones that have  the most promise and possibility.

17:17:11:00-17:19:01:07

[…What are other tools or techniques that can be used in this idea finding stage?]

There’s an infinite number. The nice thing about this stage is that there is a lot of ways to get people to stretch their thinking. This institute is a great example of that, when you walk around , and you see how people are working together – you’ll see them playing – you’ll see them doing physical movement – sometimes people are paired off – or you will have whole groups of people trying to untie themselves from a human knot or whatever. The key thing here is brainstorming is not just a mental activity; it also involves people’s spirits. It involves the use of their bodies. They get into it in a variety of ways; it’s not just a cognitive process. And I think other examples of how that is done might be, if you are going to look for ideas, I might say to a bunch of folks who where working in this kind of  process, go walk around a campus like this for an hour, and take a blank journal or a note book, and take down some things that they see going on around them or bring back an article they might find, and then to come back after reflecting on it and then to say what kind of insights did you have, now that is very different from brainstorming, but you are still stretching, you are trying to make some connections and come up with something novel something new, and going back to the first thing we talked about - definition of creativity, you do something to resolve that novelty – something to make it useful, and in the course of making selections that’s where you make it most useful.

17:19:02:01-17:19:54:03

[…can you, describe solution finding?]

Solution finding is figuring out the ways to refine…the ideas that are most promising so you might select one or two or three that have the most promise from 10 or 12…it also has a lot to do with having ways to strengthen the idea, it might come out as something that is more of a concept but you have to bring it to the point of describing it in more depth and more detail, so solution finding has to do with refinement and making the ideas sellable, lets say, improved, to improve upon your original concept and get it ready to move forward.

17:19:56:20-17:21:10:21

[…acceptance finding?] …acceptance finding has to do with how do you get other folks to accept what you are proposing, so if someone is coming up with an idea for a way to do business better within an organization, you may have to convince several key stakeholders, in that organizations, so acceptance finding would say who are the key people that need to be involved and how do we get them to position themselves to support our ideas, make it happen. Acceptance finding also has to do with how do we take all this information and put it into a plan of action and consider all of those players all of those individuals, and get the support and move forward with it. Ultimately it has to come down to who’s involved, what are we talking about those individuals doing, either individually or collectively, and by when are they expected to achieve it, and perhaps what resources do they need to get the job done. So it boils down to the people actually being accountable for moving forward and implementing a solution.

17:21:38:24-17:23:56:05

[You remember when your session was being filmed yesterday…a section of your session is on defining creativity, how would you put a voiceover on top of the video that he shot?] …there are some principles that we try to follow when we are training people in this, and one of them is that they need to do a lot of learning themselves, we need to create opportunities for them to teach each other and to learn from that…and that’s a big part of what we do, in this field in training people in creativity, this is a prime example of the best way I think to do it, rather than just stand up in front of a group and say here’s the definition of creativity, novelty that is useful. And they will go “ oh ok”, and that that is not very powerful, and they do not get to drawn into that, what we did yesterday was too say to them, you need to come up with your own definition and break them into groups in order to do that, so that every one has a chance to talk and to be heard and to contribute, we give them very little time to do that, 7 or 8 minutes perhaps, and then say part 2 is you now need to construct a definition or construct a three dimensional model of your definition, and some people go – “you are kidding” and we throw a full newspaper in front of their group and a role of tape and say no we’re not, go ahead, you got fifteen minutes, and it becomes very interesting to watch, and I think the video tape will show that, but they go through a struggle they go through a creative process in building this model, they learn how to stretch their thinking, how to listen to each others viewpoints, then how to make decisions.  So the nice part of the activity is that it represents completely what it is that we are talking about, and they experience it, rather then have us telling them. Therefore they own it, and everything we learn beyond that is based on their construction, their definition, it also launches them into being teams and working together, which is am important premise of the learning model.

17:23:57:03-17:24:49:23

[Could you say it again in about four sentences and could you use present tense?]

What we are doing here is asking people to first come up with their own collective definition of creativity. Based on that definition, what we are then asking them to do is to construct a freestanding three-dimensional model of that definition. The raw materials they have are newspaper and a roll of tape, although they use markers and other toys and stuff, based on that we get a very clear definition that they have built themselves which forms the foundation for how we move forward talking about creativity, Creative Problem Solving and the creative processes that are covered in the training.

17:25:14:26-17:26:04:11

[How are those 3-D models used?]

…we use the three dimensional models in a couple of ways. The first is for them to use as an explanation of their definition in a way that is visual, its not just verbal, it visual and you can touch it and play with it, it’s also a playful experience for people and they get to continue to build on that energy that they have working together, so we use it for a foundation of teambuilding and it is interesting, those models are still sitting there, almost enshrined, in the corn no one wants to throw them out, even though they are these weird constructions, they sit there and they are sort of a reminder, like a monument,  to where they started. It’s kind of cute that they have not gotten destroyed yet.