By Martin Vogel
As a practitioner in medialand, I learned the value of creative behaviours – ways to open up thinking and new ideas in order to develop better products. I particularly admired a book called Sticky Wisdom by ?What If!, a group of consultants who – while challenged with punctuation – cut through the fog regarding innovation. Sticky Wisdom demonstrates that creativity needn’t be the preserve of a particularly talented cadre of employees. It can be cultivated through techniques and exercises to encourage freshness of thinking, open mindedness, and a determination to incubate abstract proposals to tangible reality.
The book seems to point to a more attractive way of being in organisations. It provides ways to challenge the bureaucratic reflex which closes down ideas with criticism before they have even had a chance to develop, and it shows how to facilitate behaviours which display respect to one another. So it is perhaps not surprising that organisations have drawn on creative behaviours and tried to apply them more widely. As a freelance consultant, I have been struck to find the ?What If! model and others like it being adopted as templates for meeting behaviours in general.