John Cleese, the famous comedian from Monty Python, stated that trying to explain creativity is a futile effort because it simply cannot be explained.

So he goes on to explain what creativity is not:

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating”

Eleven years ago I decided to take a Creative Writing course that, unwarily, would become a game changer to my understanding of creativity and that has since then, become also a key tool to help me design Products/Services.

In the first class of the course we were given a simple assignment by the teacher:

“Just write whatever you want. No restrictions at all except you have only 10 minutes”

After about 1 to 2 minutes he asked us how we were doing. A great majority stress out not having written anything yet. So he recommended, start your text with “Today”.

Everyone immediately kicked off however, when the time was over, again everyone complained about not having written much. So he gave us an extra 5 minutes.

After we finished the teacher told us:

“You were tricked. This is not a Creative Writing course. This is a Compulsive Writing course”

These are some of the learnings I took from Writing to Create Problem Solving and Product/Service Design, and that I will cross reference with John Cleese’s great speech “Creativity in Management” — which I highly recommend you see right away (but make sure you come back).

#1 — The First rule about Creativity is Set Rules

After the first exercise the professor stated that, such as we had a line of work with daily tasks in our job, his required him to write about 4 articles a day. In order to so he was required to have a solid framework to keep the engine running.

The teacher then went on to point out that the purpose of this first exercise was to make us realize that, without any rules, we had felt lost and that just a small lead like starting with the word “today” had sparked the process.

The second exercise he gave us was to write a text where each sentence or paragraph should start with a number:1,2,3…

He finally told us that the whole course would be about teaching us rules and applying techniques to enhance our creativity and keep the writing flow so that we could become “Compulsive” writers.

It’s amazing how the combination of these rules and techniques — a framework — works both for Writing and any other thing you apply it to.

Design Thinking and Design Sprints are precisely frameworks that emerged to enable creative problem solving in a structured way.

Bottom line #1: Having a framework that guides you through a structured process, is key for creativity and for creative problem solving

#2 — The Second Rule about Creativity is Set the Timer

There was also a purpose on the 10 minutes’ restriction and the extra 5. The key here was to show us that you definitely need to have a clear deadline. Not having one makes you drift way, losing focus and eventually motivation.

Nevertheless, it can’t be too short either.

Too short a deadline causes stress, just as we had experienced, which blocks creativity and it doesn’t allow reviewing. This is important since the first draft is never the best one. So you will always need to leave enough time to review it.

Going back to John Cleese’s speech, to be creative you have to get yourself in to Open mode. For this you need 2 types of time:

· Time #1: Specify a period of time to seal off from Close mode and switch on to Open mode.

· Time #2: give yourself enough time to think through the problem and various solutions and don’t simply go with the first one you come up with — letting your unconscious roam free and eventually kick in

For example, one of the virtues I see in the Design Sprint process is that it creates a specific predefined time and space frame so you can be in Open mode.

Still it does seem to raise the eyebrow to whether there’s an opportunity of improvement on the process to give more room for Time #2…

Bottom line #2: Define a period that allows to switch to Open mode with a clear finish-line, but that is balanced enough to being pressure free and to allow reviewing.

#3 — The Third Rule about Creativity is Get Out of the Box

You can’t see a box from the outside if you’re inside it. So first you need to get out.

The tip the teacher had given us of using “Today” had another target that we only came to realize later on.While reading our stories out loud it was evident that all of us had jumped to talking about our own daily life and had written too much in the first person making the story too self-centered.

In problem solving Zooming Out is a technique used to develop a holistic approach to seeing problems from different perspectives and to identify the context they are part of, attempting to understand them by viewing these simultaneously.

The How Might We question tool for example is used in problem solving to partially achieve this.

Bottom Line #3: To think Outside the Box you can’t remain inside. So to be creative you need to “Zoom Out” to allow yourself to gain different and context perspective.

#4 — The Fourth Rule about Creativity is Connect the Dots

In Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford speech, he says “You can only connect the dots looking backwards”. Connecting the dots from our past experiences is something one does instinctively but that can also be worked out — it’s referred to as Analogy Thinking.

In case you haven’t noted already I’m using this myself when I’m using the “First rule about…”.

I got it from the movie Fight Club.

Another example is for you to develop a Top 5 list on several topics that you can go through when seeking ideas (idea I came up with from the movie High Fidelity by the way).

Ideo, the famous Design Thinking as a similar process you can look at called Mash-Up.

Bottom Line #4: Force connecting the dots by preparing a list of experiences, movies, books, favorite things, people, quotes, companies, etc. that you can use as references

#5 — The Fifth Rule about Creativity is Think the Opposite

Another technique I learned from the Writing course to spike creativity was the following:

· pick a fraction of a famous text/book you know

· summarize the main ideas

· right the opposite of those ideas

· finally develop on this

You will come up with completely different story.

Almost anything that exists as its contrary. Just as important as setting rules is to break them.

Sometimes the key reason why we can’t be creative is that we are unconsciously assuming constraints that don’t allow us to move forward.

It is impossible here not to quote Einstein (as everyone does I know): “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”

Notice also that John Cleese finally gets to what Creativity is by first starting with what it is not.

Here is an example of how you can use it in Product/Service design.

Usually when you add benefits you increase price (e.g. adding extras when buying a new car).

Try Thinking the Opposite and finding a way of adding benefits while getting the price to decrease.

I can assure you it’s not impossible to do so in a profitable way.

Nevertheless, be aware that in problem solving, knowing and getting rid of what you don’t want does not necessarily get you what you want.

Bottom Line #5: Either looking at problems, finding solutions or just getting started from blank, try always to see the opposite of what either exists, is being done or you think should be done.

#6 — The Sixth Rule about Creativity is Just do It

Getting started just gets you loose and once you do so, it works like a gear. It’s also about losing fear.

One of the rules the teacher recommended to us was to write as we think first and not worry too much about the content, style or being afraid to sound stupid. After all, at this point, we are writing only for ourselves.

Finally, you will (or should) review the text over, and over again and start a remake of cutting, adding and restyling of your first draft.

Bottom Line #6: Just do it, question later and don’t settle with the first solution. It creates a gear mechanism effect.

#7 — The Seventh Rule about Creativity is Reboot

Establishing a framework is not by any means assurance of quality,neither success in the solution designed. It’s a way to get you started and to guide you.

Also, as with everything it requires that the framework itself is questioned and adapted.

Whilst running through all the processes you might find yourself stuck anyway and struggling to be creative. Or at least quality creative.

When this is the case just stop and let go for some time and come back to it later.

You just might find while doing something else, such as reading a book,watching a movie,or even sleeping it might come back.

When a computer tilts sometimes the best thing to do is to Reboot.

Bottom Line #7: If you’re in tilt mode or unsatisfied with the results you achieved just shut down, reboot and come back later. Detachment helps and sometimes is required, at least for a time period.

And if at first you don’t succeed try, (reboot and) try again!!!

In case you want to find out why Design Sprints are dead click here…

The Paradox of Creativity: Want to be Creative? Restrict yourself!! was originally published in NYC Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“_________ is/are dead”!

You can put a blank space before “is/are dead”, randomly fill it with nearly anything, and one day you will most probably be right.

Design Thinking, Agile, and even UX have been “killed” already.

If you don’t believe me just google “Design Thinking/Agile/UX is dead” and you will be able to confirm it yourself.

Design Sprints are those that will follow.

So, what’s my point here? And are Design Sprints dead or not????

Before answering let me just take a step back and start with a retrospective.

All the processes I mentioned share, in my opinion, a common underlying line of thought: System Thinking.

In summary, and oversimplifying, System Thinking is a philosophy that sustains that the art of problem solving lies, among other things, in Idealized Design.

Idealized Design is a way of thinking that sustains that the path to get the best outcome to solving problems is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today(1). Doing so with the following characteristics:

· Holism: problems are not disciplinary in nature but are holistic and their understanding comes from, not how the parts act, but from how they interact

· Iteration: planning is continuous. The future will be created by continuously closing the gap between its current state and its desirable state (never attainable).

For System Thinking the “best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment so as to eliminate the problem”(2).

Here is where the epitome of Design emerges, since designing is considered the best way to gain understanding of something, how it works as a whole, and why it works the way it does.

In 1951, the CEO of Bell Labs, early one morning calls his staff to an urgent last minute meeting. He starts by saying:

“Gentlemen, the telephone system was destroyed last night”.

This is the introduction of the book “Idealized Design”, released in 2006, that explains how this claim, which was intentionally not true, led ATT in 1951 to the invention of call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail, caller ID, conference calls, speaker phones, speed dialing and mobile phones, that didn’t exist at the time.

The creative process to do so was the first Design Sprint ever, dated 1951.

And so, finally, are Design Sprints dead?

Well, honestly I don’t think so.

They actually seem to be alive and kicking.

But for the same reasons Bell Labs CEO wanted their team to believe so, and that I will cover later, let’s believe they are.

Following one of System Thinking’s core principles — iteration — processes themselves evolve in continuous improvement, redesign and adjustment to context.

Design Thinking was one of the first efforts to converting System Thinking to a tangible methodology through a 5 steps creative problem solving process, from understanding a problem to generating a solution, prototyping and testing.

Paradoxically, it is seen to be more of a mind-set than a process.

Design Sprints are a 5-day process for creative problem solving.

And by the way, they have themselves already been iterated by the agency AJ&Smart to an improved version, the Design Sprint 2.0, within only 4 days.

Nonetheless everything that becomes big and trendy follows the risk of becoming, even if it does not promise to do so, a panacea.

There are characteristics of Design Sprints that lead me to believe they are more bullet proof.

One reason lies behind the new line extension they just got, the “Brand Sprint”, also recently Jake Knapp himself.

But they also have short comings and face “death” risk. Nonetheless there are also ways to overcome this and avoid the panacea challenge.

I will cover this in Part III: “The Immortals” but for now, more than only trying to improve on them, let’s start by considering that this is the end:

“Gentlemen, Design Sprints are dead”

As it will become more clear in the next article, this is the critical assumption for one to design based on desire instead of existence as a criteria of choice.

Now that they are dead let’s go back to 1951, deep dive into Bell Labs, and see how they began.

In my next article — Part II: “The Beginning” — I will go through the first Design Sprint ever and give a short overview of how the process is documented in the book Idealized Design.

To be continued…

(1) By Russell Ackoff in “Idealized Design”

(2) By Russell Ackoff in “The System Thinker”

Design Sprints are Dead! was originally published in NYC Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.