A variety of perspectives
8. IS YOUR ESCALATOR A STAIRWAY?
The question is not whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, but is it a glass of water?
An observational question Creativity in public relations
A department store in Hong Kong was once reputed to have placed a sign on a broken-down escalator, which read: ‘This escalator is temporarily a stairway’. For the creative public relations practitioner, an ability to tolerate ambiguities is an important facet. The Roman god Janus had two faces looking in opposite directions. This image has led some experts to define
‘Janusian thinking’ as the capacity to conceive and utilize simulta-neously two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts or images.
Seeing the paradox of a situation is at the crux of creative thinking when you may be entertaining two different – often contradictory – notions at the same time. Creative people have a flexibility enabling them to deal with half an idea, even half-emerged facts, coupled with the ability to abandon old ways of thinking and to initiate different directions. The talent, as the Waterboys’ song goes, of being able to see ‘the whole of the moon’, while others can only see the crescent, is a fundamental feature of the outstanding practitioner.
Creativity was earlier defined as bringing together two discon-nected notions or elements. Therefore, the more flexibility you can display in bringing together a wider variety of elements, the greater your ability to generate a bigger number of ideas with a higher potential for originality and added value.
The flexible mind has the ability to identify different elements that:
● appear to be irrelevant and, on the surface, bear no relation to the task in hand;
● do not relate to you personally, either in time or space. This may be something from history, or from the other side of the world, which contains an element that you have identified as having potential;
● originate from a source that may lack any authority or legiti-macy. A child may come up with an idea that everyone else dismisses, and you say: ‘Hold on, there just might be some-thing in this’;
● may fall within a sphere completely outside your professional or technical background. ‘What would the public relations person know about this?’ was a put-down I once received at a management meeting;
● could only be identified by a hunch you may have about a
The creative individual
situation, where its real potential is not immediately recogniz-able or easily accessible.
Why is it that some practitioners who possess extensive profes-sional knowledge and experience are still not creative? The answer is in their flexibility of thought – or lack of it. The ability of creative practitioners to adjust their learning state when handling tasks distinguishes them from non-creative practitioners. Table 13.1 defines these different learning states.
Experienced practitioners who are good at their job display uncon-scious competence; they can tackle many tasks almost without thinking about them because they possess the necessary skills, confidence and experience. Furthermore, when looking at a new problem or an issue in a new way, creative practitioners have the skill to switch back more quickly than their non-creative peers to a more basic learning state.
The entrepreneur Richard Branson once observed in a radio interview I heard: ‘It is better to ask stupid questions than to make stupid mistakes.’ The prime feature of creative practitioners is the ability to speedily re-equip themselves with ignorance; to identify
Creativity in public relations
Table 13.1 Four stages of learning skills Learning stage Characteristics
Unconscious You do not realize that you do not incompetence know. For example, the small child at the
steering wheel of its parents’ car, pretending to drive, is blissfully unaware it lacks the
necessary skills to drive.
Conscious You realize your shortcomings, that you incompetence do not have the necessary knowledge or skills
to attempt or complete a task successfully.
Conscious You know how to do something, but you competence have to concentrate to do it right.
Unconscious You can do something without thinking
competence about it.
what new information, perspectives or skills are required. As a result, they more readily avoid applying old solutions to new issues and problems.
In addition to the four stages of learning skills given in Table 13.1, there is a further stage – conscious supercompetence. This is defined by the speed with which outstanding practitioners can adjust their learning state. Other less creative practitioners will change their learning state more slowly, and be less able to respond with new ideas or new ways of doing things. The conscious supercompetent practitioners possess high levels of skill and experience, but know they need to couple these with the talent to look at a task in a completely new way and, subsequently, quickly switch back to an earlier learning state. Figure 13.2 shows how conscious supercompetent practitioners can quickly move around the different learning states, in contrast with their less creative peers.
The creative individual
Figure 13.2 The skills of conscious supercompetent practitioners
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Unconscious competence
Unconscious incompetence
Conscious competence
Conscious incompetence
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