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How Considering Alternatives Changes Ways Of Thinking About Creativity

Forbes Coaches Council

Dominik Szot, Founder/CEO of MIA. Leadership coach, global entrepreneur, agile leadership mentor, focused on leaders' legacy.

"I don't have a bicycle, but I have very good cocaine."

The summer of 1990 was very hot. I was a student back then and had gone to Amsterdam with a group of friends wanting to find a job for the holidays. Since the main means of transport in the Netherlands is a bicycle, I wanted my own. I couldn't afford a new one, so I started looking for a used one. After consultations with my fellow countrymen, who knew the local conditions well, I went by tram to the center of Amsterdam. There, according to experts, was an African who traded bicycles in the middle of the square for 25 guldens.

When I got to the square, I approached a group of Africans and asked one of them if he had a bicycle. He gave me a shocked look, as if he had seen an alien, and then answered me in a sincere, kind tone, “I don’t have a bike, but I have very good coke.” I neither bought a bike nor cocaine that day, but I discovered a beautiful way of thinking. Since then, this quote has been my favorite saying for any occasion when someone told me they couldn't sell something.

A drug dealer inspired me to find a different solution to meet my necessity.

When I was heading back home by tram that day in Amsterdam with 25 guldens left in my pocket, I was thinking about the magic sentence "I don't have that, but I have this." I noticed a lot of broken, abandoned bicycles pinned anywhere with chains and padlocks. I figured out that with this old stuff, I could put together one whole bike, and for free. A few days later, it's what I had. It was my first lesson in creative thinking.

Over the years, I've noticed that I have to carry out what I do with passion and full alertness. But above all, I need to be able to quickly think about how can I do something in a better way, or maybe differently than my usual way of proceeding.

A decade later, I discovered I had a very strong competence, which inspired me to establish my own company, successfully develop it and then open new ones. This competence is creativity. It is a skill that we should perfect throughout all our lives. Thanks to it, we can discover new solutions and reach for the impossible. It makes it easier to find solutions. It also strengthens faith in the success of entire teams participating in a project.

Creativity enables people to recover from failures and guarantees that there is always a way out. According to Tom Kelley and David Kelley in their book Creative Self-Confidence, this skill is a combination of thoughts and actions; it is the ability to come up with ideas and the courage to try them out.

However, creativity is not achieved by reading, thinking and just talking about it. It’s done by doing. It is also manifested by open-mindedness and an assumption that our true potential is still unknown—that we are not limited in any way by what we have been doing so far. In order to use and fully develop our talents, we can learn new skills and use new tools.

We also have to get rid of the fear of failure as it is the source of lack of action or premature cessation of any undertaken ventures that come along with misfortunes. Mozart, Darwin and the Wright brothers proved, along with my own company, that failure should even be factored into actions because it teaches us how to improve faster.

As an example of such thinking, let’s draw on the experiences of Edison, the famed inventor best known as the creator of the light bulb. He claimed that the only limitation we have is the number of prototypes we can make per day. The key information is the fact that Edison had to make 1,000 trials in the form of various models until he finally created the bulb that could be used commonly.

In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink precisely defines how important creativity is today, that is in the IT era, where the automation of production processes begins to reduce the number of workplaces and completely changes today's professional landscape. Pink claims that our future depends on answering three questions:

• Is there someone across the sea who can do it for less?

• Can't the computer do it faster?

• Do I offer something that meets intangible transcendent needs in an age of excess?

The answers to these questions are also the answer to the question of who will be left behind and who will be ahead of everyone in the process of discovering those transcendent needs.

So how is creativity "done"? Let’s think about how we could use these examples to change the way we think about solutions to a problem that we haven't been able to deal with so far.

In coaching it’s called a change of perspective, i.e., giving the observed phenomenon a completely unique understanding so that a new approach becomes a starting point for positive solutions delivered by results in the future. This awareness of a designed result helps plan a course of action for achieving that desired future outcome. When there is a plan with a vision in front of it, things get easier. Suddenly people begin to achieve what they wanted much faster than they have expected.

There is always some "cocaine" instead of a bicycle because there is always an alternative. I wanted to have a used bike, but I didn’t analyze alternatives for how to get one in an environment full of used bikes. I didn’t, at first, see the broken ones that could be my solution. This is what creativity can inspire: to look for alternatives around us and often look for solutions that sometimes are invisible to us.


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