Creative thinking Entrepreneur’s help-line

As a professor of entrepreneurship, I find the task easy if the job is simply to impart skills on enterprise development and management. This, I call "business skilling".

The hard part is evoking from the students a strong desire to be entrepreneurs. Even harder still is teaching students how to be creative entrepreneurs.

Throughout their schooling, students are taught how to logically reason out but not to innovate, to challenge the textbooks, and to discover new ways of doing things. Because of this, I have experimented on new ways of doing things. Because of this, I have experimented on various creativity techniques, which have been incorporated into the curriculum of the Asian Institute of Management’s Master in Entrepreneurship program.

Photographic perspectives

Photography is an excellent hobby to cultivate creativity, especially if one joins a club with regular contests. Topics are usually assigned to club members who then try to render them in unusual ways because trite renditions always lose.

Sometimes, members are asked to shoot on-the-spot in a demarcated area to ensure that their field subjects are the same. This forces the photography hobbyist to look for different angles of the same scene.

Having personally joined some of these contests, I’ve learned to shoot from a tree, lying down on the grass, and perilously standing on river rocks. I have experimented on combining filters and special effect contraptions. I realized that what I was basically doing was getting different perspectives on people, places, and things. I tried to make them look very unique and captivating in a mysterious sort of way. Nothing too contrived, nothing too obvious. With subtle hints here and there.

There is an attempt to produce a dynamic composition by off-centering the images. This is called the "rule of thirds", where the main subject is placed in the third section of the frame (horizontally and vertically) to make the viewer’s eyes wander a bit on the photograph.

On one occasion, an on-the-spot contest was held in Bicol where the famous Mayon Volcano stands majestically. Most shots of Mayon place the volcano at the center where the almost perfect symmetry of the cone can be best appreciated. I decided to go at the back of the volcano but the view from behind was not that great. I opted to "shrink" the volcano by using a wide angle lens. Luckily, there was an overarching tree, with a nipa hut beside it, framing the volcano. The wide angle lens exaggerated the size of the nearby tree and the nipa hut.

Using a blue filter, I monochromed the entire scene. With a multiple exposure technique, I juxtaposed the full moon and a bonfire (which I shot that same night) against the volcano and tree scene. The result was a serene, enigmatic, eerie sort of interpretation, which I simply entitled, "Mayon by Moonlight". The picture won first place in a local club and was featured as the Canon camera award winner in an Asian magazine.

So what is the creative formula? Take any ordinary topic and try to see it from many angles. Assume you are different persons looking for different perspectives on the subject matter. See what ideas sprout and play around with them. Combine, disaggregate, superimpose, blend, add, subtract, divide, and multiply. See what happens. Rearrange a bit more. Take out the excess garbage and highlight the essentials.

Bonsai Technique

Speaking of essentials, there is another creativity technique, which I learned by observing Japanese gardens. In a relatively small space, the Japanese garden attempts to capture the essence of Mother Nature by using a few bonsai plants, rocks, sand, and bamboo sticks.

In here, the classic "less is more" adage is brought out to its barest. The rocks signify mountains, the sand symbolizes water, and the bonsai plants represent ancient gnarled trees of windswept forests and seashores.

The gardener meticulously trims the bonsai so that every twig or leaf falls in its rightful, aesthetically correct place. The bonsai branches shoot up to the heavens, spread across the horizon, and droop to the ground in an asymmetric but balanced patterns. The sand is raked everyday in concentric circles and swirling patterns to portray ripples and waves on the lake. The rocks are firmly planted to suggest stability and permanence but they gracefully tower over the landscaped garden to proclaim the majesty and wisdom of mountains formed eons ago.

The Japanese employ this creative symbolization technique even in their work-a-day world. Once, when I was presenting a long 300-page project proposal to a Japanese funding agency, I was asked to diagram the entire proposal and project activity flow in one page. I had to "bonsai" my tome. Having learned to do book reports, sentence diagramming, doodling, and other forms of condensations in school, I translated the complex proposal into a simple model. When the Japanese managers fully understood and appreciated the proposal, they could then endorse it wholeheartedly to their superior in their own words but using my creative diagram.

I have employed this bonsai technique in many strategic planning workshops and investment planning sessions for government agencies, corporations, and people’s organizations. Listening intently to multifarious idea advocates, protagonists, and antagonists in a cacophonous meeting, I then try to distill the essence of the discussion in a symbolic, representational drawing that powerfully captures all the important elements in a coherent framework.

One time, I drew a fishing boat, complete with outriggers and all, set against a rural scenery to summarize major points of a provincial city strategy. The sail, mast, hull, outriggers, sea waves, and countryside background became individual representations of each strategic thrust.

In another workshop, I sketched the star of David to interlock six separate but complementary strategies.

Other Methods

The Venn diagram is a simple concept which I have often used. It is composed of three overlapping circles. Each circle has its own individual space but it also shares space with one of the other circles and a common space with the two other circles in the center.

The Venn diagram shows the interrelationship of three distinct domains with each other. It is a powerful and creative synthesizing tool.

Emotional empathizing can be used effectively to stir new insights. I put myself in the shoes of the other person and totally assume his point of view. Or, I try to be another object or animal and "feel" what he is feeling. Emotions are universal expressions. Therefore, one can groove into any situation and empathize with it completely.

(Eduardo A. Morato, Jr. is on the faculty of the W. SyCip Graduate School of Business of the Asian Institute of Management. For comments and inquiries, you may contact him at: [email protected]. Published "Entrepreneur’s Helpline" columns can be viewed on the AIM website at http//: www.aim.edu.ph).