By Patrick Ibarra

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
Pablo Picasso

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” Julia Child

Nowadays, society benefits greatly from the expansion of the microwave oven and movement towards more and more fast food.  Nutrition and quality have inadvertently given way to convenience.  While this reliance on convenience is necessary in our fast-paced and Facebook world, the trend has also impacted our desire for immediacy.  Especially, where it concerns the solving, or at least effectively, addressing organizational and community challenges.  Where cooking has become somewhat of a lost art, so has the emphasis on leveraging creativity as an essential ingredient to powerful and productive problem solving.  

Creativity is often viewed as a luxury that we no longer have time to explore, because we want the issue resolved today, if not yesterday, and permanently, too, please!  We want our solutions pre-packaged and ready to implement, as though adding water will do it.  

With the new normal firmly in place and all its ancillary components – transparency and accountability the focus for local governments nationwide is on demonstrating increased value to its citizens.  Using traditional tried-and-true solutions to impact today’s biggest challenges, are not as easily accessible for today’s government leaders.  So, what are the options?  Great question.  

While growing up in Kansas City, Missouri my parents owned the Red Bull, a Mexican restaurant.  As I grew, I observed both of my parents and their intense focus on preparing authentic dishes by blending different ingredients in new and different ways.  Besides preparing delicious food, my favorite was and still is, tamales, they were never satisfied with the status quo.  Using cooking as a backdrop, I have designed eight steps you can use to participate in status-quo disruptive activities, stretch your mind and cook-up your own creative juices:

Cultivate an Appetite – Adopt a mind-set of exploration and discovery.  Open yourself to new possibilities by being curious, by playing around, by focusing on what you don’t know and by asking questions.  Above all, give yourself permission to be creative.  Ask lots of questions and see yourself as a creative person.  Explore the arts because they are especially wonderful in challenging our assumptions and pushing us out of our comfort zone.

Gather - Get the facts, figures and feelings which relate to your topic.  Collect many ingredients from many sources – local and foreign, exotic and commonplace.  When you shop in the idea supermarket, remember to check for freshness.

Add diversity to your store of ideas by looking outside your sphere of expertise.  Go somewhere new and bring something different back to your mental kitchen.  You can do this physically, by traveling to an unusual (for you) destination, such as a hardware store or a furniture manufacturer, or by taking a walk in the park.  Alternatively, you might choose to make your expedition an intimate understanding of it, through books, articles and reports.

Look for ideas that are inside you, stored in your memory.  Think of events and experiences from your past that might have bearing on the project you’re working on right now; try to remember the details and apply them to your current situation.  Can what you were doling five or ten years ago help you in your work today?  Remember conversations with your dad, your sister and your seventh-grade teacher.

Look to nature for ideas.  Our planet is endlessly fascinating, and chances are nature has already done something which related to your idea.  Search among the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds for concepts that might work for you.

Record your ideas – be they notes, sketches or musical passages. Keep them in an organized fashion.  Remember if you don’t do anything with your ideas – if you don’t shape them into reality – they will have done little to serve you.

Cut - Analyze ideas by dividing them into smaller parts.  Determine the essence of problems or projects.  Figure out qualities and quantities.  Divide ideas into new categories.  Chop them up so that you understand them in new ways.

Analysis is the act of clarifying information. Solving problems, defining objectives, determining causes, meaning and reasons all depend on crisp analysis.  Cutting both simplifies information and adds to your knowledge of the subject.

Break your problem or ideas into its component parts.  Study its attributes.  If your subject is familiar, find ways of seeing it in a different light.

Examine your idea from several points of view.  Ask yourself, how will your customer see it?  What will a six-year-old notice?  What can a scientist get out of it?  New perspectives provide new information and ideas.  Avoid hardening of the categories.

Arrange information visually.  Use idea maps to keep track of facts, relationships and details – and to keep the information manageable.  

Mix – Mixing bowls, whisks and blenders are tools that combine raw ingredients.  The different tools we use to mix ideas expand our creative abilities by helping us formulate new perspectives.  Join, relate and marry ideas.  Look for connections, make comparisons, relate your idea to others, invent metaphors and develop analogies.  Trust in your capacity to be inspired by creating the conditions in your mind for new connections to take place.

Cook - Let your ideas simmer and stew.  The doors to deeper creative experiences are persistence, hard work and drive.  Focus your concentration by developing an inner rhythm of expression and reflection, and by striving to reach the psychological state of “flow.”  Know when to turn up the heat and when to let things cool down and marinate in their own juices.

Spice - Add accent and flair to your ideas.  Collect interesting ideas, quotes, pictures, games, stories, puzzles and paradoxes.  These make life interesting and shift your focus toward the little ingenuities of life.  Ask “what if?” questions to help you look beyond conventional boundaries.  Change contexts. 

Express your idea in a different mental language.  Tell a story, draw a picture, make a model, formulate an equation or chart a map.  Challenge your assumptions, break the rules and encourage that ever-present friend of creativity – luck.

Taste - Tasting and judging help you sharpen and define your work.  Making creative decisions about what to include and what to leave out, which direction to go and how to develop something, is a never-ending process.  These decisions are reached through the dynamic pull and push of creative thinking: we need to be loose so that we don’t stop good ideas prematurely, and we need to be critical so we don’t serve a meal that’s off.  Know that ideas should appeal to the eye as well as the palate.  When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, figure out what you can learn from the experience.

Digest - Take time to assimilate ideas.  Are your ideas providing a balanced mental diet, or are you consuming too many mental sweets?  Remember that a well-nourished intellect enjoys sustenance from all the mental food groups.

So, don your Chef’s hat, put on that apron, get out your spatula, gather up your spices and head to your kitchen because now that you have read the article, I bet you are ravenously hungry, right?  Creativity and cooking have so many similarities and now that you have digested them, go ahead and open up your own restaurant of creative ideas!

Patrick Ibarra is an “entrepreneur of ideas” and architect of innovation who takes the headwinds governments are facing about the current climate of unprecedented changes and translates them into a tailwind with practical, tactical and impactful solutions that can be used immediately.  A former city manager, Patrick owns and operates The Mejorando Group consulting practice (www.gettingbetterallthetime.com).  Mejorando is Spanish for “getting better all the time” and Patrick’s firm partners with governments helping them increase employee performance and organizational effectiveness by providing consultation, facilitation, and training.  

Ibarra is an author, speaker, blogger and educator who brings fresh thinking, innovation, and new ideas to help public sector organizations succeed in the 21st century.  He has designed a training program based on “Creativity and Cooking” and has presented it to several local government organizations.  For those agencies interested in immediately improving your organization’s performance, Mr. Ibarra can be reached at 925-518-0187 and/or patrick@gettingbetterallthetime.com and follow the Mejorando Group on Facebook and Twitter.