Do Nothing

For my fourth creativity and innovation write assignment in the syllabus, I chose another technique from the Mycoted website, www.mycoted.com/creativity/techniques/index.php to write about. The Mycoted website lists a number of techniques that are dedicated to improve creativity and innovation for solving problems worldwide. I chose the "Do Nothing" technique under the Creativity techniques category.

"Do Nothing", according to Bran Clegg in his book Crash Course in Creativity is a technique of actually doing nothing and determining what the outcome would be if nothing is done. The assumption that we often make, that something must be done about a particular problem is essentially disqualified in the Do Nothing technique. If we simply stop and think about what the outcome would be if nothing were done is an obvious and creative way to consider one of three possible outcomes to the problem. One outcome is that the problem doesn't actually need to be solved. I view this as if the problem actually resolves itself without interference or attention. The second outcome could lead to a better idea of the benefits of solving a problem. The third and last would be that you would have generated some alternative problems to solve which of course there always are. I view this approach as if doing nothing was the proper technique because the magnitude of the problem wasn't as great as originally expected.

I recently tested the do nothing technique at a recent board meeting. The fact that the CEO of our not-for-profit company Westcare, failed to recognize some board members in the annual report caused some real discomfort among a few of the members. The members of the board who were not recognized including myself met before the board meeting was convened to discuss how we would approach the CEO.

I recommended that we "do nothing" and what would the possible repercussions to us if nothing was said or done and what benefit would it have if we said something since the annual report was already printed and distributed. To our surprise, the CEO addressed the fact that certain omissions including some of the board members names were made and that it would be resolved in a letter distributed with the next quarterly report. The problem was solved without our addressing it and we simply did nothing.