New course on creativity and problem solving

2025-2026: New wine in old bottles for creativity and problem solving (MN2515)?

No. 

Through our revamping of business education, we (me and colleagues) have kept the same course code.  

But this is a new version of our undergraduate management course on creativity and problem solving at Royal Holloway.

Under the new business and management portfolio, it has been a a very positive relief to be able to include systems thinking ideas more openly and extensively in this course.  And many students seem to have liked it.

As the course leader, this year I faced now a different problem: Which systems ideas or methods to include alongside their counterparts in creativity? Since 2015 (year of inception of this course), I have been combining creativity with other areas of knowledge.  In 2017, I integrated ideas from process management, which also included the study of six sigma and lean approaches to improvement, and how the later (lean) has been used with a systems thinking lens.  

This year, an answer to the above question has emerged gradually.    

I decided to start by raising the importance of thinking in terms of systems, something that could help us as individuals or organisations deal with VUCA situations. 

VUCA, a military term to account for situations exhibiting volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In the systems thinking world we name those "messes".  Such situations do not have a clear cut formulation or solution.  Moreover, they change as we try to solve their problems, because there are interconnected elements.  It is better to see them as systems which have environments.  Any change on the system or environment will affect both.  

In the course, I asked my students to choose situations of their own, and start treating them like messes.  They would then express them with the help of systemic perspectives (Jackson, 2024), a kind of metaphor or lens that highlights certain aspects of the situation whilst obscuring others.  

Students would then select and assemble three (3) relevant issues from their expressing of the situation as a system. They would formulate three (3) solutions to tackle those issues. 

We spent some time talking and practising complexity as a specific lens to identify patterns in VUCA situations.  We used Kumu software to model situations.  This is a great tool, easy to use (and free) that allows us to model systems as sets of elements and connections (using flows and stocks for example).  We can also document and label all these elements.  As seen below, we practised modelling systems with the theme of sleep (self-care).  Together with students, we identified some possibilities to improve our own self-care, creatively.   

For the second part of the course, students were asked to refine one of the chosen solutions using the six thinking hats creativity technique of Edward de Bono.  After, they were to present their solution to relevant audiences, and receive feedback.  

With the hats techniques, many students were able to add features to their solutions, and consider if it was the 'right' solution.  When presenting it, they received very useful feedback (some students used the hats to get the feedback).  They also ventured to model what had happened when presenting their solutions.  I suggested they could use another software tool for this modelling: Canva-AI.  

During workshops, I noticed that the use of this tool took students sometime.  Not only to learn about it, but to get the outputs they needed.  So for their second assessment, I made explicit where it could be used.  I also made it explicit which content needed to be generated in Kumu.  My aim was to encourage students to appropriately learn both tools.  

The final part of the assessment was to design a system with the feedback obtained.  Students could choose to design, using Kumu, a system archetype (similar to the one presented above, to identify and address patterns of behaviour); a human activity system or HAS (a purposeful system that could be discussed to identify possible accommodations between parties); or a systems boundary, which could be drawn by referring to Werner Ulrich's critical systems heuristics (CSH) or Gerald Midgley's boundary critique.  

I was very and positively impressed with many students' work.  They took it very seriously and engaged with situations varying from our university library services or accommodation to restaurants, pubs and commuting.  In their engagements, they also used the models or presentations they had produced for their course, and this helped them communicate with people who had similar or different views to them.  

Moreover, when asked to reflect on their attempts to be positively creative, many students acknowledged the value of their ideas when presenting them to others.  They also valued the resources they used (i.e. networks of friends) and overall, the possibility of using their knowledge to benefit others meaningfully, so that they could help (at least on paper) solve messy situations.  

Throughout the course, there as a perennial issue of students attendance to face to face sessions, and this seems to have affected their engagement and performance.  This is something of a systemic issue, as it is experienced not only in my course but in others.  Many students do part-time work nowadays.  Others carefully decide, on financial grounds, which sessions need to be attended and which do not.  And others are still finding the meaning of what it means to be at university.  

When I look back at this course in the previous years, I can see many differences, not only in the content or the groups of students that have taken it, but also in myself.  I am more confident to put systems thinking ideas (including my own) about, to use them to educate my students, and to support their interests to apply knowledge beyond the classroom, if that is what they want to do.  

What about the future?  Well, who knows.  My only idea to face the future with this course is to try to stay open to emerging opportunities and challenges.  And to support students who want to broaden their boundaries of thinking and action with this course.