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Sura Al-Naimi is the founder of HiHelloSura, a consultancy service that teaches and trains clients, including some AgeTech Collaborative™ participants, how to leverage creative thinking to solve thorny problems, big and small. 

Sura took some time to outline her approach, demystify the creative process, and discuss a recent engagement she led with an AgeTech Collaborative™ testbed organization.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company? 

My name is Sura, and I'm the founder of HiHelloSura, which is an innovation and creativity consultancy. My intention is to help individuals, teams and organizations be able to think differently and solve complex challenges. Whatever we do within our business, we face a lot of ambiguity. And to come up with new solutions in the face of that ambiguity, we need new thinking. That’s where I fit in: I help people access their resources and collaborate with others to bring in that new thinking. 

What does a typical engagement look like for you? 

Engagements usually fit into a couple of categories. Sometimes teams will want to be able to have an awareness of creativity and innovation and “fish for themselves.” Those take on more of a training-and-empowerment engagement: focusing on the toolkit or framework for innovation, and on the mindset for creativity. 

Other times, clients will have a specific challenge they want to work on, so we’ll partner with them to shepherd them through the process so they can collectively come up with new solutions. Sometimes, it’s a combination of the two. 

What’s the process you walk clients through with regard to problem-solving and creativity? 

There are a series of distinct steps or phases you go through during the innovation process, whether you’re doing design thinking or creative problem solving. Those are what I call the toolkit or framework for creativity. 

But there’s also the mindset, which are the behaviors and culture of an organization. The mindset is critical, because you could have the best processes in the world, but if you don’t have the mindset of suspending judgment and being curious and nurturing a new idea, you won’t be able to bring in the new thinking developed in the process. Sometimes I say that “mindset will eat process for breakfast.” So the toolkit and the mindset really have to go hand-in-hand. 

Can you say a little more about the process of creativity? 
 
Many times people will say, "I’m not an ideas person” or “I’m not creative.” But when we talk about the process of creativity — getting an innovative solution out to market, for example — there are four distinct skills.  

The first is clarifying what the challenge is, which involves research and getting beyond assumptions you might have. The second is ideation, which is imaginative, big-picture thinking. The third is development, which is refining a workable solution. The fourth is implementation, which is the “just do it” aspect. 

Bringing awareness of these skills can help people get a better understanding of what their unique strengths are in the process of creativity. Someone might be a strong clarifier and good at research. Someone else might be good at developing ideas. This democratizes access to creativity and makes it everybody's role, versus one department’s role or somebody with a particular title. It brings together diverse perspectives to create solutions. 

Breaking it down like that seems like a good diagnostic tool.

Understanding these facets can help you understand where you might get stuck. For example, if you’re a high clarity person, you might just continue researching and never actually get to the next phase. If you’re a high implementer, you might rush to get something half-baked out the door without adequately thinking about the strategy. 

It also gives you an opportunity to build your team in a powerful way. You can ask, “Are we top-heavy in one of these areas versus another?” Then you can bring in other types of creative partners to create a real superhero team. 

You’ve done some of this work with startups who are participants in the AgeTech Collaborative™. Can you give us an example? 

We did a really cool project with United Church Homes that was an exercise in user-centered design. We worked with the residents — I think our average participant was 88 years old — to come up with solutions that would enhance residence life.  

We held a series of workshops they attended, spread out over four days. We took them through the process of design thinking methodology, and at each phase of the project, we were able to introduce the tools and the processes that were relevant. After the workshops, they would go back into their teams to think about solutions on their own. They then created pitches for their own ideas, which were videotaped. So they were able to be fully engaged in the process. That's an example of how this can be applied to any audience. 

We interviewed Michael Hughes of United Church Homes, and he talked about this workshop. He was really jazzed about how successful it was. 

Absolutely, it was a huge success on a number of levels. I think that the residents really felt heard. And it really is a commitment to user-centered design, where we said to the residents, “You’re the creators and innovators.” 

The people who work at United Church Homes care so deeply about the residents, and they were so happy that the residents had this opportunity to create value for themselves. 

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share? 

It’s very exciting to make these things tangible and accessible to people. There can be a lot of mystique in the area of creativity, and my commitment is to make it very simple. It’s powerful that somebody can take a new awareness, a new mindset and a set of tools and be able to use them immediately to solve problems with creativity. 

You can learn much more about Sura’s work at HiHelloSura.com.

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