A few years ago, my daughter’s Destination Imagination team took on the Scientific Challenge.

Their solution included time travel, surprise endings, a trip to the planet K2-141b, and, as all good science-fiction stories apparently require, a mysterious button that absolutely should not be pressed.

In the original version of the story, the button was red.

Of course it was.

Red buttons practically exist to communicate:

DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON.

Which, in fiction, naturally means someone must press it immediately.

The team performed their solution at the regional tournament, did incredibly well, and won.

The red button had caused no problems.

No one suggested it needed fixing.

Then, after the tournament, I was talking with the mom of one of our newer team members. She had watched several other teams compete that day and was telling me how interesting it was to see all the different ways teams had interpreted the same challenge.

Then she mentioned something funny.

Almost every story had a red button.

Different teams.

Different plots.

Different solutions.

Red button.

Red button.

Red button.

I mentioned it to the team.

That was all it took.

Apparently, if everyone else had a red button, we most certainly could not have a red button.

The button became blue.

And one line in the script changed.

When Harleen noticed the mysterious button and asked what it did, Elaina answered:

“I don’t know, but it’s not red…”

Pause.

Eyebrow raise toward the appraisers.

“…so I’m gonna press it.”

It was a tiny change.

The entire story didn’t need to be rewritten.

The set didn’t need to be redesigned.

The team didn’t suddenly earn fifty bonus creativity points because they had discovered the color blue.

But something interesting happened.

The appraisers noticed.

At Destination Imagination tournaments, teams receive comments from the appraisers, virtual sticky notes, pointing out things they found funny, clever, impressive, or memorable.

And tournament after tournament, at least one appraiser mentioned the blue button.

Not just the button.

The fact that it wasn’t red.

I can imagine why.

After watching performance after performance, the red button probably starts to feel inevitable.

And then one team walks in with a blue one.

Better yet, they pause mid-performance, raise an eyebrow, and make sure you know that they know.

The team went on to win the state tournament and compete at Global Finals.

Did the blue button make that happen?

Of course not.

Was it the difference between a winning solution and a losing one?

Probably not.

But was it memorable?

Absolutely.

And I think that’s what I love about the story.

The red button wasn’t bad.

It worked.

It made sense.

The team had already created a successful solution around it.

They just learned that it was also the obvious choice.

And instead of saying, Good enough, they looked again.

That’s a different kind of creativity than coming up with the first big idea.

Sometimes creativity is invention.

Sometimes it’s taking something that doesn’t work and finding a way to make it work.

But sometimes creativity is looking at something that works perfectly well and asking:

Could this be more interesting?

Could it be more surprising?

Could it feel more like us?

Sometimes the first clue that an idea deserves another look is simply how easily we arrived at it.

Not because first ideas are bad.

Not because everything needs to be different for the sake of being different.

But because the idea that came quickly to us may have come quickly to everyone else too.

The following year, the team sat down at the beginning of the season to create our team norms.

They talked about how they wanted to work together, what mattered to them, and what they wanted to remember as they tackled another challenge.

The last norm they added was:

Look for blue button moments.

That’s when I knew the blue button had become something bigger than a funny line in a script.

They had developed their own shorthand for creative thinking.

Don’t stop just because it works.

Look again.

Where did we choose the expected thing?

Where might we push the idea a little further?

What could make this solution more distinctly ours?

Now I tell this story to my students when we begin brainstorming our first project of the year.

Eventually, they know the question is coming.

What’s your blue button moment?

I’m not asking them to make something weird.

I’m not asking them to decorate a perfectly good idea until it becomes “creative.”

I’m asking them to take another look at their thinking.

To notice where they’ve settled.

To wonder whether the first possibility has to be the final one.

Because creativity isn’t always a lightning bolt.

Sometimes it’s a second look.

A small change.

A willingness to ask one more question after you’ve already found an answer that works.

And every once in a while, it’s simply noticing the red button…

and deciding to make it blue.