Nurturing an attitude of personal creativity improves your ability to understand and affect systems and to develop innovative solutions. It’s not tied to the arts but is about trying to think differently than an automatic approach to the world based on what you already know.
Develop an Insight Outlook
On a daily basis you remind yourself to do a few simple things that eventually become automatic. These might include:
- ask questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”
- reach out to learn what other people think
- watch and observe for a minute instead of just walking by
- consider how the acceptable could have been improved
- reflect back over the last five minutes instead of charging forward.
Build a Tool Box of Problem Solving Techniques
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with using creativity anymore than you do for cooking. There may not be as many recipe books, but there are a collection of proven techniques you can turn to if you’re at a loss. Even picking up a handful of them can make a difference when applied deliberately.
One that I like is SCAMPER, a mnemonic of seven different things to do to your basic boring idea.
- S – Substitute
- C – Combine
- A – Adapt or Adjust
- M – Modify or Minify
- P – Put to another use
- E – Eliminate
- R – Rearrange or Reverse
Like any other tool it doesn’t do your thinking for you, but it gives you an area for development other than a blank page or computer screen.
Capture Your Ideas
We’ve all had the experience of coming up with something that sounded great – even if it was just for what we should give Mom for Christmas – combined with the total frustration of realizing that the idea has permanently slipped away from you.
Getting in the habit of writing or recording an idea that comes to mind will increase the liklihood that you’ll be able to identify and use the good ones.
Personally, I keep a notebook, but I’m highly tempted to try Jott – essentially voice mail you call from your cell that sends you a transcribed email when you’re done speaking – for those penless moments.
Use Your Eyes to Help Your Mind
Make a deliberate effort to include visual thinking techniques when you are problem solving. By this I mean don’t just talk about the situation or write lists down.
Use the width and breadth of the paper and whiteboard. Draw squiggles if they represent the idea better or along with a word. Connect pieces that seemed very far apart with lines.
Turning an abstraction into something that we can physically see is process that crosses disciplines. It pops up everywhere from graphs of mathematical data to causal loops diagrams in systems thinking and flow charts in quality management.
Our brains often think in pictures and many of those images are housed in the free-ranging right brain. When you bring that aspect into a problem solving or idea creation session you are encouraging your left and right brains to talk to each other.
Creativity Hacks
These four tips are distilled from my reading of the new ebook by Chuck Frey and represent its four sections. Creativity Hacks focuses on how to improve your personal creativty as a tool for innovating. It contains nearly a hundred pages of information and is styled horizontally for easy on-screen reading and referral.
Chuck is the primary contributor to Innovation Tools and an expert in using mind-mapping software. I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time and appreciate his insights.
If reading about creativity is new to you, then his ebook will be a good place to start, especially since the bonuses include reviews of books and tools to turn to expand your studies, if you wish. Of course, there’s always the budget-friendly option of turning to the local library or online resources if you’re not ready to purchase yet.
If you’ve read extensively about creativity then you’ll not find anything new here, but it’s a good reminder of what a practitioner and student of creativity has found personally important and relevant after nearly two decades of trying things out in his career and endeavors.
I especially appreciated the list of advantages and disadvantages of different idea capture techniques in Section 3 and the inclusion of photography and scrapbooking as visual thinking methods in Section 4.
I am signed up for the affiliate program, so if you purchase a copy of Creativity Hacks after clicking on one of my links, then I will receive a commission. I purchased my own copy for the full price before the affiliate program went live because I didn’t want to wait for it and consider the money well spent.
