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Great to have Woody Bendle back this week with a new creative thinking exercise that, for those of you old enough to remember, will take you back to the 80′s while it also has you pointed toward future ideas! Here’s Woody . . .

 Creative Thinking Exercise – That’s Just the Way It Is

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones…” - John Maynard Keynes

I love this quote from Keynes.  In its brevity, it articulates two fundamental realities nearly every business faces.

1. Most organizations typically aren’t lacking for new ideas; and
2. The processes and procedures that helped to make organizations successful, are often the exact things preventing them from being innovative and finding that next level of new growth.

I have an idea…

Ideas are abundant – they really are. But good ideas worth backing are exceptionally rare.  By good idea, I mean a bona fide idea that can uniquely satisfy an important unmet or underserved consumer need.  And one that has the opportunity to create new consumer value in the marketplace.

Let’s face it, it feels awesome when you’ve come up with a really cool idea!  But, one of the most significant challenges every innovator faces is resisting the temptation to chase a cool idea rather than solving consumer needs.  This is a proven path to almost certain failure that we need not go down; but still so many do.

Innovation is a numbers game – just not in the way that many still think.  When 80%+ of all new products that launch each year fail, I would consider the current state of innovation a fundamentally broken numbers game.  Tossing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall is irresponsible; not to mention an incredible waste of time, effort and money.  There is however a better numbers game and that is generally regarded as the needs-first, or jobs-to-be-done approach to innovation.

By methodically and thoroughly understanding consumer needs and appropriately sizing up the market opportunity, you can flip the numbers from 80% failures to 80%+ successes. I don’t know about you but I like those numbers a whole lot better!

So, once you have identified the need(s) you wish to address, what do you do next?

Anyone got an idea?

Now is the time to come up with ideas.  Even though ideas can be abundant, coming up with well informed and focused ideas isn’t always easy.  Occasionally, you will be lucky and have one of those serendipitous eureka moments; but more times than not, it doesn’t work out this way.  Coming up with good new innovation ideas is hard work – really hard work.  And, thankfully hard work can often be made easier with creative thinking exercises.

One such creative thinking exercise I often like to use is one I call “That’s just the way it is” (cue Bruce Hornsby… now).

That’s Just the Way It Is, is pretty much what you might assume given the name.  This creative thinking exercise starts by identifying things are often regarded as standards, norms or expected protocols.  Many of you might have read (or at least remember the title from) Kriegel and Brandt’s 2008 book Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers” (affiliate link).

The “That’s Just the Way It Is” Creative Thinking Exercise

That’s Just the Way It Is essentially builds upon the notion of challenging existing conventions (and / or sacred cows) as a way to identity opportunities for innovation.

There are five steps to this creative thinking exercise:

1. Given the need(s) that you are attempting to innovate against, identify things (processes, procedures, designs, constructions, etc.) in your business or category that just are what they are.  These will be those things that are always done a certain way – and That’s Just the Way It Is.
2. List as many reasons as you can think of for why this is (or might be) the case.
3. List all of the ways (and reasons) the current state is good for your organization and all of the ways this is good for the consumer.
4. List all of the ways (and reasons) the current state might be limiting (and potentially even a negative) for your organization and your consumers.  And finally…
5. Take the thing you identified in step one and “go opposite.”  That is, what might it look like if you did the exact opposite (or reverse) of the thing you’ve identified.

Once you’ve completed steps 1-5 for the first thing came up with, keep going because this is where the real numbers game happens!

At this point in your idea generation phase, the more things you can identify that are Just the Way It Is, the better.  And more times than not, the things you come up with much later in this exercise are often the ones that have the best opportunity to be real game changers.

So what do you think? Is this a creative thinking exercise you can see adding to your creativity tool box?  Let me know!

Now, let’s get innovating! - Woody Bendle

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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Can you believe we’re already this far into the year? It seems like yesterday that we were looking ahead to what the new year would hold personally and organizationally. 

Now, the year is a third over. To celebrate how both innovation and Spring are in the air (and are a lot alike), it’s great to have Woody Bendle back on the Brainzooming blog. Here’s Woody:

Innovation Is a Lot Like Spring by Woody Bendle

“The force of Spring —
 mysterious,
 fecund, powerful beyond measure.” - Michael Garofalo

I love spring – I have always been inspired by it.  It’s not that I have any particular disdain for the other seasons; but rather, spring has always represented newness, a fresh start, and a promise of tomorrow.  And for me, there’s simply something special about new.

Every year, Mother Nature orchestrates a truly remarkable renewal; putting in motion the natural order of life anew.  It feels as if Earth unleashes an inquisitive energy as it casts aside its winter respite.

Each spring, life takes on new shape and form as it reaches out seeking a new way.  And, every spring, I am captivated by the many remarkable things I maybe haven’t seen before.  Most of which have emerged from things that have been there in front of all of me all along.

In many ways, innovation is like spring…

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Innovation as “the introduction of something new.”

And in business, Innovation is often regarded as:

“The process of creating and delivering new customer value into the marketplace.”

That certainly has a spring-like feel to it. When I think about the meaning of innovation and its impact, I feel it can be summed up in the following way.

Through Innovation…

  – Businesses, markets and cultures change

  – Businesses, markets and societies grow

  – Businesses, markets and consumers prosper

And through Innovation, we can forge a new and brighter tomorrow.

Yes, Innovation is a lot like Spring.  - Woody Bendle

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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To wrap up World Creativity and Innovation Week, here are ten of the most popular Brainzooming posts since last year’s celebration related to creativity. The ten article represent a good overview of our creativity content, including posts on strategic thinking questions, creative ideas, creativity tips, and creative thinking exercises:

1. Creating Cool Product Names for a New Product Idea – 8 Creative Thinking Questions

2. Extreme Creative Ideas – 50 Lessons to Improve Creativity Dramatically

3. Storytelling & Creative Process Tips from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

4. Creative Thinking Ideas from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

5. Cool Product Names – 17 Creative Questions for Winning Product Name Ideas

6. Strategic Thinking – Exercises and Tools for Creative Thinking and Strategy

7. How to Be More Creative? 3 Ways to Boost Creative Confidence

8. Creativity In Mobile Game Design by Hillary Hopper

9. Creative Strategy Lessons from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

10. Creative Thinking Exercise – SCAMPER around KC by Woody Bendle

Mike Brown

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you improve your creative thinking skills and generate fantastic ideas! To boost your organization’s innovation success, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help you rapidly expand strategic options and create strong implementation plans. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we’ll deliver these benefits for you.

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With baseball season underway, I was thinking about what the starting lineup might look like for a winning creative team if you were limited to nine starting players. If you had the limitation (or maybe the luxury) of nine roles to assign, what nine creative team members would you have in the starting lineup for your creative project? In what order would you have your winning creative team members listed?

Starting Lineup for a Winning Creative Team

I’m not sure this starting lineup would look the same mid-project as it does at the beginning or end, but on opening day for a creative project, here are the nine positions I’d want on my winning creative team:

1. The Upbeat Person

People who embody a positive attitude are exactly what a creative team will need during challenging times when a positive attitude is the last thing on anyone’s mind. An upbeat person is slotted in the lead off spot for a strong start to a winning creative effort.

2. A Servant Leader

Individuals with strong servant leader orientations instinctively look at opportunities and issues from an outside-in perspective, putting others’ interests first. A servant leader can advance and enhance creativity from others in meaningful and productive ways.

3. The Doodler

If someone is a natural doodler, especially of cartoonish-looking doodles, you can tap them for their visual thinking and expression skills. This is the spot to make something happen early on in the creative process.

4. An Event Person

People who have event production backgrounds are strong at anticipating what might happen and translating the empty space between now and a future event into scheduled steps someone has to do. You want them right the heart of your creative team starting lineup to bridge the early creative ideas to what they may become and how they’ll get there!

5. The Socializer

If someone on your creative team excels at making connections with others, they’ll be able to take the steps to reach out and secure the various types of participation the creative team will need from outside itself.

6.  A “Math and Music” Person

Those people who have aptitudes in both music and math bring a natural whole-brain thinking perspective to the creative team. As you make the case for moving forward and seeing impact from your creative efforts, you want a strong switcher hitter to see both the creative and analytical sides depending on what the creative team needs.

7. The Instigator

Further down the creative team starting lineup you want to make sure there is someone who is all about making things happen – no matter what. It will be the instigator who gives you the push to go from creative thinking to sustained creative action.

8. The Person Who Is Good with Words

Someone has to turns creative ideas and concepts into words so they can be shared with others. Plus deciding on the words to describe your creative team’s work will stretch and challenge your creative thinking as well.

9. A Quiet Thinker

The person who doesn’t say much most of the time because they’re thinking about things on multiple paths will identify the issues and opportunities the team needs to consider. Putting the quiet thinker at the end of the starting lineup gives them time to think and be ready when needed.

What would the starting lineup look like for your winning creative team?

What other types of players would you have in your starting lineup? And would your lineup vary based on whether it was early or late in the creative season? – Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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Some people are explosively creative. They don’t need creativity exercises or structure to sustain their voluminous creative output.

Then there’s the rest of us.

If pure creativity eludes you, then having the right structures, exercises, and tools helps you get more from your natural creative thinking skills. For the rest of us trying to figure out how to be more creative, having a personal creative thinking skills formula can be an incredible help.

How to Be Creative through a Personal Creative Thinking Skills Formula

What might you include in your creative thinking skills formula? Consider these elements to boost your creativity:

1. Volume of Creative Output

Creativity CAN be viewed largely as a numbers game: create enough of whatever you create, and you can play the percentages. Some portion of your creative output will rise above the creative expectations in place. The rest of your creative output can be swept under the creative rug.

2. Creative Perspectives

Your perspective about a particular creative challenge or opportunity makes a dramatic impact on what you do with it. This idea is the basis of lateral thinking, in that a different perspective than you usually take helps you see and create new things. Sometimes a new perspective happens by accident or instinct. But far better to be armed with standard moves you can make to change perspective when you need it to trigger creativity.

3. Creative Combinations

Similar to structure, there are combinations and formulations of inputs to enhance creativity. Standard color combinations, musical scales, and geometric patterns work because they put together, constrain, and keep separate the right elements to strengthen creative output.

4. Creative Structures

Across creative disciplines, there are typically standard structures shaping creative output. Three-panel cartoons, 12-bar blues, sonnets, list-based blog posts, ‘high concept pitches” etc. are all examples. These all represent accepted creative structures. If you can fill in the blanks, you’re at least some (if not most of the way) toward creative output.

5. Tools

The tools you use for creativity do make a difference. When I got a great guitar, I was a better guitarist automatically, even though my skills hadn’t changed. Simply having a guitar that played well enhanced my very humble abilities. The plethora of apps and software available now for creativity are all examples. But whether online or offline, the right tools can make you (or make you appear) more creative.

That’s my creative thinking formula – what’s yours?

What are the parts and pieces of your creative thinking formula? I’d love to hear them, because I’m always looking for new ideas for how to be creative that I can borrow, as you’ll learn more about in tomorrow’s Brainzooming post.  - Mike Brown

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic new ideas! For an organizational creativity boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these innovation benefits for you.

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Yes, I Wear Orange Socks

I’m not sure where the Wall Street Journal got a picture of me in my orange socks to put in this ad . . . Bill Gates had a story in the Wall Street Journal recently on how to solve  the world’s problems. Maybe he could solve PowerPoint problems first and then get back to us . . . For whatever reason, food doesn’t just miraculously appear in the refrigerator. As much as it seems like it should, it never happens.

If you’re going to be a week off on the date when an event is, it’s better to be a whole week early . . . Not a good thing: Calling your new trainer by the name of the trainer you’ve been working with for 6 years . . . You mean that Matthew Perry show is still on? Really? Really?

Late Night Twitter

Ever spend time on late night Twitter or Facebook? Here are my typical reactions, “Eeeek. Sheesh. Nice. Liar. Again? Watch out. Who are you?” . . . Intriguing that they deleted all the former Pope’s tweets on @Pontifex but the account still kept its 82 Klout score . . . People criticize the Catholic Church for medieval thinking, but you have to remember: IT WAS  AROUND IN THE MIDDLE AGES to be thinking.

For as competitive as I am, I don’t get into “my THING is bigger/better/earlier than yours” discussions. If you go there with me, you automatically win . . . I once wrote a clean limerick that started with the line, “There once was a girl from Buckhead.”

I Love My Freudian Slip Checker – When It Works

From a speaker I saw, here’s a quote to tweet if you’re into tweeting quotes: “It’s like. Um. You know what I mean” . . . Two typos that got through the Freudian Slip Checker that I’ll be using in presentations: Tirade-offs and sueprising . . . Every rubber band that’s stretched snaps back – or breaks. Think about the repercussions.

I hate that it’s easier to go from 0 words to 900 words in a blog post than it is to get from 2,300 words to 900 words . . . Thinking just now: If not for similes, there would be hardly any blog posts written . . . It has been a snowy winter, and I’m not sure which caused more muscle pain: The 19 hundredth day of blogging or the 3rd day of snow shoveling?

Just because something matters to you doesn’t mean it matters to everyone else. That’s Exhibit A in proving you’re wrong when you think everyone is like you . . . In my opinion, the Award for the Best Blog Post Title Ever goes to It’s T-Bone Walker’s World. We’re All Just Doing Two Shows a Night in It. It just doesn’t get any better than that, people . . . Rants have a narrow range of length to be effective. Too short and you simply sound disagreeable; too long and you seem like somebody the FBI should be watching.

That Was Never an Argument Just Now

Personally, you have to pay me to argue. I don’t argue with just anyone for free . . . My most recent thing I wanted to say to a client and didn’t: “How would I know? Because I’m not 25 and just got out of college. That’s how I’d f’n know”  . . . I’m not sure what just happened here, but I hope not to regret it tomorrow . . . As we say around our offices, “When in doubt or you don’t have anything else to run, run a Larry King column.” - Mike Brown

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Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal “Review” section teemed with wonderful reminders of creative ideas. These reminders were helpful for providing a handy creative thinking skills refresher on ideas that can become easy to overlook.

Check out these thirteen creative ideas pulled from three of the Wall Street Journal “Review” articles.

Pick one of these creative thinking ideas and do something about it this week – even if that is as simple as thinking about it for a few moments today. You get bonus points if you actually take action on any of these ideas to enhance your creative thinking skills this week.

13 Creative Thinking Skills worth Remembering

Each creative idea is followed by a reference to the list of articles below from which it came.

Creative Perspective

• How readily do you suspend your cynicism to be able to imagine possibilities? How do you consciously force yourself out of a cynical perspective when that’s needed? (1)
• How often do you give yourself the permission to be “new and stupid”? (1)

Creative Inspiration

• If you derive a lot of creative stimulation through online interactions, how are you regularly creating equal creative stimulation through in-person interactions? (1)
• Do you keep going back to the same creative wells repeatedly? Or do you continually seek out new creative experiences where you do not already know the whole story? (1)
• Do you know where your best ideas come from? (It is okay if you don’t know.) If you can recall where your ideas come from, are they originating from different creative inspirations? (2)

Creative Process

• When you take on a new creative project, do you have a “total immersion” process you go through to become fluent in the new subject? (3)
• As you imagine a new creative project, how are you creating a “look book” with inspiration, depictions, and prototypes for your strategic and creative approach? (3)
• When addressing a traditional topic, are you asking, “What doesn’t matter?” This helps identify unnecessary elements ripe for elimination. (3)
• Are you growing the number of people you know that face similar situations to yours? These are the relationships where you can have candid, deep conversations on challenges and opportunities you both face. (1)
• How are you leaving room for surprise and unexpected twists and turns in your creative projects? (2)
• If you enjoy planning everything out on a creative project, are you willing to pursue your next creative project with less upfront exploration? (2)

Creative Experience

• When trying to convey large amounts of information to an unfamiliar audience, how are you using design to simplify the information and draw in audience members while letting the design fade into the background? (3)
• To anticipate a major creative experience impact, ask, “What’s going to stop (the audience) in its tracks and (make them) think about this completely differently?” (3)

Creative Inspiration for these Creative Ideas:

(1) “Bordellos for the Brain (Conference Mania)” by Holly Finn

(2) “In the Beginning,” by Ron Rash

(3) “Creating – At the Side of an Expert Exhibitionist” – Melanie Ide, Museum Planner

Next Week’s Creative Thinking Skills Assignment

I hope you enjoy working one of these creative ideas this week. While you’re at it, bookmark this page and come back to it next week to refresh even more creative thinking skills! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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