The Brainzooming Group

For more on World Creativity and Innovation Week, visit http://toronto.wciw.org/

World Creativity and Innovation Week starts today (as it does every April 15^th) in honor of Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday.  We’ll join in with the World Creativity and Innovation Week theme this week since innovation, creativity, and enhancing your creative thinking skills are all topics core to our coverage at Brainzooming.

7 Ideas to Get the Most from Your Creativity

Maybe your job requires daily creativity while offering few opportunities to recharge your creative thinking skills in dramatic ways.  Perhaps your work environment’s attitude is less about waiting for creative inspiration and more about, “Be creative dammit!”

If this describes your work situation, how do you get the most from your creativity on a daily basis? Here are seven ideas I’ve been depending upon to boost creative thinking skills and keep them strong daily:

1. Take advantage of the time right after your sleep.

The creative refresh that comes from sleep can help boost your creativity so much. Early mornings and late evenings (after a refresh nap) are all important for a fresh view and maximum creative output.

2. Cultivate your spirituality regularly.

Might as well take advantage of the greatest creative force there is! To stay focused on spirituality, I need structure surrounding me. Attending a church service every weekday morning refreshes my creativity at the start of each day and opens my mind to possibilities I wouldn’t have imagined the night before.

3. Revisit your creative inventory.

I hang on to completed creative output, as well as interim drafts and partial ideas that might never see the light of day. Not only does this provide a source for new and reformatted creative ideas, looking at interim creative drafts helps me think about previous creative techniques that might be a fit for what’s needed now.

4. Develop reusable creative structures all the time.

Call it laziness or call it smarts, but with every client we take on for a strategic or creative effort, we review how even impromptu efforts can become creative thinking exercises we can use as future creative structures.

5. Have creative fakes available.

A “fake” songbook gives musicians enough of a song’s framework (lyrics, melody, chords) to perform at a moment’s notice. A creative fake book provides the core of a creative structure to go from nothing to creativity rapidly. For me, the Brainzooming blog is my creative fake book. When I need a creative structure to get started quickly, I visit the blog, no matter where I am.

6. Get away from the daily routine whenever you can.

Contrary to everyone else on the planet, I love airports and airplane flights. Time on an airplane is my most creative because it is disconnected from the daily routine. Even if I don’t have a plane trip on the horizon, going somewhere different around town that’s fun and new can provide the needed creative boost.

7. Be around the right people.

From experience over time, I know being around people (vs. being by myself) helps to get the most from creativity. Specific individuals can often stimulate certain types of creativity very efficiently. When it’s been too long since I’ve been around one of these people, I know it’s time to get together right away!

What boosts your creative thinking skills daily?

These seven ideas are what I’ve been using the past few years when I tell myself, “Be creative dammit!” What works for you when you’re facing the same type of creative demands, whether imposed by your client, boss, or even yourself? - Mike Brown

Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

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I’ll readily admit I’m a proponent for borrowing creative inspiration. Not anything illegal or unethical, mind you. But borrowing creative inspiration in the sense of always being on the lookout for inspiration in everything you encounter. Unless you simply ooze creativity, this idea of borrowing creative inspiration is vital to having new ideas when you need them.

6 Areas for Borrowing Creative Inspiration

Here are six areas where I most frequently look for creative inspiration to borrow:

1. Design Layouts

I can do basic design (as evidenced by an advertising layout award in a long-ago state high school journalism contest), but it’s not my forte. If I need to design an ad flier or white paper, I comb through magazines looking for patterns and spatial relationships to mimic. In fact, the structure for our advertisement in The Social Media Monthly is based on the advertising my previous company did that was very effective.

2. Stock Photos

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Photocase.com as our main source for stock photos after a Twitter-based recommendation from Sally Hogshead. While Photocase.com definitely has some intriguing and novel photos, its European roots leave it lacking for photos representing some particularly US-oriented images and idioms. As a result, I’ll sometimes use an image on Photocase that’s close, but misses the mark as inspiration to draw or photograph something on my own that more closely fits the need for a blog image.

3. Blog Titles

Magazine headlines, especially for self-help publications, are great inspiration for borrowing engaging headline structures for blog titles. Again, as with design, headlines are not my strongest suit, so any inspiration for catchy blog titles is beneficial.

4. Social Media Content Sharing Patterns

I’m always on the lookout to see how people who seem to know what they are doing are approaching social media content sharing. It’s particularly intriguing when they change how and when they are sharing social media content. I adapted our Twitter sharing pattern from a prominent social media specialist who was sharing content more regularly and frequently than I would have imagined. When I saw Brainzooming had developed a sizable global audience, it made sense to move to a 24/7 social media content sharing cycle on Twitter, with planned tweets every 60 minutes.

5. Speaking Styles and Patterns

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve mimicked how those around me speak. For whatever reason, if I’m around someone enough, I start picking up words, phrases, and speech patterns they use. As a result, when I hear speakers in person or repeatedly via recordings, I unconsciously pick up vocal mannerisms. These often pop up in presentations that I only catch when I listen to my own presentations later.

6. Creative Thinking Models

Whenever I read about or become exposed to a cool business strategy success story, I ask the question, “How could you get to that same result again?” This question is the basis for many of the creative thinking exercises The Brainzooming Group uses in our work. Whether or not a company actually used the questions or steps we envision is irrelevant. We try to create a solid, strategic structure that would plausibly lead an organization down the same successful path.

Where are you most frequently borrowing creative inspiration to boost creative thinking?

In what situations do you borrow creative inspiration? How have you incorporated borrowing into your creativity? And importantly, do you share your creative ideas in a way that others can borrow from them for their creative pursuits? – Mike Brown

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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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When the Brainzooming blog started, its focus was to be on strategy, creativity, and innovation. In fact, the first five Brainzooming posts in 2007 framed our views on strategic thinking and its importance as widely distributed function within organizations. A number of years later, the compilation of those five posts (our “Strategic Thinking Manifesto”) still receives strong readership and social media sharing.

Since these first posts, there have been well over six hundred posts on Brainzooming categorized under “Strategic Thinking.” Given all that strategic thinking content, it’s a good time to update our framework. In conjunction with updating our “Creating a Strategic Perspective” workshop, we’re sharing both the structure and links to a subset of the relevant Brainzooming content underpinning the workshop today.

Strategic Thinking as an Ongoing Approach

The “Cultivating a Strategic Perspective” workshop is organized in two sections:

• 4 Characteristics of Solid Strategic Thinking
• Applying Strategic Thinking Daily – Tools and Techniques to Foster Successful Strategic Thinking & Implementation

4 Characteristics of Solid Strategic Thinking

1. Strategic Thinkers Seek Perspectives from Multiple Sources

• Three Important Perspectives – Strategic Thinking Success – 3 Critical Thinking Perspectives
• Strategy Can Be Simple - A Simple Strategy Check
• Benefits of a Whole Brain Perspective – Right Brain, Left Brain, Whole Brain?
• Involving a Team of Great Thinkers – Strategy Challenges? Share Them with a Great Strategy Team

2. Strategic Thinking Goes Beyond Today’s Reality

• Finding Multiple Paths to Innovation – Innovation – Can Successful Innovation Only Happen in a Certain Way?
• Suspending Conventional Wisdom to Imagine New Ideas – Unwrap New Insights!
• Brainstorming to Deal with an Uncertain Future – A Career-Changing Business Quote – 10 Years Later
• Altering Your Familiar Perspective – A Poor Question for Valentine’s Day: “Can You Change Your Look?”
• Imagining Possibilities – Saturday Special – More Benjamin Zander from TED

3. Strategic Thinkers Question Both the Familiar and the New

• Cultivating a Strategic Perspective through Questions – BrainzoomingTM – First Questions and Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand
• Developing Strong Strategic Questions – Great Strategic Questions – A 3-Step Strategic Question Formula  
• Protecting New Thinking – How Creative Thinking Gets Killed by Team Members – 8 Fatal Blows

4. Strategic Thinkers Display Both Patience and Impatience

• Balancing Patience and Action – Patience – Strategic Advantage or Disadvantage?
• What It Takes to Make Strategic Patience Work – The Waiting Game Strategy and “Wait” by Frank Partnoy – Making It Work
• How Brainstorming Can Provide Value for Your Organization – The Value of Brainstorming Techniques for Business Ideas
• Time Doesn’t Determine What Is Strategic – If Not Time, Then What Else Matters?
• Playing a Subtle Strategic Leadership Role – Tactically Influencing Strategic Situations
• Determining What Type of Change Strategy Is Right – Creating Change and Change Management – 4 Strategy Options

Applying Strategic Thinking Daily

Using Rich Strategic Questions

• Collections of Strategic Planning Questions – 20 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for Next Year and 15 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Get Ready for Next Year
• Questions to Prompt Extreme Creativity – 9 Extreme Creativity Questions from Peter’s Laws
• Questions to Prompt Innovation and Disruption – 11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation in Markets

Anticipating Future Issues

• Anticipating the Future in Your Industry – A Strategy for Predicting the Future More Accurately
• Imagining Unexpected Events  - Strategic Thinking Exercise – Black Swan Events in Your Plan

Finding Ideas with Intriguing Connections

• Looking for Analogous Situations – New, Innovative Ideas – Strategy Planning with What’s It Like
• Reaching for Tough to Find Comparisons – Creative Thinking Skills – Comparing Apples and Oranges 7 Ways
• How Would Someone Else Do It? –  Need New Creative Ideas? Change Your Character

Generating Many Ideas Quickly

• Transforming the Current Situation for Many Ideas – 1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day

Innovating Amid Constraints

• Limiting the Possibility of Performance Issues – Constraining the Possibility of Poor Results
• Limiting Your Resources and Still Succeeding – The Simplicity of Next to Nothing
• Developing New Ideas when Constrained by Too Many Similar Alternatives – 24 Ideas for Dilbert (and You) When a Great New Idea Is Lacking
• Limiting the Need for Too Much Performance – Convergent Thinking Week – A BDTP Perspective

New Thinking with Old Ideas

• Helping Your Organization Be More Innovative – New Business Ideas and a Creative Block in Your Organization
• Exploiting Ideas Leftover Ideas – Creating from Creative Residue – Brainstorming for Later Use
• Making Old Ideas Extraordinary – A Friday Shrimp Special
• Reusing and Recycling Ideas –  New Year’s Resolutions – Be More Derivative, Creative, Fun and  Strategy in Action – Suzy and Jack Welch & Fast Company Links
• Changing Familiar Ideas in New Ways – Diet Coke Can Redesign – Branding and Creativity Lessons
• Being Better at Borrowing Ideas – Reinterpreting Creative Inspiration – 7 Lessons to Borrow Creative Ideas

Addressing Unknowns

• Dealing with Knowledge Gaps – Strategic Thinking Tip – Keep Going!
• When Rapid Timelines Create More Unknowns – Twenty-One Project Management Implications of Wanting Things FAST
• Forcing Faster Decisions when Information Is Missing – Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions  

Efficiency and Results

• Targeting Your Best Successes – Ted Williams and Focusing on Your “Happy Zone”
• Prioritizing by Value with Stoplight – Reinvent Yourself Week – Look and Ask Around
• Where Brainstorming Provides Value – Innovation and the Value of Brainstorming
• Knowing When to Stop Brainstorming – Brainstorming Ideas – 10 Signs You’re Done Brainstorming

Envisioning Possibilities

• Simple Ideas for Visual Thinking – Visual Thinking Skills – Getting Them in Shape with Letters and Shapes
• Using Graphs More Effectively – Graphs for Visual Thinking – Problem Solving with 2 Lines
• Using a Matrix More Effectively – Visual Thinking Tools – A Matrix Is a Hard Working Tool
• Visual Thinking Overview Presentation – by Liz Burrow, Burlix Studio http://ow.ly/i9vVj (Slideshare)
• The Marketer’s Visual Tool Kit by Terry Richey  (Affiliate Link)
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam  (Affiliate Link)

Telling a Strategic Story

• The One-Page Recommendation Format – Improve the Success of Your Letters to Santa – Guaranteed!
• Making Strategic Messages: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story-filled – Made to Stick – Chip and Dan Heath (Affiliate Link)

Working Across and Up an Organization

• How an Idea Evangelist Works – Innovation Strategy with a New Audience  
• Things to Listen for in a Potentially Adversarial Conversation – Find Agreement in an Adversarial Conversation – 10 Things to Listen For
• 5-Level Decision Making –Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence
• Sharing Interim Thinking – Dirty Ideas? Let Others Clean Up Your Creative Thinking
• Seek Out Emerging Experts – You Find Experts Everywhere You Look
• Making New Team Members Successful – New Employee Success – 5 Ways to Create Success for New Ideas
• The “Dinner Table” Analogy for Team Interaction – Project Management – Dinner Table Analogy for Project Team Members

Managing Challenging People

• Diagnosing the Difficult Personalities around You – The Periodic Table of Corporate Behavior
• Five Ways to Keep the Boss from Dominating Strategy Planning – The Process of Strategy Planning: 5 Ways to Keep the Boss from Dominating
• When Someone Doesn’t Want Your Help – Assistance Unwanted – 5 Management Style Signs Helping Is Futile
• Taking Advantage of Critical Thinkers – Creative Thinking Skills – 5 People Vital to Critical Thinking, Literally
• Sharing the Credit for New Ideas and Success – Creative Quickie – Share the Credit!

Would Your Organization Benefit from Stronger Strategic Thinking?

If your organization would benefit from stronger strategic thinking, we’d love to share our expertise and tools through workshop training. Delivered in-person or online, all at once or spread over multiple sessions, The Brainzooming Group approach can help your people improve their skills in identifying new, strategic opportunities and turning them into market realities. Call (816-509-5320)or email us (info@brainzooming.com) to get started! - 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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Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season. Lent involves a time to increase time devoted to prayer and reflection while avoiding the typical distractions of daily life. In what has become an annual Ash Wednesday tradition, I re-share the creativity prayer below written for a creative inspiration presentation several years ago.

Anytime you are mired in the creative doldrums, find time to seek out perhaps a new source of creative inspiration and a more peaceful creativity than you’ve been experiencing.

My hope is that this prayer can be a source of creative inspiration to  will help you discover a peaceful creativity for yourself and all those you encounter!

Lord,

Thank you for creation itself and the incredible gifts and talents you so generously entrust to me. May I appreciate and develop these talents, always recognizing that they come from you and remain yours.

Guide me in using them for the benefit of everyone that I touch, so that they may be more aware of your creative presence and develop the creativity entrusted to them for the good of others.

Help me also to use your talents to bring a creative spark and new possibilities to your world, living out my call to be an integral part of your creative force. Amen.

Copyright 2008, Mike Brown

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Photo by: zettberlin | Source: photocase.com

If you are suffering a creative block (or even creative apathy), try a different type of idea to combat it: Figure out another task, topic, or need that creates such a large sense of avoidance for you that it dwarfs your creative block. Then watch your creativity flow!

Yes, one answer to conquering your creative block is to find an even bigger block related to something you REALLY can’t or don’t want to tackle right now even more!

For me, if I’m struggling with writing a blog post, any type of involved administrative task can prompt a new rush of creativity. For example, now that it’s time to start focusing on preparing documentation for income taxes, I expect to have a rush of blogging ideas and legitimate interest in writing and finishing them.

If you can identify your bigger creative avoidance area, don’t be surprised to find you suddenly have renewed creative inspiration for what was previously your biggest creative block.

How’s that for a creative quickie? – Mike Brown

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If you are making New Year’s resolutions, additional inspiration can always be a help to achieve what you resolve to accomplish. While the Brainzooming blog does not address all the New Year’s resolutions you might make, we featured a number of blog posts during 2012 to help provide inspiration for many

If you’ve signed up to improve productivity, career prospects, or stress levels with your New Year’s resolutions, these twenty-two articles should help you achieve what you resolve. of the most common ones.

Get Organized and Improve Productivity

• Minimizing Strategic Distractions – Interesting Opportunities – 6 Ways to Identify Strategic Distractions
• Stopping Yourself from Getting in Your Own Way – Distracting Yourself – 19 Ways to Undermine Your Success
• Delegating More of the Right Decisions to Others – Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence
• Getting Past Your Tendency to Not Start on Projects – Implementation Problems? 7 Signs You’re Understarting, Not Overthinking
• Discovering New Ways to Be Inspired by Your Every Day Activities- Creative Ideas – Creative Inspiration from Your Daily Life
• Getting Around Client-Specific Creative Blocks – Combat Client Block – 8 Ways to Beat Client-Specific Creative Block
• Effectively Repurposing Your Social Media Content to Save Time – Social Media Content – 7 Ways to Repurpose What You’ve Written

Improve our Career

• Fine Tuning Your Personal Career Success Basics – 7 Personal Success Strategies
• Addressing Ethical Temptations – C-Level Executives and Ethical Missteps – W W WYTYATHTYCEO D?
• Being a Better Listener – Dr. Ray Guarendi on Following a Conversation
• Improving Your Visual Thinking Skills – Visual Thinking Skills – Getting Them in Shape with Letters and Shapes
• Deciding When to Over Deliver or Not – Over Deliver or Not? 21 Ideas about Our Tendency to Give Too Much
• Sharing More of Your Strategic Thinking (and Less of the Thinking of Others) – Strategic Thinking – Do Your Own and Let Us Know What You Think
• Getting Attention for Yourself When You’re the Steady Performer at Work – Consistency – 6 Keys to Positive Attention for Personal Brand Consistency
• Improve Your Career Options When You Don’t Love What You Used to Love – Career Challenges – 6 Ideas when Losing the Love for What You Do
• Ideas for Making a Big Career Change – Career Change – 4 Career Tips for a Mid-Career Professional

Managing Stress Levels

• Better Understanding Where You Can Make the Biggest Contribution in Life- Personal Branding and Career Success with a Core Purpose Statement
• Do a Better Job of Setting Your Priorities for What Matters – 3 Questions – Are You Giving Your Most Precious Gift Where It’s Deserved?
• Learn Better from Your Past Successes and Mistakes – 13 Exit Interview Questions to Prepare for 2013
• Having More Fun at Work – 10 Corporate Fun Ideas for a Long Work Week
• How to Reduce Stress in Your Relationships – One Secret to Long-term Relationships – Don’t Keep Score
• Finding Agreement When Someone Disagrees with You – Find Agreement in an Adversarial Conversation – 10 Things to Listen For

Best wishes in 2013 with your New Year’s resolutions!  - Mike Brown

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