The Brainzooming Group

Monday’s post on getting the most from your creativity daily mentioned the idea of creative fakes and compiling your own creative fake book.

When I wrote this, I was thinking about how musicians use “fake” songbooks that include only the melody, lyrics, and chords for a song. From these basics, a musician can create an impromptu live performance of a song. And since the information is skeletal, it becomes much easier and portable to have access to many, many songs for performance.

Faking Creative Thinking Skills in a Live Setting

This mention of a creative fake book got me thinking afterward about what skeletal items I’d put into one for Brainzooming. Thinking about how The Brainzooming Group performs “live” creative thinking sessions that often have an impromptu feel, there are four areas I’d include in our creative fake book.

These four types of creative thinking exercises would provide the basics for faking the structures to enhance an individual or group’s creative thinking skills.

1. Creative Thinking Questions

These are the initial creative thinking questions you can ask to get people to start exploring new ideas. By starting with questions, you both prompt people to start working together to answer them, you also begin to develop a sense of where the initial creative thinking is being directed. These questions oriented toward disruptive innovation would make it into the creative fake book.

2. Creativity Enhancers

These probes and prompts provide a way to redirect an individual or group’s creative thinking into new or more exaggerated paths than it pursues originally. A creative thinking exercise we call “Shrimp” is a fantastic one in a group setting to foster both creativity and fun.

3. Comparisons

Comparisons and analogies provide powerful ways to shift an individual or group’s creative thinking perspective to address an opportunity or challenge from a different, more creatively rich direction. One of our staple creative thinking exercises for comparisons is “What’s It Like?”

4. Narrowing Exercises

These convergent thinking approaches are vital in narrowing the full range of intriguing ideas you generate. Through narrowing exercises, hundreds of ideas are winnowed into the strongest ideas and concepts an organization can implement. In a group setting, you often have to push to prioritize uncomfortable ideas to make sure the group is truly stretching into new territory when it comes to implementation.

What would go into your creative fake book?

Those four types of items would make it into the Brainzooming Creative Fake Book. Would they work in yours or are there other items you’d want to have handy to make sure you can get through a live creative performance when the situation demands it? - Mike Brown

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

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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

This World Creativity and Innovation Week, I’ve been thinking about the people I most cherish for their creative help, advice, and prodding over the years. They are a diverse and eclectic group!

21 Talents and Creative Thinking Skills Among My Creative Friends

Here are twenty-one talents and creative thinking skills I cherish among creative friends and team members:

1. A sense of humor
2. A strong listener
3. Active on social media so it’s easier to reach them
4. Open to having impromptu time to talk
5. Will challenge my thinking or perspectives in a constructive way
6. Have different interests in life than I do
7. Think in intriguing ways
8. They are confident in their opinions
9. Know lots of things I don’t have a clue about
10. Express themselves well in varied ways
11. Honesty
12. React to ideas in predictable ways
13. Have a positive attitude
14. Are encouraging to others
15. Can work together well with each other to create and strengthen ideas
16. Have an appreciation for spirituality
17. Both encourage and are willing to try new things
18. We have complementary strengths and weaknesses
19. They share and teach what they know
20. They push me to be better than I am now
21. They know intriguing people

What talents and creative thinking skills do you cherish in your creative friends?

Do they know how much you cherish them? If not, maybe it’s time to thank them during World Innovation and Creativity Week!  – 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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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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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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you’re blogging on a regular basis, it’s likely you have accumulated plenty of blog scraps along the way.

Blog scraps are the stray ideas, sentences, paragraphs, or maybe nearly complete blog drafts that have not turned into published blog posts. It could be they aren’t timely anymore, you’ve struggled to fashion them into full blogs, or you are suffering from creative apathy relative to the original topic. I can’t even begin to tell you how many online pages and notebooks I have filled with partially written copy that is only seen when I revisit them looking for ideas on what to blog about when time is tight and there’s a daily blogging deadline looming.

What to Blog About – 10 Things to Do with Your Blog Scraps

While these scraps may have seemed like good ideas for what to blog about at some point, that has not turned out to be the case. No matter the reasons  your blog scraps haven’t been published though, the question is can you find SOMETHING to do with them?

Here are ten things to do with your blog scraps:

1. Expand a blog scrap into a full blog post in a different direction than you originally intended to write it.
2. Simplify the blog scrap to one central idea, making it more viable as a blog post.
3. Compile a bunch of related scraps into a themed blog post.
4. Compile a bunch of unrelated scraps into a potpourri blog post.
5. Add your scrap to a related blog post you’ve already written to freshen it up.
6. Find someone else’s blog where your blog scrap works as a comment.
7. Make your blog scrap into a short Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn group post.
8. Keep the scraps for use as fresh content in a white paper, eBook, or book.
9. Take another shot at writing the original blog post for which the scrap was intended.
10. Throw the blog scrap away (or delete it online) to free yourself of feeling guilty about trying to do something with it.

What do you do with your blog scraps?

When an idea you have for what to blog about doesn’t turn into a fully fledged blog post initially, what do you do with it? Are there other ways you’ve found to take advantage of your preliminary work to get value from your initial writing, video, or audio efforts? Please share what works for you! - Mike Brown

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If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have seen a status update the other evening about launching an intense period of learning for Brainzooming as we undergo a process change the next few weeks. We’ve been in the midst of introducing a new online collaboration tool over the past several months. In the next few weeks, we’re incorporating this online collaboration tool into multiple strategic thinking sessions with varied objectives, formats, and group sizes.

In the midst of designing and facilitating these new types of strategic thinking sessions, there have already been ample opportunities to have session participants play new roles within the Brainzooming methodology. Whenever that type of process change happens, we benefit and learn many lessons as new individuals carry out what we’ve designed.

I imagine it must be similar to a playwright seeing his or her written work interpreted and brought to life by actors. There are bound to be nuances and lessons in these performances  the playwright didn’t envision.

12 Process Change Lessons

Thinking back over the first half of this week’s strategic thinking sessions, here are twelve lessons from loosening or completely turning over the reins to others in bringing the Brainzooming process to life.

So far, I have . . .

1. Become reacquainted with little things we do without thinking that make a significant difference in helping people perform more productively.
2. Realized anew how we create a visual and photogenic depiction of an organization’s strategy.
3. Seen how others approach resolving open questions and issues in alternative ways that make sense to them.
4. Taken process suggestions from others causing me to use skills I don’t use that often now because they aren’t as fun.
5. Been forced to stick with a strategic thinking exercise I didn’t think was working (but ultimately worked very well) because a client wouldn’t let me skip to another one.
6. Gotten to see what others expect they will need or will have happen during a successful strategic thinking session.
7. Needed to marry our new technology with other client technology to integrate remote participants in a strategic thinking session.
8. Used our new online collaboration tool in ways I hadn’t anticipated in order to be more personally productive.
9. Cut down the development time for what we do by weeks because of a client’s limited availability.
10. Tried to figure out fewer things ahead of time to give our strategic thinking process more capacity to adapt to a client’s current needs.
11. Screwed something up without freaking out which allowed someone else to help troubleshoot the problem and fix it with little notice.
12. Accepted “better done than perfect” more readily than I prefer.

These dozen benefits didn’t take much time to list. But being able to identify them depended on being willing to exercise less control, embracing experimentation, and being open to mistakes.

Step Back, Experiment, and Learn with Your Own Process Change

When was the last time you stepped back from a process you know inside and out to experiment, learn, and see how it plays out under the influence of others?

My advice is, if you haven’t pushed for this type of process change recently, figure out a way to make it happen right away and starting learning new lessons! – Mike Brown

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

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The inaugural TEDxWyandotte is in the books, and my talk leading off the second half of the evening covered “Diverse Ideas in a Porous Community.” Thanks to all my Kansas City-based friends who came out to see the event, which concluded with an incredible spoken word performance by Sheri Hall. Quite honestly, after seeing Sheri in rehearsal, all the speakers suggested putting her last since none of us wanted to follow her!

Six Ideas for a First Time TED Talks Style Presentation

At some point, the TEDxWyandotte videos should be available online. We’ll highlight them here when they are posted. While waiting for the videos to go online, here are six suggestions for preparing a TEDx Talk based on my initial experiences for TEDxWyandotte.

1. Don’t overdose on videos of TED Talks

Some people watch TED Talks frequently (even daily) for inspiration. I don’t, for a variety of reasons, chief of which is they often frustrate me more than they inspire me. While my initial inclination was to play catch up and watch a bunch of TED Talks, the only complete talked I watched was Sir Ken Robinson’s humongously viewed talk on creativity and education. My main objective was to look for structure and flow ideas since his video has obviously resonated with so many people. I suggest perusing the list of most viewed TED Talks, finding one that best matches your style or topic, and concentrate on it for presentation style and delivery ideas to consider.

2. Come up with a snappy title for your TEDx Talk

This is an area where I fell flat. Based on the timing for the event’s kick-off meeting and the initial press release about the event, I had to come up with a topic and title over a weekend. Mission accomplished, but it would have been far better to have a snappy title such as one from a TED Talk Barrett Sydnor pointed me toward: “When Ideas Have Sex.” That’s a TED Talk title for you!

3. Do something different to make it a YOU Talk

TED Talks have evolved into a format that takes the audience almost completely out of the talk. It has become overly focused on the speaker, in my opinion. That’s counter to my presentation style, and I didn’t want to deliver something that was forced and unnatural. I obviously followed the time limits and tried to emphasize stories as the format suggests. Instead of being one-way delivery, however, I structured the TEDxWyandotte talk similar to the “live blog” presentations I’ve started doing. In a live blog presentation, the audience is presented a list of topics and can choose how they’d like to see the talk progress. It’s the closest I’ve discovered to giving the audience hyperlinks (akin to a blog) to go deeper or skip content as they choose.

4. Dig for stories and ideas you haven’t shared before

Telling new stories was the best suggestion I read while developing the presentation. I incorporated a story from childhood no one outside my family has ever heard and included a variety of stories and examples from blog posts outside my typical presentation repertoire. Still other stories were reworked to fit the overall event theme (“Core Impact”) more directly. The result was that even the few pieces of familiar content in the talk received a very different treatment for TEDxWyandotte.

5. Decide whether you are targeting the live audience or the video audience for your TEDx Talk

Knowing the maximum live audience in Kansas City, KS (KCK) would be 400 people made creative decisions trickier. The decision point became whether to target the live audience or the (larger – I hope) video audience who would later see the TEDxWyandotte talk. While the in-person audience prompted the “live blog” approach (especially since letting the “community” drive the content was consistent with the topic/theme) and a few Kansas City, KS references, other creative decisions were made with the video audience in mind. There were fewer KCK mentions and visuals than originally planned and I minimized the references to previous speakers more than I’d ever do (since the video audience would have no context for those remarks). These decisions were not something I anticipated beforehand.

6. Be a good boy or girl on time and the level of commercialism

Among the apparently many requirements and recommendations that go along with TEDx, the most obvious one is completing your talk within the time limit – eighteen minutes for the longest talks. Another is to not make it a commercial talk. If you’re going to sign up for a TED Talk then you need to follow the rules on these. Plan and develop your presentation so you’re removing enough content that time won’t even remotely be an issue for you or the organizers to fret.

If you have the opportunity to do a TEDx talk, do it!

Even with trying to preserve the TEDxWyandotte talk as a MIKE talk in style and approach, developing this presentation was not how I would typically approach any other presentation. The result was that it felt “off” to me right up until the event day. Even still, if you have the opportunity to present at a TEDx event, don’t hesitate to say, “Yes.” The experience was a great way to stretch myself and feel a good type of creative tension! – 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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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