The Brainzooming Group

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

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 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.

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading

Most of the time the Brainzooming blog shares strategy, innovation, and creativity ideas while consciously trying not to tout what we do at The Brainzooming Group. Our hope is by sharing intriguing and insightful content on strategy, innovation, and creativity, you will want to explore more deeply how The Brainzooming Group can improve your organization’s performance. Suffice it to say, we do not toot our own horn too much. (Did you like the way I got both “tout” and “toot” into the same paragraph? That will make the SEO grading apps crazy.)

Why Change Is Hard and 3 Ideas for Making Change Easy

Recently I was reading (okay, listening) to, Switch (affiliate link), the book on change by Chip and Dan Heath. I was struck by how The Brainzooming Group successfully addresses what Chip and Dan Heath identify as three of the main points from Switch addressing why change is hard:

Why Change Is Hard #1: Organizations resist planning for change because it is too complex or too hard

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: At The Brainzooming Group, we refer to this challenge of planning for change as the “can’t get over the hump” problem. We see it repeatedly. Smart organizations with solid people get only so far with developing implementing strategy, but cannot get any further.  Sometimes the answer is strategic thinking tools; sometimes it is resources; sometimes it is strategic focus.

In the Brainzooming process, we analyze what the sticking point is and apply the correct “lubricant” to move the process forward. When you have built up the arsenal of strategic thinking tools and successful creativity approaches we have over the years, finding the answer to move a strategy toward implementation is quick.

Why Change Is Hard #2: People have a fear of failure, so they won’t even try to think about what should be changed, much less make the effort to change it

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: We account for the probability of failure as we design our strategy thinking process. As a result, we inoculate you against being afraid of change. The Brainzooming Group helps you generate a significant number of ideas and concepts as we temper the natural inclination to censor or needlessly debate whether ideas or concepts are good during the early stages of strategic thinking.

We don’t leave you with a pile of uncategorized and unusable ideas, though. We have tested strategic thinking tools to help organize, categorize, and evaluate the new you generate. Knowing the chaff is going to be thrown away helps people not be afraid to generate the kernels of wheat (or nuggets of gold) that lead to successful change.

Why Change Is Hard #3: There is too little attention paid to building upon success and too much attention placed on solving problems

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: The Brainzooming process helps you solve problems. Just as important though, we also help organizations better recognize what they are doing right and provide them the structure and options for building upon that success.

Would You Like to Make Change Easy? At Least Easier than It Has Been?

Thank for indulging this exploration on how the Brainzooming process accomplishes relative to making change easy. We’d love to talk with you about the opportunities and issues in your organization where you are finding change is hard. We’ll return tomorrow to our usual focus on less self-referential issues of strategy, innovation and creativity. Today though, I wanted to point out specific ways we help smart organization make successful change easy. – Barrett Sydnor

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.

    (Affiliate Link)

Barrett Sydnor

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading

Following up our post on tools and exercises for enhancing strategic thinking skills, I started jotting down a list of clues indicating  you’re not dealing with a strategic thinker.

The reason?

These clues should suggest someone who would most benefit from taking time (if you could get them to do it) and working on the strategic thinking skills to improve business performance.

29 Clues You’re Not Dealing with a Strategic Thinker

As typical, I didn’t begin with a target number of clues for the list. Here are the twenty-nine clues that came to mind.

Photo by: ad Rian | Source: photocase.com

It’s a clue you’re not dealing with a strategic thinker when an individual:

1. Wants to limit strategic conversations to senior management
2. Shuns thinking and perspectives from others
3. Doesn’t respect other business functions in the organization
4. Has a reputation for poor strategic relationships in the organization
5. Feels strategy is complex (or has to be complex to be good)
6. Disconnects strategy from day-to-day organizational activities
7. Doesn’t understand his/her own personal limitations and thus doesn’t compensate for the limitations with a strong, complementary team
8. Becomes easily focused on a personal view of ” reality” and can’t entertain alternative possibilities
9. Is uncomfortable considering multiple ideas and possibilities for addressing a situation
10. Won’t break or even bend an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make sense
11. Is unwilling to question the status quo
12. Is put off by questions from people considered subordinates
13. Is quick to cut off exploration of multiple alternatives in the interest of not over thinking things
14. Struggles to shift between taking time to explore new ideas and then moving to prioritize ideas and make decisions
15. Automatically equates “strategic” with long- term and “tactical” with short-term
16. Struggles with the idea of serving those seen as subordinates
17. Is reluctant to do homework to help prepare others to make solid decisions and implement them successfully
18. Struggles to make challenging decisions
19. Spends too much time on easy, solvable issues that don’t produce value for the organization or its customers
20. Spends more time talking than asking questions to better understand situations
21. Shuts down when faced with dramatic changes to a personal view of reality and/or what’s necessary to sustain that reality
22. Doesn’t function well when there are significant unknowns in a situation
23. Automatically views doing something new / different as better than doing the smartest thing
24. Automatically views doing the same thing as better than doing something different because of lesser perceived risk
25. Loses track of agreed to priorities – for whatever reason
26. Spends too time on things that don’t matter for the organization
27. Struggles to generalize situations so they are more understandable to non- experts
28. Is quicker to argue than finding ways to agree
29. Tends to dominate conversations

Does this list describe anyone familiar to you?

Do you see co-workers’ behaviors in this list? If so, how many of the strategic thinking skills behind this list do the lack? No one is going to have all the strategic thinking skills one could have, but I’m not sure yet how many “Yes” answers signal you will have challenges getting an individual involved in strategic thinking. Based on running some people I’ve worked with previously through the questions, I’m guess a score of 10 or more means someone is a weak, or at least problematic, strategic thinker.

What strategic thinking skill gaps would you add, subtract, or modify on this list?

It would be great to have you shape this list of clues you’re not dealing with someone that has strong strategic thinking skills. You can share your ideas in the comments or check out tomorrow’s post to learn about a more dynamic way to create and have a group participate in collaborating and shaping lists. It’s an idea I’ll be investigating, without a doubt!  - Mike Brown

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

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading

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

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

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading

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.

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading

Woody Bendle is back with one of his favorite strategies for getting past creative blocks, using a creative thinking exercise we explored early in the days of the Brainzooming blog under the name “Change Your Character.” I really enjoy Woody’s very fun take, turning the brainstorming questions from “Change Your Character” into a creative thinking exercise that puts the FUN into a creative funk!

Overcoming the Funky Creative Funk with Scooby Doo and Friends by Woody Bendle

We’ve all heard of “creative blocks” and most of us have probably experienced one at some point in our lives.  If you have experienced a creative block, you know they can be frustrating and sometimes even worse.  So, where do they come from, and what are some strategies for getting past creative blocks?

A creative block is generally regarded as a common and temporary psychological condition.  I personally call it “creative funk.”  And if your livelihood depends upon creativity and producing creative ideas or solutions, a creative funk can feel devastating. Time in a creative funk feels like an e  t  e  r  n  i  t  y and is exceptionally nerve racking, especially if there is the looming pressure of a deadline.

For some, a creative funk can even begin to feed on itself and snowball, creating anxiety and sometimes even leading to a person seriously doubting one’s ability to be creative at all.

That’s a major creative funk!

Creative Funk and a Bad Brainstorming Session

Creative funks can be caused by a number of things ranging from fatigue, to stress, to criticism (or fear of criticism), to obsessing over self-imposed performance expectations (perfection).

And, if you’ve ever participated in a poorly run brainstorming session with your organization, you’ve probably experienced all of theses things, and possibly even more.  There aren’t too many things worse than a bad brainstorming session.

Let’s see if any of this sounds familiar. You’re cooped up for hours with a bunch of corporate stiffs in a small, sterile conference room with buzzing fluorescent lights; getting hopped up on M&Ms, Twizzlers and Coca-Cola, and you’re being told to come up with a bunch of good, game-changing ideas because you’re organization’s future (and your job) depends on it.  Yep, that’s a recipe for a real funky creative funk. YIKES!

On its own, the pressure of having to be imaginative or creative under a time crunch can be stressful.  But, add the pressure of having to be brilliantly creative in front of your peers (or perhaps, even your bosses) – it can almost be paralyzing.  I mean let’s admit it, we’re human right!  And even though you’re told that the two most important rules for brainstorming are: 1) there are no bad ideas, and 2) do not criticize the idea, you naturally might be worried about making a bad impression and being judged.

So, what do we do?  Scooby Doo!

Scooby Doo and Friends to the Brainstorming Rescue

One technique I’ve found particularly valuable in breaking through a funky creative funk is something I call, “What Would Scooby Do?”

I use Scooby Doo as my illustrative cartoon idea sleuth, but I recommend inserting as many different characters (cartoon, TV, or movie) as you like. The idea here is to put yourself into your character’s mindset and approach solving your problem as they might.  This exercise can be particularly fun in a group!  When everyone is assigned a very different character, and is asked to think about as many different ideas that character might bring to the table, some pretty interesting things can happen.  But the most important thing that happens is that the creative funk gets broken and the creative ideas get flowing!

This creative thinking exercise can help you, and your team break through your funky creative funk for the following reasons:

1. You focus on the character and not yourself – which can instantaneously de-funk your creative funk
2. A character has permission to provide “whacky”, off the wall ideas – it’s their idea, not yours
3. People often see characters quite differently and can offer additional very interesting opinions about how any given character might approach solving the problem, last and perhaps most importantly
4. It’s a ton of fun and you feel like a kid again! And who doesn’t want to have a little more fun every now and then?

Scooby Doo in Brainstorming Action

So, let’s say you’re team has been charged with coming up with a revolutionary new way to get remove dust from delicate, high-tech surfaces.  There are a number of products out there already that do this pretty well, but how many of those solutions were created by, Rambo, or Wile E Coyote, or MacGyver, or Harry Potter, or Tigger, or Po (Kung-Fu-Panda), or Ferris Bueller, or Kenny (from South Park), or Granny (from the Beverly Hillbillies)?  You’re getting the idea by now I bet.

Each one of these characters would likely approach the problem quite differently and have VERY VERY different ideas about how to solve it.

• Rambo might just decide to blow the surface up – screw the dust and the stupid surface it’s on!
• MacGyver might use duct tape – because what can’t he do with duct tape?
• Tigger might hop up and down to vibrate the dust off.

We could go on like this for hours!  And that’s actually the point in the first place. You’re looking to break down your creative funk, and once you get the ball rolling with this technique, it’s actually hard to stop those creative juices from flowing!

I’ll admit that “What Would Scooby Do” might not be the solution for every creative funk, but what have you got to lose?

Have your own techniques for breaking down creative blocks?  I’d love to hear about them! - Woody Bendle

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.

Guest Author

The Brainzooming blog has a wonderful group of guest authors who regularly contribute their perspectives on strategy, creativity, and innovation. You can view guest author posts by clicking on the link below.

More Posts

Continue Reading

Do expectations of making something to your own standards of perfection ever create a creative block that stops you from getting started?

That was the case a dear friend described as she struggled getting started creating a very special book of reflections about her husband. She could see the book perfectly in her mind. But her apprehensions about the potential disconnect between the perfect book of reflections she saw in her mind and her expectations of how the final product would fall short created a huge creative block to getting started.

The thing is the book of reflections will be a truly incredible gift – no matter what it ultimately looks like.

Creative Block vs. Getting Started Block

When you have expectations of perfectionism on a high stakes creative effort, it’s possible for an apparently huge creative block to form. My contention though is it is less about a creative block than a getting started block.

Thinking about the situation that evening, I created this list of eight questions that might be helpful for her or you when facing a similar situation and expectations of perfection prevent getting started.

Honestly answer these eight questions about your creative situation:

1. How many people (other than you) will notice if it’s not perfect?  ___
2. How many people (other than you) will care if it’s not perfect?  ___
3. How many people will change their opinion of you if it’s not perfect?  ___
4. How many truly great future opportunities will you lose if it’s not perfect?  ___
5. How many significant problems will you create for yourself or others if it’s not perfect?  ___
6. Can you find people who will happily help you to do the best you can?  Yes | No
7. Are you able to practice ahead of time to help you do better?  Yes | No
8. Will something prevent you from starting over or adjusting if it’s not as good as you’d like?  Yes | No

Add the numerical answers to the first five questions with the number of “No” answers to the last three questions.

Getting Around Your Getting Started Block

In some cases, the number may be large – if you’re Beyoncé and supposed to sing the National Anthem live at the presidential inauguration. In most cases, however, the total number is probably very small. In my friend’s case, I’d contend the number was “zero” for all eight questions combined.

If you find the number seems too large, your answers can show where to adjust your creative situation to minimize the getting started block.

With my friend, I was helping her create cartoons for the book (question 6), she developed her own handwriting font to allow her to format and adjust the book’s written sections on the computer (question 7), and she found a book style that allowed pages to be removed and added (question 8).

In a follow-up phone call, she was still hesitating. I asked her how many pages were in the book compared to how many pages she needed (a version of question 5). Her answers revealed she had 50% more pages than she needed for her completed book. Think about that – even with all the concerns, she could still have a 50% “failure” rate and be okay!

It’s far easier to see how someone else should just be getting started than it is when we’re the one facing an apparent creative block. Ideally, these questions (which I readily admit AREN’T perfect) can help you in getting started next time you’re the only one stopping you from getting started with your first creative step.  - 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.

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading