The Brainzooming Group

The June 2013 issue of Psychology Today includes an article on “The Enemies of Invention.”

It is a compilation article featuring five authors’ perspectives on factors standing in the way of creativity and innovation.

The article also includes creative ideas from each author on how to get around these impediments to creativity.

Creative Ideas for Defeating “Enemies of Invention”

Here are snapshots of each of the five authors’ perspectives, along with our Brainzooming point of view on these creative ideas:

1. The Danger of Starting in the Same Old Place by Art Markum

“Don’t think differently. Think about different things.” 

The point is when we start from the same frame of reference as the creative challenge we face, we come up with run-of-the-mill ideas. Instead, we have to begin by thinking about other things from different perspectives. Brainzooming Article: What’s It Like?

2. Fear of Failure Narrows Vision by Peter Gray

We “work best when we are playing, not when we are striving for praise as a reward.” 

To be creative, don’t be so serious so much! Have some fun and play! Brainzooming Article: Kids and Creativity

3. Concentration Is Creativity’s Killer by Sian Beilock

 ”Turning your attention to something that requires just a little bit of concentration is a better way to jump-start the creative process.” 

Don’t concentrate so much on the task at hand. To instigate your creative possibilities, free up space in your mind to let your creativity work. Brainzooming Article: Finding a Huge Task to Avoid

4. The Downside of Avoiding Imitation by Christopher J. Sprigman and Kal Raustiala

“In practice, creativity is a cumulative process, one that often involves tweaking, adapting, and melding existing creations.” 

As we say so often, borrow existing ideas and twist them into new creative ideas all your own. Brainzooming Article: Lessons in Borrowing Creative Ideas

5. Battling Boredom Thwarts Serendipity by Peter Bregman

“Wasted moments are ones in which we often unconsciously connect the dots.” 

Resist the temptation to fill your head and attention with stuff that gets in the way of creativity. You’ll be much better off if you pursue empty-headed creativity! Brainzooming Article: Perhaps not surprisingly, we don’t have an article on doing nothing as a way to spur creativity. We’ll have to get on that right away!  - Mike Brown

If these creative ideas for defeating enemies of invention intrigue you, check out the links below for each of these authors’ books (affiliate links):

                                                                                  (Affiliate Links to Books)

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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I was writing a story for The Social Media Monthly magazine recently on the Mall of America and its social media strategy. In the course of interviewing Mall of America Senior Public Relations and Social Media Manager, Bridget Jewell, she discussed how the Mall introduced each of its social media presences based on a specific opportunity or seasonal campaign. Instead of immediately hopping on every new social network right away, MOA creates a presence when there’s a clear business reason to do so.

Not surprisingly then, as Bridget reviewed the content strategies and specific content media shared by channel, each had a different purpose. While its multiple social media presences are brand consistent and integrated, the Mall of America Twitter and Facebook sites are used differently (i.e., not simply sharing the same links), and Instagram isn’t simply for sharing photos from MOA YouTube videos.

Can you answer these 5 social media strategy questions as well as Mall of America can?

Taking a cue from the smart social media strategy at MOA, here are five questions any organization should ask about its own social media content strategy:

1. In what ways is our content well-suited to the specific social media network and our current and prospective users on each of them?
2. How is our content across the channels integrated and collectively representative of our brand?
3. How does our social media content vary across our different platforms?
4. What is included in our social media content to move the audience toward progressively beneficial behaviors for our organization?
5. What do we incorporate into our social media content that makes it worth remembering, sharing with others, and returning to in the future?

All five are very rich strategic questions. That means you need to be able to provide strategically rich answers.

Need some ideas for your social media strategy?

If you want to go to school on an organization doing it right to get a sense of how these questions should be answered, check out the varied social media presences for MOA. You’ll learn a lot – trust me. - 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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Talking with a senior executive about creative ideas and strategic planning for his organization, he mentioned being a published business cartoonist. He showed me his very funny cartoons that appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal, among other noteworthy business publications.

I asked him how someone not cartooning full-time managed to publish cartoons in the Wall Street Journal. He directed me toward a publication with specific details for the types of content publications seek for their audiences and how to submit ideas. Ultimately, he said it’s a numbers game where you have to actively and regularly submit enough creative ideas to get some cartoons published.

Getting Your Creative Ideas Out There

On the surface, what he shared is common sense. In fact, playing the creative ideas numbers game and the importance of content resonating with the intended audience are topics we’ve covered here.

The big surprise for me though was you don’t have to be a full-time cartoonist to submit cartoons to publications.

Why my surprise?

As a kid, I submitted a variety of stamptoons (drawn cartoons which incorporate a postage stamp in the design) to Boys’ Life magazine. All my stamptoons were summarily rejected and returned with a letter saying they weren’t up to the magazine’s standards.

While that was a one-time rejection for a twelve year old, I took it as a general pronouncement my cartoons weren’t good and there was no need to submit them anywhere ever again unless I happened to develop into being a professional cartoonist.

Even though I kept drawing cartoons and even created a business humor blog largely featuring cartoons, it had NEVER occurred to me to submit cartoons to a publication.

Overcoming Rejection of Your Creative Ideas

You see, so much material in the Brainzooming blog is offered for your benefit. The impetus for much (most?) of it, however, is the need to regularly work through MY OWN blocks, fears, and apprehensions with creative ideas.

There is no reason in the world why I couldn’t take a shot at getting cartoons published, but it had never occurred to me as a possibility before last week. Because of an anonymous person at a kids’ magazine years ago who didn’t like my creative ideas, I have only shared my cartoons on my own sites online because I allowed my creative horizons to be squelched.

I’m not sure what to say for myself other than that if you struggle with whether you are creative or talented enough, keep trying to figure out what works for you to get beyond your creative apprehensions. Maybe it’s reading. Maybe it’s doing. Maybe it’s talking to someone who is doing something with the types of creative ideas you’d like to do but never imagined you could.

Whatever it is, don’t ever give up on the search for sharing your creative ideas. – 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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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

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 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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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!

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

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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 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

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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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