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
