Jumpstart Your Creativity (2 page)

Our
goal in this book is to help you understand tools, tips, techniques, and approaches you can apply today to help you generate better ideas, evaluate them and get better results.

Why are you interested in jumpstarting your creativity? Why are your jumper cables out to begin with? Why do you
need a jolt to get you going in terms of creativity? Why do we ask why? Because we know that you will get a lot more out of the book if you have identified the reason you want to learn about creativity in the first place. Your reasons may include:

• I am not creative, but I want to learn to be more creative.

• I'm already creative and would like to be more creative.

• I haven't studied very much about creativity and would like to understand more.

• I need to be more creative at work and this will help me generate better results.

• I have to get more creative with my dates or I may never get married.

• I need to be more creative with my children and help them stay creative.

• My life isn't working right now, and I'm finally ready to fix it.

• My wife said I need to read it.

• My dog said I need to read it.

• My cat downloaded the book on my e-reader so I figured I might as well read it.

So what is your goal? Some of the goals you have may be in this list, and some may not.

Write the reasons you are reading this book and why you want to jumpstart your creativity. If you are reading this on an e-reader of any kind, please do not write on the screen with a marker. Please write your reasons on a piece of paper with a pen, marker, or pencil.

Now circle your “Top 2 or 3” that are the most important and urgent. Circle the ones that have the greatest potential to make a difference in your work or your life.

Now that we have determined your “why” for creativity and you know what you want to work on, the rest of this chapter is designed to give you tools, tips, and approaches for generating new and unique ideas.

Before we go further, one quick word of caution: the process of ideating is extremely messy and imprecise—it is a mix of science and art. Ideating is a big hot mess, and you often end up with a massive collection of ideas. When you review these ideas you will find there are some horrible ideas, some notso-horrible ideas, some really stupid ideas, some good ideas, and a few brilliant ideas. Keep in mind that during the ideation phase you are not making judgments about the quality
of the ideas—your goal should be to develop as many ideas as possible. It's about quantity not quality at this stage. Having lots of ideas helps generate more ideas. It's a catalytic process. When Steven and I brainstorm a book, project, program, or a product, we come up with a multiplicity of ideas, probably too many. We both realize the more ideas we come up with, the more these ideas multiply, and we come up with other ideas.

Many people often ask us this question, “Where do you come up with all of these ideas?” Our answer is usually something like, “They just come to us.” When people who aren't creative or who want to be more creative hear us say that an “idea just comes to us,” they are often mystified and sometimes frustrated wishing they could say the same thing. It often sounds to people as though the ideas fell out of the sky and into our laps. So we do not say, “The ideas just come to us.” What we do say is, “Both of us, over our entire careers as both employees of corporate America and as serial entrepreneurs, have developed a set of tools and approaches that help us develop ideas and concepts quickly.” So how can you find ideas and information?

First, we want to encourage you to be aware of information and stimulation and ideas that are continually circulating around you. Often the information circulating around you at work and at home can be a source of inspiration. If you pay attention and are observant, you will see, touch, smell, and hear information that can be a stimulus for an idea. Shawn
once received a catalog for Restoration Hardware. He was so inspired by this catalog that he wrote an article about it. Below is a short excerpt from that article:

I went out to the mailbox to get my mail this afternoon. I sat down for a light lunch and was sorting the mail, not knowing that I would come across something that was absolutely amazing. I reached into the stack and pulled out the latest Restoration Hardware catalog. I opened the front cover and was immediately pulled in to a new world. Inside the cover was an impassioned message from the CEO with an amazing picture of him wearing a leather jacket. As I turned the pages I realized that I was not looking at the catalog but I was looking at a work of art, and I was amazed at the quality of the photos, the layout and the extraordinary way all of the products were arranged in each picture. It reminded me of a brochure from a world-class art museum. As I sat slack-jawed looking through the glossy pages I started thinking. Has a catalog ever amazed me before? No. Have I ever been fascinated by a catalog before? No. Have I ever considered a catalog a work of art before? No. What is it that made that catalog so amazing? As I contemplated this over my lunch I realized what it was—it was extraordinary.

Often there are things that you come across or are exposed to that can have an impact on you creatively, but you have to be alert enough to notice it.

So here are a few tips from the creative team to help you be a better observer and creator:

Wherever you are, make sure to look at what's going on around you. We often have the experience of saying to someone when walking in a city, “Hey did you notice that clown back there doing a handstand on the unicycle juggling oranges?” The typical response is, “Where did you see that?” Come on, open your eyes people! We know the typical routine is to walk with your eyes looking down, make no connection with other people, and listen to the music playing on your iPod. With this routine, you are missing out on stimulus that may help generate your next best idea. But don't beat yourself up for this. An interesting 1999 Harvard University study, “Gorillas in our Midst” by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris coined the terms “inattentional blindness” and “change blindness.” The idea is that people often miss seeing large changes in their visual field, even if these changes are significant enough to be easily noticed if one is expecting them. Filling out forms at the doctor's office without reading them, realizing “everybody has a car just like mine” the day after you purchase your new car (these cars were always around you, you just didn't realize it), and missing a clown in the road when you are staring down the street are all examples of how easy it is for us to miss these things with our eyes.

Oh well, thank you, you guys are geniuses—I should read? Wow, that's a new one. But we have a very specific suggestion
about reading. If you want to become more creative and more innovative and better at generating ideas, don't just read fiction like most people. Read biographies about creative people. Read biographies about inventors and artists. Read about architects, jugglers, circus performers, sideshows, explorers, astronauts, movie directors. We're not saying that fiction can't stimulate your creativity, but nonfiction work is often laced throughout with new ideas, approaches, and inspiration. So we recommend a mix of fiction and nonfiction books about creative people, creative ideas, creative lives, and, of course, how to be more creative. If you read a book about the building of the Eiffel Tower, you can't help but be stimulated with the amazing creativity and innovation that was involved in building the tower (at least if you're paying attention that is).

If you normally read magazines about engineering or project management, you have our sympathies (okay that was a joke), but if you normally read magazines about your industry, go to the newsstand or download to your e-reader magazines that you normally don't read. Getting outside of your normal reading and viewing habits can certainly stimulate your creativity.

The popularity of the new sources for video viewing has been a boon to people who are creative. Why is that? Well, often both of us spot documentaries on Netflix or on Amazon that we would've never known about in the past nor
would they have been available. With a quick click, you can download any number of documentaries, television shows, or movies that you never had access to before. These can be tremendously stimulating to your creativity. The same approach can work by looking for videos online on sites such as You-Tube in order to stimulate your creativity.

Too many times when we see something that is viewed as creative or as a little bit different we have a tendency to dismiss it. Think about popular acts that are currently playing across the country at the writing of this book. The Blue Man group has many shows in several cities that are all highly successful. Cirque du Soleil has dozens of shows playing around the world, almost all of them highly successful. However, we are both completely convinced that in the early days of The Blue Man Group, people probably thought they were wacky and that they would never be successful. The same is true for Cirque du Soleil. How do you possibly explain either one of them to someone who has never seen them—it is difficult at best. A circus with no animals? Three blue men? But yet both of these shows are so creative and so amazing that they have been very successful. Even if something is not successful, it still is a good idea for you to pay attention to it because it might give you new and different ideas that you can apply to your own life or work.

We know that you're shocked by this suggestion as you certainly are not a medical examiner or a funeral director!
So what the heck is a morgue? Back in the old days, professional cartoonists used to keep what they called a “morgue.” What is a morgue for a cartoonist? It was simply pictures that they had cut out of magazines and newspapers and filed them for future reference. So if a cartoonist was drawing a frog for example, he or she would simply look in their F files for pictures of frogs. Why does a cartoonist need a picture of a frog? Well it's very simple, it is easier to draw a frog when looking at a picture of a real one (this was before the Internet). Consequently, a cartoonist would have thousands of pictures of anything you can imagine that would be required to draw in a cartoon. It could be a picture of a crab or a camel or a Cadillac. The pictures were important reference points to draw cartoons that looked like what they were trying to depict.

So what would be your version of a morgue? It could be a notebook or a file that you physically drop images into or an electronic collection that you can access when needed. The idea is to collect images, articles, fabric, whatever materials stimulate your creativity. We think of this as “idea harvesting.” The harvest goes into your morgue. You could tear pages out of a catalog, put in a note from a legal pad, drop in a greeting card that someone gave you, or a napkin from the restaurant you went to while on a business trip. You define what “they” are—if they inspire you or stimulate your creativity, they go into your morgue. We are sure by now you've probably figured out the way that a morgue is used; when in the process of creativity, you pull out your physical or electronic morgue file and look it over. Hopefully something there will stimulate a creative idea.

Before we cover the ideation techniques, there's one other key component that we need to review with you. This is known as
displayed thinking
. Anytime you are in the midst of a creative activity for generating ideas or creative solutions, you need to make sure to write those on a whiteboard or flip chart (or the wall) so that everyone can see the answers. How does displayed thinking help in the creative process? Well simply put, it allows each person in the group to see the ideas as they are recorded, and that helps them know what has been said and they can also feed off the ideas that are being displayed. If those ideas were written on a small legal pad where only a few people could see them, it does not work nearly as well. So don't make the fatal mistake of not writing the ideas in a place where everybody in the group working on the ideas can see them. Display the thinking on a white board or flip chart.

There are several different ideation techniques you can use to generate ideas. What we are asking you
not
to do is brainstorm. We believe that the era of effective brainstorming is over because we say so (just kidding); in all seriousness, we think that brainstorming has lost its effectiveness because it has been overdone and poorly done. Most people, when invited to a brainstorming session, are not exactly thrilled. When there are so many other great techniques out there
aside from brainstorming, why use the one that's the senior citizen falling apart and on life support?

One cautionary point regarding ideation with groups is the importance of avoiding “group think.” Group think can surface when groups are brainstorming or discussing issues. Group think occurs in several ways such as the group depending too heavily on consensus-based group decisions to the point that individual creativity and contribution is minimized or missed altogether, letting individual biases or viewpoints, especially from high-influence group members, keep others from sharing their ideas or causing them to unfortunately modify their statements to be accepted by the group even though their authentic statement might be in contrast to the discussion.