Creative Streak

Bits & Bytes

Here's some of my week-end catch-up on posts related to creativity, innovation and communications.

Framing Is Everything - One of my favourites, Luciano Passuello writes Litemind, always a thought-provoking blog on creativity and innovation. His post Framing Is Everything speaks to the process of "framing" and its importance to problem solving and decision making. He suggests that how you articulate the problem will profoundly influence how you solve it with creative thinking.

How Good Is Your Website? -  My colleague Neil Drewitt sent this website to me - Bowen & Cragg - a company which consultants on website effectiveness. It has a terrific database of best practices, plus 1,000 articles free on its website. You can also sign up for its newsletter. Handy, practical and a beautiful website to boot (no surprise there).

Two Articles on Innovation

Creative Jolts

I read lots of great articles by innovation and creativity experts wanting to enable massive global organisations to be more creative. My niche is the reverse. I prefer to help the singular person, working solo, sitting in their cubicle and coming out every now and then for a brainstorm. For them, a new series in addition to my regular posts, entitled “Creative Jolt” ... (which is a shorter name than the original “XX Things You Can Do Right Now To Start Being More Creative”.) They're concise (well, for me), easy to implement, 'incremental innovation" if you will, served up for one.

Draw your problem.

Don't get alarmed: it's not about artistic skill. Instead, this tip forces your brain to work and think in a way it avoids. By expressing your problems and thoughts outside of its default method, your imagination often re-frames the problem. It might re-draw the problem in a new context, or from a different perspective. (This works in reverse for the visual person too: try 'drawing' your problem with words, or speaking them aloud. Again, do it in a way you normally do not.)

Get started ...  Grab a bunch of coloured pens or texters an draw the problem on a flip-chart hanging on the wall. Use pictures, lines, scribbles and what-not. Draw the problem from the POV of the customer, a child - anyone not associated with the topic. Draw it backwards (from end point to creation). Upside down.

Verbal vs Non-Verbal Communications

You may not recognise the name, but Albert Mehrabian authored some of the most famous studies in communications research. His most well-known hypothesis: When two people communicate face-to-face, how much of the meaning is communicated verbally, and how much is communicated non-verbally?

First published in 1971, his research is almost a quaint idea today, considering that a lot of organisational and personal communications uses decidedly non-face-to-face methods of social media.

Despite using Twitter, Facebook, blogs to communicate (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone), there's something in Mehrabian’s research that continues to fascinate.

 He concluded there are three parts to face-to-face communications – sometimes called the 3 V’s – and these three elements determine how much a receiver “likes” the speaker:

• Visual, or body and facial expressions, accounting for 55% of the liking
• Vocal, or tone of voice, accounting for 38% of the liking
• Verbal, or words, accounting for 7% of the liking

Bits & Bytes

Some random things I've found during the past week ...

Creative Technique: Free-writing – Some good simple instructions for one of the most basic brainstorming techniques, an especially good one when you’re working solo. (From BQF, the blog of the British Quality Foundation’s special interest group on Innovation, written by Paul Sloane.)

How to live a simple and peaceful life: 13 tips – If you want some basic tips to simplifying your life, this is great. If you can read between the lines, there’s some interesting points here about creativity too: being aware of living in the moment, seeing unusual relationships between objects, finding metaphors between different tasks – and perhaps a new solution, scheduling time to think – or dare I say the word, ‘daydream’? (From WikiHow, a useful blog about all sorts of different things.)

Six writing techniques to increase your creativity – Love tips, absolutely love them. This post has six good ones about proper preparation, analysis and creativity to improve your writing skills. In particular, I love tip number 5: annotating. It’s not only about thinking actively about what you’re reading, but then, writing down what you actually mean. I constantly read things where I stop and ask myself: what is this person trying to say? (From Fast Cash Freelance, a blog about – how aptly named! – free lance writing.)

WSJ Interview with George Buckley, 3M CEO

An interview with George Buckley, CEO at 3M, in today's Wall Street Journal entitled Wall Street Journal entitled "Innovation Comes in Tweaks and Snips" . I particularly like the quote "Creativity comes from freedom, not control.

Photo by Mike Ekern

Planning Successful Workshops, Part 4

This is the last post in a four-part series of my conversation and brainstorm with Kate Whitehair and Tamsin Stanley, two veteran event organisers at Zing, on how to plan, prepare and manage events. Links at the bottom will re-direct you to the previous posts.

Stage Four: Conclusion and Follow-Up

Prepare a suitable and immediate evaluation form to assess the event. Make sure it’s quantitative and qualitative, as well as candid and confidential. If possible, check back with participants within 2-3 months to see how the event’s purpose and messages have influenced performance.

Debrief internally within three weeks. Gather key people to a thorough review of all aspects of the event, with a specific goal of learning how to improve future events.

Six Ways to Ruin a Brainstorming Session

Re-posted from Ralph Kerle's blog at the Creative Leadership Forum, which he took from an article by Paul Sloane, author of The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills.

They say brainstorms are old-fashioned and no longer effective. But the real reason for the frustrations is that the brainstorms are not facilitated properly. A well-run brainstorm is fun and energetic. It will generate plenty of good ideas. But a poor brainstorm can be frustrating and demotivational. Let's look at some simple ways to ruin your next brainstorm meeting.

1. Having no clear objectives

A brainstorm with a vague or unclear purpose will wander and lose its way. So set a clear objective. The purpose of the brainstorm is to generate many creative ideas to answer a specific goal. It is best to express the goal as a question. A wooly objective is not helpful. 'How can we do better?' is not as good as 'How can we double sales in the next 12 months?' Once the question has been agreed it is written up clearly for all to see. It is worth setting objectives for the number of ideas to be generated and the time to be spent. 'We are looking to generate 60 ideas in the next 20 minutes. Then we will whittle them down to 4 or 5 really good ones.'

Planning Successful Workshops, Part 3

This is the third in a four-part series of my conversation and brainstorm with Kate Whitehair and Tamsin Stanley, two veteran event organisers at Zing, on how to plan, prepare and manage events.

Stage Three: On-Site, Particularly for Multiple Day Events

Assign (or hire) a person to be wholly accountable for the event. All information should flow through this ‘event manager,’ and this person alone chooses how to delegate. Allow this person to make the best decision without interference. For 99% of decisions, their authority should trump the majority of others.

Establish a central area. Tell people to go to the this area (the rego desk, for instance) if they have problems or want answers. Staff the area with internal team members so they feel like they’re part of the event success.

Facebook vs. Twitter?

Here's an interesting article comparing the use of Facebook and Twitter in social media marketing strategies.  Personally, I find Twitter drives most of my own traffic to this site (Linked-In a close second), but my Facebook contacts are far more vocal. Favouritism aside, what sort of behaviours do you see specific social media audiences reacting to your organisation?

The artwork comes from a similar series of posts from Mashable.

Definitions of 'Creativity'

I was re-reading some old posts yesterday, and found one I wanted to update:  Definitions of Creativity on January 5, 2009. The original list included general statements, whereas the list below are specific definitions I've culled from a variety of resources.

Having or showing imagination and artistic or intellectual inventiveness.  Drs. Richard Paul and Linda Elder, from Critical and Creative Thinking. I've found lots of links that suggest the words "artistic or intellectual inventiveness" come from Webster's Dictionary, but the copy staring at me from my desktop has the vanilla definition: "The ability to create."

Nothing more than going beyond the current boundaries, whether those are boundaries of technology, knowledge, current practices, social norms, or beliefs. Creativity is nothing more than seeing and acting on new relationships, thereby bringing them to life.  Joseph V. Anderson, from "Weirder than fiction: the reality and myths of creativity", Academy of Management Executive, 6:4 (1992), page 41.

Planning Successful Workshops, Part 2

This is the second in a four-part series of my conversation and brainstorm with Kate Whitehair and Tamsin Stanley, two veteran event organisers at Zing, on how to plan, prepare and manage events.

Stage Two: Implementation

Create a theme that both stimulates and provokes. Themes can range from specific and aggressive to subtle and subconscious. Whichever you choose, the theme should be complementary to or elaborate upon the event's objective and the values of the organisation They should be written in active voice.