As I sat down over the weekend to outline creative topics for the next few months, I also decided to review some of the key creativity principles during the past month.
1. Your first idea in a brainstorm is rarely good. In fact, it's usually average. That's OK - in fact, it's normal because everyone's ideas typically are pedestrian when they first pop out of their head. Like a car in winter, your brain needs to "warm up" its creative thinking skills. So, you need to get these initial ho-hum ideas out of the way at the beginning of the the brainstorm so the better ones can emerge later. As well, never accept your first idea about any topic until you're able to judge it among all ideas to ensure it's "best."
2. Do some mental gymnastics immediately prior to a brainstorm. Professional athletes would never play a game without stretching. The same is true for your brain. Do anything you can to mentally separately what you were doing immediately prior to the brainstorming from the brainstorming itself. Look through a visual magazine. Try to solve a brain teaser to sudoku. Get up and walk around to get the blood circulating. If nothing else, start your brainstorms with an ice-breaker.
3. You don't need to brainstorm all of your ideas at once. Break down your idea generation into smaller periods of time, or at different times of the day. Do some now, others later. Giving yourself time between brainstorms is also good because your imagination continues to think unconsciously about the problem, need or desire after you've gone on to another project. It's also a good way to give yourself a mental break on those other projects.
4. Do not let anything get in the way of generating as many ideas as you can. Of all the mandatories in brainstorming, this - to me - is most important. You want quantity, not quality. If that means cutting negativity in the bud, so be it. (We'll discuss the purposeless of negativity in a few weeks.) Does that mean generating hundreds of ideas in each brainstorm? No, because that's not always possible. But, you should strive to generate 50 percent more ideas by the end of the brainstorm than you thought you would.
5. Creative thinking may be fun, but it's not easy. You always need to push and stretch your imagination beyond both your initial expectations and your first set of ideas. The good news is that you'll be more likely to generate a brilliant idea which could have a profound impact on your business situation.
And isn't that really the point of business creativity?
Finally, a last thought for January 2009.
Discussing creativity in his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore tells how Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was suspicious of people who were simply a font of creative ideas.
Stravinsky believed creativity owed as much to hard work, discipline and craftsmanship as to imagination and inspiration. “Should the impossible happen, and my work suddenly be given to me in a perfectly completed form, I should be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, as by a hoax.”
