Creative Streak

Fun Facts About Your Brain

Some fascinating fun facts on a Friday about your brain.

Your brain weighs about 3 pounds (1.3 kilograms), and roughly 2% of your total body weight. All of your skin weighs more than your brain.

Your brain is made of both grey matter (40%, comprising neurons which gather and transmit signals) and white matter (60%, comprising dendrites and axons, or the network which the neurons send their signals.)

There are 100 billion neurons in your brain, and each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses.

Your brain is made up of 75% is water, and 60% fat. It's the fattiest organ in your body.

There are no pain receptors in your brain, so it can’t feel pain ... no matter how stupid that idea is you have.

You can't tickle yourself because your brain knows the difference between an unexpected touch and your own touch.

Bits & Bytes, 11 July

During five weeks of vacation, I got 257 e-mails on creativity, innovation, websites, links. In a word: Oy.

On a cold, wet Sydney winter's Sunday afternoon, here's some of the ones which made me stop and think for a few minutes.

A Definition of an Insight

I liked this definition of an insight, from a post entitled “How to Find The Best Insights,” by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón, CEO and president respectively, of Maddock Douglas.

"An insight — for the purposes of innovation — must embody a penetrating customer truth rich enough to generate significant ideas that can help build your business. Ultimately, an insight seeks to make someone's life simpler, more convenient, more economical, or even more worthwhile."

I Hear Voices In My Head ... and Sometimes They Give Me Good Idea

I wish I could hand a copy of this article to some of my high school teachers. “Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind” (New York Times, 28 June 2010) reveals that “the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.” It does on to say “A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.” Amen.

Bits & Bytes, May 29

Again, some miscellanea from around the Internet.

Adults, Play and Creativity

Two posts on ‘play’ for adults, particularly in business. On one hand, it’s fairly well-known that play is an important ingredient for adults, both in creative thinking and in learning. On the other, I know there's real hesitation from the Regular Person who doesn't understand what we often mean by that statement. A random search on Google has some questionable suggestions by creative experts, such as “Learn to cut loose, even at work!” or “When you’re writing your next report, think like a child!”

I'm not sure this is a good example of playing at work, but a few weeks ago, at a workshop for a financial services company in Melbourne, an executive and I were analysing how to improve her 78-page slide presentation for an upcoming meeting of the Board of Directors. Her immediate supervisor demanded she put all of his slides in the presentation, but then said "But feel free to make it your own." (Talk about Creative Paradoxes, see below.)

After getting our heads around the complex topic, we began to joke about how we might turn the presentation into something playful. “What would the Board of Directors never expect?” And, "What would make her presentation a surprise?” Or, “What if the Board were in control of the presentation, instead of her?”

Bits & Bytes, April 26

Some slow posting lately, but lots to read on creativity elsewhere on the web. Here's a few of my recent favourites.

Creativity and Lawyers

Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball in the US, and a lawyer by education, wrote a commentary on how he changed his own views about creativity as it relates to business.

“If a client came up with what we saw as a creative solution to a business problem, it was often our job as lawyers to explain why that route was illegal. In business, we saw creativity as the effort to do — often indirectly — what should have been done directly. In that world, a “creative” answer was not the admirable, straight answer.”

Creativity and Teams

From Edward Glassman’s book, Team Creativity At Work II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best, some interesting thoughts in this article on teams and creativity. Specifically, that the single biggest factor to enable people to be more creativity: other people.

“The biggest factor that helps people to be more creative, according to about half of 450 people I have surveyed, is "other people." Items like time, challenge, and freedom occur at a much lower frequency. Rewards are hardly mentioned. Conspicuously absent are customers and vendors, who usually want to help. One person wrote: "The biggest help to my creativity is when my boss leaves town."

Creativity and Solving Problems

While I can’t exactly account for the background of its author on an online news database, I do agree with this commentary from a news syndicate in Hawaii on the power of problem-solving, and more so, I like the simple definition of creativity.

“The intelligent solution to a problem seems to involve more than trial and error. It often requires a fresh insight based upon a sudden shift in the way the problem is viewed. Creativity always is the answer to a problem.”

Creativity and Accounting

Here’s something I never thought I’d read: an article in favor (correctly!) of “creative accounting”!

"If you think about it, I bet many of you are positively creative every year, month, week and day. You have to find ways to track and get the accounting right on new business transactions. You are asked to find ways to change the old methods of doing things in order to track more transactions, more accurately with less labor. You are asked to find better, faster ways to report the results of the business so that management can make better decisions quicker. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. CPAs need to be creatively accurate.”

Bits & Bytes, March 23

Nothing like a sinus infection to make you dredge your head into a pillow for most of the weekend. Nonetheless, three inspiring points cut through ...

 A thoughtful post from Scott Berkun's blog which turns into brilliance with this one paragraph.

"The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards. Anyone who wants to create something new is placing a bet that their view of the future is better than everyone elses’, or at least their competitors."

The second post, from Glen Stansberry's blog, "Are You Prepared To Lose Control Of The Idea?"

I've edited together the key points for me:

"One of the most intoxicating aspects of having an idea is having control over the idea. We thrive on building, planning, analyzing, almost anything but actually doing.

"Some people never understand that if they hand over control of the original idea, something better might come out of it.

"Sometimes our idea outgrows us. The trick is to swallow the thick pride and embrace the potential of what could happen."

And last, a quote from Robert Frost which I found in the entertaining book: "I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like,' by Dr. Mardy Grothe. "An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor."

Bits & Bytes, March 15

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

Bits & Bytes, March 5

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.)