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

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

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, Conferences

(This is the first in a four-part series. Today’s post: Pre-Planning.)

There’s a skill to planning and scheduling a brainstorm, but what about when your meeting expands to a full-day workshop (including both strategic and creative modules)? Or, spreads out over several days, such as a sales conference, an in-house employee event, or an off-site meeting?

While many of the organising tasks are similar, additional elements – more people, a bigger or more broad agenda, perhaps even an outside venue – means there's also additional preparation and implementation steps. Last week, I sat down with two experienced event planners – Kate Whitehair and Tamsin Stanley at Zing – to brainstorm some helpful tips and considerations at each stage of the event planning process.

Stage One: Pre-Planning

1. Articulate clearly the purpose or objective of the event. Think about what you want the event to accomplish. Consider how the event might support or bring to life the organisation’s vision, mission or values into the event. Also, does this event fit into other initiatives, or is parallel or complementary? If so, how should they be linked together?

Winning Business

The process of new business development – specifically, winning a new assignment from a client – is often elaborate, time-consuming, lengthy and political.

To make the process easier, more productive, and focused on generating the right outcome, the client should outline and broadcast the specific criteria they’ll use to select the best agency. (More about “and broadcast the specific criteria” in a moment.)

The criteria tends to fall into six different categories.

Content. Will the agency’s proposal – specifically, its strategies, its tactics – help the client meet both its business and communications objective? How measurable are the objectives?

Creativity. Will the ideas which bring the strategic and tactics to life be cut-through, differentiating, unique and tailorable to the client’s messages? Can the agency talk about its creative process?