Creative Streak

Warm-Up with an Ice-Breaker

It’s 6 a.m. in Chicago.  It’s 6º Fahrenheit (that’s a balmy -14º for those in Celsius).  I’m looking at every car on our street under 8 inches of snow, even more now that the city snow plow has gone through upending even more white powder onto the cars.

The first two people out for the morning have different plans of action.  The first man – blue coat, blue car – comes out, pushes just enough snow off the windshield/windscreen to see, starts the car and drives off.  I can hear the car groaning as it drives down the street.  I can’t tell if the trail behind the car is exhaust in the frigid air or snow blowing off the car.   The interior must have been as cold as the exterior because he'd already fogged up his car.

The second man – red coat, red car – clears enough snow off the car to get in and start it.  Next, he works his way around the car to wipe off more snow on all four sides.  By the time he gets in a few minutes later, the car is warm, he can see in all directions, and his car easily glides out and down the street.

Excuse the pun, but that’s pretty much the point of an ice-breaker. In short: get your brain warmed up before it brainstorms.

The Attributes of the Creative Individual

In his 1996 book, Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, said that “Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives.”

He reasons that creativity is one of the central tenets of our lives. “Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity,” he writes.

But what of the person who doesn’t believe they’re creative? I think of Allen, a friend of mine, who has never considered himself creative – even when you explain there are two types of creativity: 1) aesthetic/artistic, or 2) solution finding/problem solving. In his mind, Allen is a master implementer, not a creator. He is brilliant at doing what someone else tells him to do, but he doesn't believe he could ever be able to create the idea to implement.

His belief matches what many people think, that a person’s creativity is a natural extension of their personality, a talent they’ve  unconsciously nurtured since birth. My friend Greg is the opposite of Allen. Greg is one of the most creative people I know, who once told me that “(Creativity) is like breathing to me.”

So can a person really improve their creativity? For every Allen and Greg, I think of Marilyn. I believe she’s an extraordinary artist, but she only believes she’s become an artist through intense hard work, discipline and consistency. Her opinion is that some of the world’s greatest artists had to learn how to hold a brush, mix paints, apply it with different strokes to a canvas. They’ve taught themselves the relevant skills, and only through practice and diligence have they improved and excelled at their creativity.

Two Articles on Creativity from Psychology Today

One of the nice things about the holidays have been the chance to catch-up on my reading. Among many, here's two of the best, both written by leading experts on creative thinking, and both published in Psychology Today.

Appearing last month (December 2011), the first is Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking, by Michael Michalko.

1. You are creative.
2. Creative thinking is work.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
5. There is no one right answer.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
8. Trust your instincts.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.

Life Without a Back-Space Key

December 7 (Pearl Harbour Day in the U.S.) made me stop and think about milestones. Some days of importance are tragic, others historic, But the profound ones changed how we live.

For hundreds of thousands of years, man's life was dictated by two key factors: the rise and fall of the sun, and his own cycadian rhythms. That ended on 4 September 1882 when Thomas Edison threw the switch on the first electrical power distribution system. It changed everything – from our waking and working hours, to our at-home entertainment, to the general organization of the home. Another one: on 18 October 1952, music became portable with the launch of the first transistor radio – the Regency TR-1. We now were controlling our music, taking it with us wherever we wanted.

I believe human creativity changed – for better, for worse – on an unnamed day in April 1973 when IBM unveiled its Correcting Selectric II typewriter. An improvement from the original IBM Selectric launched in the early 1960s, this advanced machine had a new and ground-breaking key, one which allowed the typist to back-space and then overstrike the previous character, thereby erasing it.

This is a milestone?

How Not To Be Creative

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. The work on the desk is uninteresting and uninspiring. Every word from your colleagues is a red-hot knitting needle poking against your eardrums. Friday is as far off as that promotion. The last thing you want to do is be creative.

This post is a tribute to all those people who’ve had that momentary (or lifelong!) desire to strangle the creative process to its lethal end. It's understandable, really. Good ideas do nothing but ruffle up the status quo. Change means disruption which means not going home at 5.01 pm. Territories are necessary to keep people in their place. In the end, a culture of ideas just sets people up for failure.

So for Pete’s sake, it's time to nip all that ugliness in the bud. Trust me, try any or all of the tactics below, and I’ll guarantee that you’ll never have another good idea in your organisation every again. Andiamo!

1. Tell people exactly how to do their jobs. In person, by e-mail. Preferably by shouting.

2. Pretend to listen to people. Frankly, the only opinions which count are yours.

3. Keep your circle of contacts small. Relationships are exhausting. Outside perspectives can’t be as relevant to what you already know.

How to Tap Employee Ideas

A great article from Inc.com entitled "How To Tap Employee Ideas."

"Encouraging your employees' creativity can not only create an engaging work environment, but create new business. Seven experts share their tips on getting employees to share their ideas."

 

29 Ways To Stay Creative

 

A good use of 1.51 minutes: 29 simple ways to keep the creativity flowing, thanks to MrNotFamous and YouTube. (Thanks for the discovery too, from Denny McCorkle (aka @TweetRightBrain), a good source of daily tweets on creativity.)

Is It Better to Be Decisive or Flexible When Presenting Ideas?

This is a group of responses based on one of the most popular posts I've written in the three years since Creative Streak began. How To Make A Creative Director Cry outlines the ten most common responses I've heard as a creative director, with links to each subsequent post giving more thoughts and suggestions to address each statement. This is statement #9: "That's an interesting idea. What else do you have?"

Statement #9 is a distillation of many debates in my creative director career about the best way to present ideas to a client or project manager.

There are two schools of thought. Present the client with several ideas from which to choose. Or, present the client with one definitive idea.

Several ideas?

From the presenter’s point of view, a selection of ideas demonstrates the breadth of their creativity, and by extension, a range of alternatives for implementation for the client. But from the client’s point of view, a selection of ideas can look overwhelming, if not unfocused.

The problem typically lies in how the ideas are presented. In what order are the ideas presented? In what context or reasoning? Like a comedian, do you start with your funniest joke? Or like a storyteller, do you take the client on a journey with the most compelling idea coming at the end? Or, are the ideas presented without preference, neither highlighting nor elevating one idea about the others?

Give Up Trying To Find Your Idea

At the beach today, I overheard two friends talking about love, or specifically, the lack of. At one point, I heard the familiar advice: “You know, the moment you stop looking for love, you’ll find it.” How strange, the same thing is true with the elusive idea. Got a problem to solve? Go do something else.

The intentional separation of your brain from the problem is a form of cognitive disengagement, a turn of phrase meaning “mental activity not associated with the problem itself.” I’ve found several psychological text books which give it a more colloquial definition: “spacing out.” It’s been more or less a part of creative philosophy since the first specific process was articulated by Graham Wallas in his book Art of Thought, published in 1926. He developed a four step process where Incubation (“where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening”) was a necessary part of ideation. Almost every creativity expert outlining their own thought process has included a similar element ever since, from Osborn to von Oech to others.

Many times, the incubation step of “daydreaming” accompanies a creative block. More often than not, the block is self-imposed – usually by assumptions the brainstormer places on the topic or issue. The most common remedy for creative blocks – found in creative writing courses to acting workshops to engineering analysis – is to get away from the problem.

Creativity On The Go

Liz Massey, author of the blog Creative Liberty, interviewed me by e-mail over the past month about travel and creativity. I've enjoyed reading her posts over the past few years, so it was a thrill to be the subject of one. Here's a link to the post.

Liz Massey is a writer, editor, media producer and a creative agent provocateur. Experienced in artistic disciplines as diverse as music, photography, filmmaking and journalism, Liz has a deep hunger to understand how the creative process works. She began Creative Liberty in 2007 as a way to share what she’d learned about developing and maintainingcreative momentum.