Creative Streak

Cindy Ratzlaff on Leaders' Successful Daily Habits

Marketing expert and blogger Cindy Ratzlaff gathers an insightful list of daily rituals from successful leaders in a variety of fields and industries in her post "15 Daily Habits of Powerhouse Leaders." She interviews her friends and colleagues on tips ranging from philosophical to immediately practical, in areas such as social media, curiosity, time management and creativity. Some good food for thought during a time-out break this week. (Photo taken from her website.)

Brainstorming in a Digital World, Part 2

Part #1 is here.

When I began leading brainstorms as a full-time activity, one of the first strange experiences was running an ideation session with a group of people who weren't even in the same room. Or continent. It was me on a bad squawk box in Chicago. Two people arguing in New York. A woman in Miami with a radio playing in the background, and a half-asleep person listening in Beijing.

Despite its revolutionary brillaance, the Digital World still needs the human brain to come up with ideas. The key is finding ways to use its tools to bring disparate people - by space, by geography, by ideology - together mentally to facilitate their creative skills. The good news is that the tools improve every day, and will only get better.

I have my own preferences: love some, hate others. If we compared our lists, I'm sure we'd clash. Here's where we should agree: the ground-rules of remote brainstorming, whichever tools you choose to use.

Personal Innovation Lifestyle

Sometimes modern technology gives us phrases which at the same time ring true but sound hilariously pretentious. Exhibit A: Personal Innovation Lifestyle.

It’s easy to give PIL a glossy iStylized definition, but here's one in plain English: a desire to learn new things, about yourself and/or the world around you. (Haha, do you know how hard it was to write a definition and not use the words “evolve”, "personal brand", “transcend”, and “higher power”? Add those words in somehow and you'll get a more exact meaning of PIL)

Before the digital world revolutionized everything, learning something new (like a language) or something more in depth (like gardening) was “a hobby” – which in itself was something you did when you weren’t at work, taking care of the kids, and had some time and a bit of leftover cash.  Now, thanks to Mark Zuckerburg’s desire to learn Chinese, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s display of jumping from acting to singing to cookbook writing, we now have PIL.

Brainstorming in a Digital World, Part 1

Has the Internet made us better at creative thinking?  There’s been a huge swath of articles over the past several years debating whether the Internet has made us more stupid or smart. Here's a short list of its strengths and weaknesses.

The Digitalista would say the Internet gives us more creative fuel by allowing ...

• Instant communications with more types/diversity of people from a larger network
• Instant information (facts, research, intelligence)research, ideas, concepts, intelligence)
• Instant inspiration and exposure (ideas, concepts, trends, options) – IOW, flowing in of stimulation
• Instant self-expression – IOW, flowing out of stimulation
• Less to remember, so our minds can do more important tasks – like make ideas
• Remote working, allowing us to create in environments more conducive to our personality and style

In other words, the Internet harnesses our creative thinking through a larger collective consciousness.  As my friend Teresa said, “It makes me feel creative.”

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

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.