Get Cre8ive

Every human is creative. There, I’ve said it. However, you must understand that creativity and artistic ability are not one and the same. Once you get past that hurdle, it’s easier to find your creative muse.

Roger von Oech, in his book A Whack On The Side Of The Head, says that there are 10 mental locks that may keep us from freeing our minds to be creative.

One of the biggest “locks” in my view is the fear of appearing foolish. Not all of your ideas are going to be great. You should grade yourself on the quantity of ideas you come up with, not the quality of each idea. You are not going to hit every idea out of the park.

Baseball provides a good analogy for ideas. Ty Cobb has the best lifetime batting average of anyone at .366, or about 36 percent of his at bats. That means he did not get a hit 64 percent of the time. Would you call him a failure?

How about Thomas Edison? He admits that he “learned” thousands of ways not to make a light bulb before hitting on one right way.

How do we avoid the mental locks? You need to forget what you know. Otherwise, your brain will be cluttered with answers from everyday life. Consider Johann Gutenberg. The wine press and the coin punch were in existence during Gutenberg’s time. But he was the first to “forget” that one was used only to smash grapes and the other only to leave an image on a coin. By combining the two devices he invented the printing press.

How do we manage to forget what we know? You need to shake up your brain with exercises that challenge your assumptions – a virtual whack on the side of the head.

If you want to be creative, then you must pump a little mental iron to get more ideas flowing. Because nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have.

Pump Up Your Brain
According to Nobel prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. Unfortunately, school teaches us to find the right answer, when actually there is usually more than one right answer for a problem.

When an adult is challenged to come up ideas, he or she typically generates three to six possible solutions. The average child generates 60. We need to be more child-like in our approach to ideas. Let’s try some exercises to help us generate ideas or to look at things from a different – and perhaps, childlike - perspective.

Change the question.
Sometimes just by changing a word or two in a question, you can come up with radically different ideas. Centuries ago a plague spread across Europe which was almost always fatal. In one town, a person thought to be dead was buried alive. Townspeople wanted to make sure this didn’t happen again. One group proposed putting food and water in every casket and an air hole up to the surface. Their question: “what if we bury someone alive?” Another group suggested placing a 12-inch spike in the coffin lid and aligning it with the victim’s heart. Their question: “how do we make sure everyone we bury is dead?”

Ignore The Rules.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you should break laws. Rather, I am saying you need to look for approaches that fall outside the norm. Ancient prophecy said that whoever could untie the Gordian Knot would be king of Asia. Everyone, including Alexander the Great, failed when the tried to unravel it. Frustrated, Alexander took out his sword and sliced the knot in half. Mission accomplished.

Reframing The Problem.
You can look at problems from different perspectives using what is called the Reframing Matrix. Take a piece of paper and write down your question in the middle of the paper. Draw a grid around it. In one grid you might ask, “how would a doctor approach this problem?” In another, “how would an engineer solve this?”

Group Think.
Brainstorming in a group often does not work because people are afraid of speaking their ideas out loud. This is a way around that fear. Assemble a group. Write down three ideas on a piece of paper and pass it to the person on your right. That person reads the ideas and adds three more ideas triggered by the previous ideas. This continues until it gets back to the beginning.

Random Input.
A random piece of information often can take your problem-solving process into hyperdrive. Once you have your question or problem clearly stated, open up a dictionary or a thesaurus to any page and select a word. Now, think about how this random item applies to your problem. There is some connection and your job is to find it.

OK, now you have some new tools to pump up your brain. Do some heavy lifting.