This seems an odd thing to be calling for, especially when trying to sell the idea of creativity to businesses. Generating ideas for a purpose consists of divergent and convergent phases but our brains cannot handle divergence and convergence simultaneously without exploding!! Have you ever tried sitting in a group brainstorming to solve just one problem. It probably failed, partly because you selected the wrong technique but also because you were trying to do 2 things at once. Separating these phases will help but will introduce inefficiency. You will generate many more ideas (good) but you may have to spend
Innovation – forget the words Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing
Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing have become buzz words of late which is a shame as it encourages those who blindly adopt best practice to jump on the bandwagon. It is often said that to truly understand a situation you must know enough to be afraid and there are too many consultants pushing concepts on unsuspecting businesses and organisations without really understanding what they are telling organisations to do. The thing is that Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing really are valuable tools in our quest for Innovation. When innovating we have a dilemma, do we try to keep the fruits of our
Creativity – It’s All About Perspective
As Albert Einstein noted, a problem cannot be solved within the same frame of reference in which it was created. This does not mean that we have to employ Einstein’s methods and shift ourselves into outer space or become time travellers, it simply means that our problem must be reframed or looked at in a new way. You can get someone else to look at your problem or just change your own perspective. My good friend Gerardo Porras, based in Mexico, created a very useful metaphor for this very situation. We are inside our house looking out and what we
Creativity – why the UK Foreign Office has very little
Yesterday a huge story hit the news stands here in the UK. Within the Foreign Office a brainstorming session was held to do some ‘blue sky thinking’ around things that should form part of the Pope’s forthcoming visit to the UK. As with all good idea generation sessions everything was recorded and the results marked not to be distributed externally. Of course, some of the ideas upset one or two people who took it upon themselves to make the document public. The BBC article can be read in its entirety by clicking here. This whole sorry episode highlights some DOs
Only We Can …
I notice that a number of people play this game in their workshops but here is my version. It can be used in a number of different ways and can also be used solo or in groups. If you are having issues with a current product or service then you might try to produce statements such as: Only we can deliver product xx within 24 hours Only we can produce xx at a cost of less than £5 Only we have the technology …. This should not be too difficult, especially if you are already having some success but if
Innovation – There’s a head in my shed, starting out from scratch
Many fledgling businesses do actually start out from a shed at the bottom of the garden. Hewlett Packard started this way and many other technological breakthroughs too (remember Marconi?). The shed is, however, just a metaphor for that inappropriate and often cluttered place that we find ourselves in with our good ideas. We are simply a 'head in a shed'! It does not matter whether you are a lone inventor who really does have a shed at the bottom of their garden or you work for a large organisation and your 'shed' is your office or laboratory. You have the
The Morphological matrix
This is a form of random stimulation that can be used solo or in groups. It is ideal for generating ideas when you have an idea about WHAT you wish to do but not HOW you might go about doing it. If you were a TV producer you might ask the question “How might we go about creating a new soap opera?” To use this technique in such a case first create a table with ten rows labelled 0 – 9 and 4 columns initially numbered 1 to 4. Next perform the following steps: Label each column with a different
When is Creativity not creative?
There have been (and there will continue to be) debates about what exactly is creativity and what it means to be creative. I remember having a discussion with some artists about being creative. Being artistic, they naturally thought of themselves as creative and were seen in a similar way by the general public. To be fair, their methods and output was, to say the least, alternative but I posed them the question “If you use the same method for each piece of art work you produce, are you being creative even if the output changes?” There is no real answer
