Before & After : Creative thinking in business

It’s easy to think that your best bet for coming up with creative ideas is full bore, lobes-to-the-wall thinking. You’re right. And you’re wrong.

Throwing megawatts of creative energy at a problem or opportunity is certainly a great way of solving it, or at least making a lot of progress against. But to do this for long periods of time is hardly the most efficient way of finding huge ideas, and often not the most effective way either.

I believe the best method of coming up with fresh ideas is on again, off again thinking, where the off time is as important as the on time. And any of the things you think about when you’re away from the problem can actually help you solve it, as they act like bumper posts on a pinball machine, diverting the direction of your thoughts, setting up all kinds creative possibilities against the problem you’re, ahem, “not” working on at that moment.

Yeah, it sounds kind of wacky, but here’s how it works. (more…)

Simple word choice when we start our brainstorming can channel it toward a quick dead end or open up the process to a plethora of possibilities.

I love the word “might.”

When framing a brainstorming session for, say, customer service, you can ask, “How can we serve our customers better?” or you can ask “How might we serve our customers better.” The second phrasing is mighty better.

When we ask “How can” we do something that begs for certainty, a solution that can be done. Literally, that means it is proven; it has been done. Because a truly new idea is not proven, uncertain. This leads us to known solutions, which may be okay, but if we already knew them why are we brainstorming? Because they don’t work, or they may not be enough.

When we ask “How might” we do something it opens up all sorts of possibilities, and they don’t have to be proven or even likely of success - they just might be solutions. And there are other benefits. (more…)

The best golfers use the most advanced clubs. Sure, anyone can still play golf with a 40-year old club, but you won’t find many serious players doing it.

The best carpenters use the most high tech drills and stud finders and table saws. When time is money quick setup tools that help you do it right the first time make the work better and the job more profitable.

My dentist scans the inside of my mouth with leading edge imaging technology, builds a computer model and then carves out a new tooth cap with an automated shaper in the back room of his office, all this before I can finish the cover article in Men’s Health. Remember when you used to wait two weeks as they sent this type of work out to some lab?

Before & After is in the creative training business. Sometimes even I think that sounds strange - “creative training? Oh, really?” But, hey, all we’re really doing is helping people improve their creative tools. And we do it with some pretty savvy companies; industry leaders in many fields, companies with some very bright, extremely creative people. The creatively rich working to get richer. Could this explain some of the success of the clients we serve?

So, what are the creative thinking tools we teach? (more…)

Did you ever get an idea seemingly out of nowhere? Of course you have. It happens to us all the time. Usually when we least expect it.

You’re riding in the car or on a plane or train. You’re playing with your dog. You’re out for a morning jog. Bam! A great idea strikes you for that project you’re working on. You write it down on a scrap of paper. Or, if you’re a flake like me, you don’t have a pen, so you call your own voice mail.

Of course, the idea didn’t come totally out of the blue. You can’t come up with a solution to a problem you are unaware of. You must have planted a seed at some point; five days ago, this morning, 30 minutes ago,… In Do-it-yourself Lobotomy workshop* terms we call it “ask the question early.” Everyone does it. But do you do it consciously? Do you do it consistently? It’s an amazing way to jump start the creative process and a great means of time management, too.

(* The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy is a professional development workshop we’ve conducted for over a quarter of a million people. “Ask the question early” is one of many “creative thinking “tools” covered in the workshop.)

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Important for all of us. Critical for managers.

When we speak of creativity we usually refer to it as an active thing. “Coming up with new ideas.” “Having fresh ideas.” “Conjuring up something different.” All descriptions of how we actively use the imagination to entertain something that has never been considered before.

Well, how about using your imagination in a less concerted manner? How about just being open to new ideas that might present themselves? Doesn’t that take just as much open-mindedness? Maybe more.

And for people in management, which usually means senior people, with more experience to leverage, and often more attachment to how things “should” be, this openness to ideas you didn’t expect is usually the difference between being a great leader and a, well, less-than-great leader. ( I’ll speak to more on this later.) (more…)

There’s a cat written up in a recent edition of The New England Journal of Medicine that can foreshadow death. The feline, Oscar, hangs around the halls of the advanced dementia unit in a nursing home in Rhode Island. If Oscar camps outside a patient’s door, well, that patient isn’t long for this world.

How accurate is this cat at predicting death? According to the nursing home’s staff, he’s never wrong. Never.

When I first read this, not to make light of the fate of these patients, nor this animal’s gift, but I thought, “wouldn’t it serve many of us if we got a strong signal that one of our ideas were doomed before we proceeded to put a lot of effort or money into it?”

That was my first thought. My second thoughts were, “don’t we already have too many death cats?” and, “aren’t they wrong a lot.” (more…)

My little brother Michael was born with a large hole in his head.

It was his mouth.

When brother Mike, 13 months my junior, was drawing at the kitchen table as a kid, you never had to guess what he was drawing. You could always hear what he was putting down to paper.

If Michael was drawing a farm, the rest of the family could tell from two rooms away. “Oink! Oink!” we’d all hear. Or, “Moooo!” Or, “Cluck, cluck, cluck.”

If we heard “Pow!!! Boom!!! Pow!!!” or “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.” We knew Michael was drawing a war scene.

Then there were the times we’d hear “Oink, oink, POW!” Oh no, Michael’s blowing up pigs.

What was the lesson I got from this innocent (?) little exercise my little brother did daily with his crayons? You have to let it out. You can’t keep it inside you. When you’re creating, you have to risk looking or sounding a little foolish, and you have to let it out.

So often when leading brainstorming sessions or when conducting some in-room exercise at my training programs I can see it in people’s eyes that they’re holding back. I can see the excitement for having a wild idea battling with the self-consciousness of exposing one’s inner whims.

Every great thinker of every great idea has faced the moment when they had to make the decision to go public with their concept or not. (Or they didn’t think at all,..) We should all be grateful that so many people had the guts to let those wonderful ideas out. We can only imagine how many great ideas have been lost on the tip of someone’s mind, pen, paintbrush or keyboard.

Fortunately, I had my brother and his 80 decibel Crayolas® to help me get that important lesson early in life, that if you don’t let ideas out, no one will ever know what’s on your mind.

Look around you. Look at all the good ideas. All the good stuff. Products. Services. Art. Entertainment. Try to find great stuff.

Voltaire said, “Good is the enemy of great.”

When it comes to creative thinking in business, I believe the reason most people don’t come up with great ideas is because they come up with a good idea, and then they stop.

In all fields, we see too many people, even pretty creative people, stop at their first good idea too often. Is it because they are too busy? Too lazy? Their standard is too low?

Take advertising, the business where I made a living for 20 years as a player and the past dozen or so as a coach; by today’s standards, most work that was done 20, 30 years ago was pretty bad. Back when the average American was exposed to fewer than 1200 messages a day, the best advertising stood out, as much as anything, because most of the work was not very good.

Today, the average work that appears in the media is much better. I’ll even say it’s good. But what good is good? When the average American is exposed to over 3,000 messages, how many are making an impact? Even if you say 10% (which I think is a high estimate at 300), still 90% of the work is invisible or forgettable.

“But it’s pretty good!” you might protest. And I say, “it doesn’t matter. If it isn’t great, it’s not worth much in the ad sweepstakes.”

Good is seductive. Good is too often good enough to feel like you’re finished thinking, but not good enough to win big in the marketplace. (more…)

One of the biggest mistakes people make in group think has to do with the number of participants. Too often I see brainstorming teams simply involve too many people. With the intention of putting a lot of mind power against a challenge or opportunity business people often assemble groups of 7, 8, 9, heck, I’ve seen groups of 20 people bumping into one another in the spirit of more is more.

Well, I have to tell you, at a point in gathering together brains to storm, more is less sooner than most people think.

I believe the ideal number for group ideation is 2 or 3, maybe 4. After that the benefits, if there are any, are far out weighed by the drawbacks. (more…)

No, sorry. Common minds think alike. Great minds have different ideas. Very different ideas.

We hear it a lot. “Great minds think alike.” We even say it ourselves. Particularly when someone else has the same idea we have. No delusion there.

Yeah, it’s only an expression. And, yeah, often times it’s probably said with a wink. But the truth is great minds are much less likely to fall into the same old thought patterns that lead to predictable ideas. And we mere mortals, when we’re at our creative best, we’re not entertaining common ideas either.

I could talk about finding original ideas as an individual. But, of course, that’s what we discuss in 90% of the posts in this blog. So how about putting this in the context of group brainstorming, where a bunch of people are thinking about the same issue? So, in group think isn’t similar thinking validation that an idea is good? No, it’s validation that an idea is common and probably not particularly differentiating from a marketing standpoint. (more…)