Make your idea happen this week!

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” Edison

We often hear statements in the work place like “We need to think differently!”; “We have got to be more creative around here!”  and “This project needs some fresh ideas!”

Organizations are faced with complex, ever-changing, open-ended challenges and need to realize that constant, ongoing innovation is critical to stay ahead of the competition which is why it is necessary to be on the lookout for new ideas that can drive innovation. The ability to think differently, generate new ideas, and spark creativity within a team becomes an important skill.

Most people can readily come up with definitions of creativity. They often associate creativity with words such as new, unusual ideas, out of the ordinary, imagination, unique, exciting, wacky or something radically different.It is unusual for people to associate creativity with words such as usefulness, value, visionary and purposeful. Creativity is a natural part of being human. It is not reserved for those people with some sort of special gift. We all have inspiration and resourcefulness.Accessing and using creativity can release tension and help people lead healthy, effective and more productive lives both professionally and privately.

To answer the question of how a different perspective leads to a creative solution, we need to understand a little neuropsychology and what happens in the brain when you are solving a problem…. reaching that “Ah ha !!” moment.

How does this process work? When you are faced with a puzzle, be it visual or functional, you solve it by first running through all the usual solutions that are obvious and you’ve used before.  This means you first engage your left brain by recalling the obvious tried and true solutions. Sometimes these ideas work, sometimes they don’t.  Once your left brain has exhausted all ideas that don’t work, you get frustrated and you hit the wall. The wall is the inability of your left brain to create new connections from your old ideas and to find different solutions. The only way to get unstuck is to try to see the problem in a new way at which point your right brain engages. Your right brain solves problems with images. Once the left brain is out of the way, your right brain is able to freely associate in the language that it knows- pictures. Then, it connects — the connection is made, and all of a sudden, you have that new idea  and everything falls into place. What you have just done is create a new connection in your brain, literally.

Let us reflect on the four simplistic stages to problem solving:

• Preparation (investigating the problem in all directions)
• Incubation (reflecting or thinking about the problem)
• Illumination (the appearance of the “happy new idea”), and
• Verification (validity testing and reducing the idea to an exact form).

What are the characteristics necessary to be creative when approaching problem solving?

• Curiosity
• Risk-taking
• Imagination
• Originality
• Flexibility
• Elaboration
• Playfulness
• Complexity
• High energy
• Fluency
• Independence Tolerance of ambiguity
• Capacity to make order from chaos
• Openness

So, how do we generate new ideas?

The ability to generate new ideas is an essential work skill today.  A skilled facilitator can help individuals and teams acquire this skill by using various techniques to break old thought patterns and  consider new perspectives forging new connections.

Along with practicing these techniques, you need to adopt enabling strategies too.

Standard idea-generation techniques concentrate on combining or adapting existing ideas but to come up with a new idea that is truly original and innovative, one needs to break thought patterns.

Breaking Thought patterns

There are several techniques you can use to break established thought patterns:

• Challenge assumptions –  for every situation, you have a set of key assumptions. Challenging these assumptions gives you a whole new spin on possibilities.
• Reword the problem – stating the problem differently often leads to different ideas. To reword the problem look at the issue from different angles. “What is the problem – why do we need to solve it?”, “What will happen if we don’t solve the problem?”
• Explore different media –  explore the challenge through different media such as art, music, word association games.  Different expressions might spark off different thought patterns. And these new thought patterns may yield new ideas
• Think in reverse –  instead of focusing on how you could solve a problem/improve operations/enhance a product, consider how could you create the problem/worsen operations/downgrade the product. The reverse ideas will come flowing in. Consider these ideas – once you’ve reversed them again – as possible solutions for the original challenge.

Shift Perspective

If you want different ideas, you will have to shift your perspective.  Over the years we all build a certain type of perspective which in turn yields a certain type of idea.

• Get someone else’s perspective – ask different people for input on what they would do if faced with your challenge. You could approach customers, suppliers, senior citizens, someone from a different culture or even friends engaged in different kind of work who might see things differently.
• De Bono’s six thinking hats is another effective tool to view problems differently and creatively.  Whoever has a specific colour hat adopts the relevant strategy. White hat focuses on data and facts either known or needed; Red focuses on instinct, gut and intuition; Yellow focuses on values and benefits and why something may work; Black focuses on difficulties, potential  problems and why something may not work; Green focuses on possibilities, creativity and new ideas; and, Blue manages the next steps, action plan and next steps.

• Play the game “If I were….”  asking yourself “If I were …” how would I address this challenge? You could be anyone such as Gates, Jobs  etc. The idea is the person you decide to be has certain identifiable traits and you have to use these traits to address the challenge.

Use Enablers

Enablers are activities and actions that assist with, rather than directly provoke, idea generation.  They create a positive atmosphere and can help leaders, managers and you get your creative juices flowing such as:

1. Believe that you are creative, believe that ideas will come to you; positive reinforcement helps you perform better.
2. If you are the leader or manager, provide freedom to try new ways of performing tasks; allow and encourage each individual to achieve success in an area and in a way possible for him or her; encourage divergent approaches by providing resources and room rather than controls and limitations.
3. A trained facilitator will harness the value of individual differences, styles and points of view by encouraging the activities, tasks, or other means to be different for various individuals.
4. If you are the leader or manager you should also establish an open, safe atmosphere by supporting and reinforcing unusual ideas and responses of individuals when engaged in both creative/ exploratory and critical/developmental thinking.
5. Removing Blocks and Barriers – many of the strategies for increasing your personal creativity come from an understanding and removal of your personal barriers or blocks to creative thinking. You may notice that in some situations you feel confident about yourself and your ability to succeed in a particular task, while in other situations you do not.
6. Creative Time Out : Go for a walk, listen to music, cook a meal, take a break from formal idea-generating. Your mind needs the rest, and will often come up with connections  when you least expect it.
7. Eliminate or minimise distractions: de-clutter your thinking space both literally and mentally. Switch off you mobile, close the door, divert your phone calls and then think.
8. Change your environment: sometimes a change in your setting also changes your thought process. Go to a nearby coffee shop instead of your office or the conference room or walk and talk somewhere.
9. Fun:  Enjoy what you do, be passionate and have fun – these are essential ingredients, especially in team settings.

Final Thoughts

When approaching your next project or trying to find a solution to a problem – try to build in new ways to look at the problem. We’ve explored just a few here. There are many other creativity and idea-generation tools to help you develop creative solutions to business problems.