by John Brooker | Mar 5, 2015 | Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Overcome Challenges
If you want to enhance your creativity you need to interrupt your trains of thought … “I have coined the term “bisociation” to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single plane, and the creative act which always operates on more than one plane. Arthur Koestler, Philosopher How might you enhance creative thinking? I was on holiday in Spain last week and with glorious weather and time to think I began playing with a concept that I last wrote about in Yes! And Blog 80. This was the idea of using a railway metaphor for how people think and create ideas, leading to how you can stimulate your creative thinking. As I pondered on it, the whole concept became a lot clearer for me so I thought I would build on that last article. In this telling of the metaphor, the track is your life path. All of your learning, skills and experience sit in carriages (or coaches). The carriages at the back contain all of the information from your childhood, one each for pre-school, primary school and secondary school, perhaps one for childhood outside school (chunk the carriages how you like). This is your own “train of thought” (sorry for the pun!). Information was poured in to the carriage(s) from the world outside, either actively introduced through interaction with people, by personal experience or passively absorbed. These carriages now contain memories. You can access the carriages and the memories but logically cannot add anything as you move on to a new piece of track (another period of your life). The memories are your...
by John Brooker | Feb 18, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Overcome Challenges
“Finding ideas is like picking blackberries” John Brooker Do you want your idea generation to be more fruitful? This week, I went to pick blackberries with the children. I realise some of you assume this means I took them to a computer store to enrich their lives with the pleasure of an e-mail overdose, (makes a change from an E number overdose). In reality we picked the last of the summer’s fruit. As we picked (and my son ate), I mused on what a great analogy blackberry picking is for idea generation. You arrive at your site and some big juicy berries hover there, groaning “Eat me, eat me,” (my son politely obliges). Three pickers ensure rapid removal of these “low hanging fruits.” As you pick one you notice it is part of a ripe bunch and you delightedly strip them. You bound around several brambles, picking away. Then it gets tougher. You gently lift prickly leaves to discover one nestling there. You duck down and look up, finding more secreted away; you peer over the top of foliage and find a tantalising bramble just out of reach, so trample down a few nearer brambles and reach them triumphantly, only to find a maggot on steroids eye-balling you with menace. Next you walk round the tangled mass of vegetation to look from different angles and spy more which have appeared as if by magic. Gradually you find the numbers dwindling but there is always one more you can see, so you “reeeeaaaach” for it. You tease it off its stalk but it slips from your fingertips as a large bramble...
by John Brooker | Jan 21, 2015 | Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Overcome Challenges
Our facilitated workshops help you achieve tough targets, leverage opportunities and tackle complex challenges with unconventional thinking. If the conventional methods are not working, find out how we can help. Send an email to [email protected] or explore this site further....
by John Brooker | Jan 3, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
““When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.” Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees Do you listen well? Really listen? Or do you spend the time whilst others are talking, thinking of what you will say next? How much more creative might you be if you listened well and built on the ideas of others? I was in a café in a garden centre on a recent Monday, waiting at the counter for my coffee. Two ladies walked up beside me, chattering away to each other very animatedly. As I waited, my ears attuned to their conversation and I realised they were not talking to each other but at each other. One was talking about her garden and the other was talking about her mother. It was surreal and a bit sad, like a Woody Allen movie. By chance I had just attended an Improvisation Comedy course that weekend. Improvisation puts great emphasis on listening to the other performers. That’s “listening” not “hearing”. Taking the time to consider what is said and so perhaps finding a deeper meaning to the words. If we listen in Improvisation, we can build more on the creative ideas of others and we can prevent our own preconceived ideas ruining a scene with an insensible response. It also provides the other players with the confidence to develop the scene further, as Menninger says, “it makes us unfold and expand”. In short, by listening we can make the work more creative and humorous. When you speak in innovation workshops, you only hear one idea. When...
by John Brooker | Jan 1, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges
“I’m not at all creative, so I want to see how others do it.” Open University Student You can create and innovate. With knowledge of different methods and techniques and a creative climate, you can become more successful at both… The quotation above was the response from an MBA student (an experienced manager) when I asked for his learning objectives at an Open University, Creativity & Innovation course. Now I believe even gorillas can be creative, though I can’t prove it because I’ve never found one that spoke English. (This thought makes me wonder what it would be like to facilitate a group of gorillas. Would they listen more effectively than some humans?). So I asked the student what led him to believe he was not? ‘Because I am 64 on the Kirton scale and that means I am not creative’. ‘Whoa, that’s some limiting belief you’ve got their’ is a thought that crossed my mind but I empathised and explained that the ‘Kirton Adaptation Innovation’ inventory reflects whether you have a more adaptive or innovative style of problem solving, not whether you are more or less creative. [See here for information] What would you say to that student? Now, I say something like: ‘You can all create and innovate. With knowledge of the different methods and techniques and a climate conducive to clear thinking, you can become more skilled at both’. Many people say they are not creative. Some feel it is ‘arty farty’, tree hugging, warm and fuzzy stuff and they aren’t like that. Others see creativity and innovation as the generation of ideas. But this is...
by John Brooker | Sep 11, 2014 | Develop Opportunities, Innovate
“Miracles, you do not have to look for them. They are there, 24/7, beaming like radio waves around you. Put up the antenna, turn up the volume – snap… crackle… this just in… every person you talk to is a chance to change the world…” Hugh Elliott, American blogger How can you sense more opportunities; more novel opportunities? Recently, I went to the Design Museum in London with my son. For him, it was a way to fulfil his Design and Technology homework requirements. For me, it was a chance to tweak my creative antennae. The “Design of the Year” exhibition is running and from a sizeable list I made a tough choice for my top three: a. the “Lego Toy” bottle top; b. a roll up bicycle mudguard and c. a medical syringe that turns red when it has been used. Along with an excellent exhibition on the work of designer Daniel Weil, this is a great opportunity to stimulate your people to sense opportunities. SO Many of you do not live in London or nearby, so here are six ways to enhance how you sense opportunities: Free time to sense opportunities People become so focussed on the day job, they fill their waking minutes with it. When this happens, weak signals of opportunity become lost in a storm of “noise” and your competitors are likely to hear louder signals too. You have to free up time to give your mind quiet and space. It is worthwhile to record potential opportunities so that a list is always at hand. Use the notes app on your phone. Create a regular...
