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 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 2, 2015 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
“This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” Orson Scott Card ~ American Author Do you feel uncomfortable when people challenge your thinking or beliefs? Do you ever put yourself in the position where others can challenge your beliefs? Or do you seek to avoid such situations? If you do you may be missing an opportunity to stimulate your creativity and innovation. If you have the chance to attend a workshop on Solutions Focus (SF), do attend. Solutions Focus is an approach to change and tackling people issues. It differs from more conventional approaches such as Creative Problem Solving (CPS) because it focuses on finding a solution for messy situations (i.e. there is no right answer) rather than exploring the problem. Its central hypothesis (in my words) is that focussing on the solution builds positive energy to create change whilst focussing on the problem can develop a negative energy (resistance) for change. In that hypothesis, it has links to other positive approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Having attended a course on AI and read a book on SF [The Solutions Focus by Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow], I had been seduced by the positive approach; it appealed to my nature. But seduction can be dangerous (de Laclos didn’t call his book “Les Liaisons Dangereux” for nothing) and I had doubts that SF could replace CPS entirely. After all I have spent ten years schooling myself in various aspects of CPS and I find it works. As a recent participant in...
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...
by John Brooker | Sep 7, 2014 | Develop Opportunities, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Tools
How can you trigger creative ideas? “Insights obtained from conceptual blends constitute the products of creative thinking, however, conceptual blending theory is not itself a complete theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend originate.” Mark Turner, author in “The Literary Mind” (Page 93) How do you trigger creative ideas? Here’s one way. At the weekend, I struggled without success to find a topic for this article. Monday morning I went for my regular walk. I had a goal to climb Pinner Hill, a strategy to use a different route to the normal and no conscious thought of the Creative Gorilla. I walked across a meadow, saw a gap in the hedge and cut through it. Surprise. I discovered a semi formal public garden I had not seen before in 20 years of living here. I wandered around looking for the exit and realised the only exit was the entry I had come through, away from the houses that surrounded it. It was like a secret garden. I was looking at the garden when my article came to mind. The seed of a topic arose, “disrupt your patterns and you might discover something new.” Inspired, I completed the first draft of the article on the walk, using the recording app on my phone. What did I do to provoke this idea? I did nothing that I planned. So Let’s consider what I did do and elicit some creative principles: I had a goal to climb the hill and deliberately chose a different route, which meant that I broke my pattern. Creative principle?...
