by John Brooker | Mar 20, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 80 If you want to have more creative ideas, you need to change your signals and divert other trains of thought through your brain station “There are trains that don’t come by again or ones that don’t even stop at the right station.” Juande Ramos, Former Coach of Tottenham FC, discussing his reasons for joining the club. Do you need to change your signals? We were on holiday in Venice, a perfect place I thought, to get creative ideas for a Gorilla article. Certainly there were catalysts; the picture on my mobile telephone changing from the Houses of Parliament to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as I switched it on in Venice airport (what a lovely idea!); the way the Venetians use the water for everything (e.g. collecting the rubbish); the absence of modern buildings; the speed of the vaporetti (water buses) helping to destroy the foundations of buildings the Venetians are trying to save. I had so many ideas they were all running round in my head until my wife bought me a wonderful blank paged notebook (Moleskine brand) and I sat on a train from Venice to Padova and began sketching the ideas in a radiant map. As I mapped I thought how maps are remniscent of railway junctions, which set me thinking about metaphors for creative thinking and so I had yet another idea! Information bombards us all the time through our senses and the brain filters out the information we don’t need at that time so we don’t go crazy. To use the railway metaphor, think of information like...
by John Brooker | Mar 19, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 79 There might be an alternative use for some of your products or services if you spend a little time thinking about it… “The best car safety device is a rear-view mirror with a cop in it.” Dudley Moore, Comedian and Actor Could you adapt some of your products and services to other markets with just a little thought? I’m in one of my idea phases this morning, which tends to make me a bit absentminded (anyone inferring that it might be age related may stop reading now). I was in the shower when I realised I hadn’t shaved. No problem, I’d shave in the shower; but I had no mirror. Looking down I saw the big chrome head of the waste plug and picked it up. It was a near perfect shaving mirror; it even made my face slimmer, a double whammy (and you can use it for plucking your eyebrows too gentlemen!) I wondered if the firm who made it realises this and could use it as a benefit. “Chrome waste plug with new vanity mirror facility. Even better, they could market it as a vanity mirror that doubles as a waste plug. Put that in your handbag, gentlemen. (No one is going to accuse me of political incorrectness in this article!) So This set me thinking how many other things in the same environment could be used for different purposes and could we apply the thought to organisations? There is so much emphasis on “reuse and recycle” it struck me that it would be worthwhile for organisations to have a workshop...
by John Brooker | Mar 13, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 73 Mapping your thoughts is a good place to start when your creativity falters… “I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.” Steven Wright, US Comedian Do you need to unblock your creative pipes? People sometimes ask me if I ever run out of ideas for Gorilla articles. Last week I thought it had happened. We were on holiday in Venice, a perfect place I thought, to get creative ideas for a Gorilla article. I had five “triggers”, the first being the picture on my mobile phone changing from the Houses of Parliament to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as I switched it on in Venice airport (what a lovely idea!). Normally, I sense a trigger and mentally fit it to a suitable concept for an article, but I couldn’t fit any of these five. I had a creative block and needed a creative plumber to free it (and before you say it, help me tap in to my creativity). Then my wife bought me a lovely notebook (Moleskine brand) which I promptly used to map out all the triggers in the form of a Mind Map. (If you are unfamiliar with mapping, here is a link to give you some background) Mapping my thoughts helped me find a connection, but I’ll write about that in the next article, because I realised as I mapped that my mental block was a trigger and mapping is the article concept! When I got home I did a search on all of...
by John Brooker | Mar 9, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla #69 By altering the concept, you can generate new ideas… ”There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Ansel Adams, photographer Have you some concepts you might challenge? If you have ever travelled by train, you will likely empathise with my thoughts as I sat on a Metropolitan Line tube train in to London, one which appeared to be auditioning for a bit part in the World’s Slowest Railway Journeys and watched as a fast train sped past mine. “I’ve paid only a few pence less than them,” thinks Grumpy Old Man, “they leave from a more distant station and get in earlier…that’s not fair!” That led me to think about how Transport for London charge for Tube travel, which is based on the concepts of distance and the time of day you travel. I pondered over alternatives to these concepts, e.g. cost per “kilometre minute” but it was all a bit fuzzy and the slow motion of the train led me to doze. Cut to a Flexible Thinking course I was running recently, a few weeks after my train journey. The group used “Super Heroes”, where people adopt the viewpoint of a Superhero to generate ideas, as a technique. Andrey, a participant, decided to use “Dash”, the speedy little kid from “The Incredibles” as his Super Hero. His idea was that you could use an electronic chip to measure the speed Dash travelled between two points. That was the “Eureka” moment for me and my fuzzy pricing concept. With 3 million London commuters using Oyster Cards (these use contactless chips,...
by John Brooker | Mar 6, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
Creative Gorilla#66 A Haiku is a great way to consider and refine a challenge … “Waterfall roaring – though the sparrow sings unheard, still he keeps singing” James Kirkup ~ English poet Do you need to make a concise statement of a situation to help with challenge definition…? My wife gave me a beautiful a book of meditations called The Bridge of Stars, beautiful because the visual design and photographs are as much part of the book as the poetry. Reading the Haikus in the book reminded me that this Japanese poetry form is not just a great method of writing poetry but also a great creative technique when you want to define a challenge in a succinct way. I first learned about the Haiku on a creative writing class. It is a form of poetry in which you use 17 syllables in three lines, five – seven – five. Strictly speaking it was not invented until the 1890’s, adapted from the Hokku, the starting verse of much longer poems. A hundred years later I thought it would be a great way to have people redefine their challenge definition and so I experimented in my Open University residential courses. It worked very well. So I invited the students to consider their challenge situation (e.g. How can I motivate my team?) and reduce it down to 17 syllables. The power lies in the brevity and in the discipline of achieving the syllable structure. Brevity provides clarity and having to find words to match the number of syllables helps to give a subtly different perspective on your situation. As an example, I...
