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...
