by John Brooker | Feb 13, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 44 Mindset can be a major obstacle to successfully tackling challenges… “Professor Douglas Hartree told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in Britain could be done on the three digital computers which were then (1951) being built.” Lord Bowden Is your mindset an obstacle to finding solutions? Imagine this. It’s 6.00 a.m. in a small hotel. You’re creeping down the back stairs to go for a run (OK that’s probably fused your imagination circuits). Half way down, you stumble over a young guy sitting on the stairs in his underpants. He looks at you but doesn’t say anything. You look at him and think “he must have just got back from a run and is cooling down.” You nod at each other in that polite British way and you head off for your run. Yes. That was me last week in Lincoln. Never mind that he was in his underpants (making the assumption they were his) and was otherwise naked, I thought he’d just got back from a run. Thirty minutes later I returned and “Underpants Man” was still there. We looked at each other. He didn’t speak. I asked if anything was wrong. “I’m locked out of my room,” he replied sheepishly. At that point I feel a bit stupid that I hadn’t thought this earlier. I tried to contact hotel staff at the locked reception via intercom (no response) and by telephone, getting no answer. I suggested “Underpants Man” might sit in my room but he refused (was that a look of panic on his face?),...
by John Brooker | Jan 6, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 6 How might you overcome personal obstacles to move your ideas to fruition? “There are plenty of great ideas out there… but so few people actually do anything about them” Speaker on “Woman’s Hour” BBC Radio 4 Have you ever had a really great idea for work or personal life but not taken it to fruition? The quote above came from a lady speaking on the radio. She sought to sponsor a mature woman writer by offering an idyllic place for them to live and write rent free. She believes that by giving them the chance to get away from their frenetic home environment they can be more creative and productive, that they can produce a book that gets published. Sadly I was half asleep at the time and didn’t catch her name, but she did set me thinking about the variety of obstacles to creativity that exist within organisations but particularly within us. I have devised the acronym PIGS to categorise these obstacles: Process, Individual, Group, and Structure. [If anyone would like to fatten up the idea, your thoughts are welcome!] For this article, I will focus on individual obstacles to being creative. These include: Premature judgement ~ writing off your ideas before they have a chance to flourish. Step back from judgement, allow the ideas to flow and sleep on them Lack of belief ~ giving yourself “ten reasons why my idea won’t work”. When you find yourself doing this, sit down and list ten reasons why it will work Lack of curiosity ~ accepting the first idea that comes in...
