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Entries in creativity (83)

Thursday
Feb202020

Could the discovery experience of travel, work at work

The promises and rewards of travel are many : exploration, discovery, insight, learning, life-changing experiences. We are invited to show up, not knowing much about a country or culture, encouraged to tour, learn, listen, sample, test and experience.

Could more leaders in more businesses encourage the joys of discovery at work, like travel does for us?

Are there fears that all that discovering will take/waste a lot of time?

That it won’t really deliver any benefits?

Or that it isn’t needed: at work we just do what we do, same as yesterday, last week or last year.

Newer ways of thinking and working include doing things like deliberate discovery. It’s invited, welcomed and expected. I’m not suggesting it switches to all, full-on discovery, 100% of the time. It’s not an all or nothing thing.

It’s about some. Allowing some time for discovery. Some budget. Some opportunity. Some guidance or coaching so that your team knows how to discover, explore and unearth.

Otherwise, one day you’ll wonder where all the good people went to, why they left. They’ll go where there are opportunities for a better ‘adventure’.

Friday
Feb142020

If you don’t think you're creative... 

While we hear that creativity is even more important in today’s crazy world, it’s a big shift for some of us to believe ourselves to be creative... or capable of creative thinking and inventive work.

I’m not here to debate your level of creativity so could we just look at this another way? With another word?

Let’s go for INGENUITY. It’s not creativity on steroids or more or bigger.

It’s different.

Creativity is about being generative, inventive, it's the making.

Ingenuity is about being resourceful and being able to use the skills you have, the resources on hand to fix something, solve something or find a clever way of working it out.

When we put our smarts to work on solving a challenge, this is being resourceful, using what we have, accessing whatever we can. It’s a sweeter, more helpful and practical mindset than thinking we have to be creative, running the tiresome loop that is the ‘I’m not creative’/‘oh yes you are’ game. That does little to give us more resourceful ways of thinking and working!

Think more about using what’s already available to you (that’s ingenuity), using whatever resources you can access, and worry less about whether you’re being creative enough. 

Monday
Feb102020

Could you do it in reverse 

I collected the mail from my mailbox yesterday at 11am and saw the postal delivery worker, the ‘postie’, finishing delivering mail to other letterboxes.

Usually she delivers the mail to our area at about 3pm.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘Hey you seem a bit earlier, a different time today?’

‘Yes', she said, 'I thought I’d do my round in reverse today; you know, keep it fresh.

She went on...'It’s easy to become a machine, doing the same thing, same way, same route, riding up streets the same direction, the same order and same views. But wow, this has really snapped me out of things today; I’ve had to think and not just go by habit.'

She delivered the mail and a great insight.

What’s the current way you do something? And how could you reverse it? Even a small part of it? Go try.

Creativity and novel thinking data suggests this helps us see new things, make new connections, make sense in other ways.

Most of all, it changes our locked-in perspective.

Friday
Dec202019

What reading will you do to prepare you for the future 

The Institute for the Future continues to urge us to prepare for the future skills we'll require to cope with uncertainty, change and new ways of working. If you can't zip out of the office to complete a 'Future of Work Diploma', what are you doing to educate yourself so you're ready? Over the weekend, during the week, on holidays, people often find gaps in the day - after breakfast, waiting in the car, in airport queues, after dinner, waiting for the weather to change/clear/change again.

All of these times - and more - are opportunities to be taking on bite-sized chunks of insight and learning.

Our brain loves this; much better than cognitively overloading ourselves or filling up our sponges with too much information in one hit.

So, what are you reading... and planning to read?

Here are some ideas for you I've worked on over the past six years...

(Hey pssst! The purple one is available for FREE download via my website; the others, where you usually get your books or via my website).

Friday
Dec202019

The person with the most spontaneity wins 

As leadership evolves from command and control to consultative/coaching and beyond to facilitative, those who can handle what happens are well placed.

We can’t predict what people will say, what will happen at a meeting, how a client will respond or what the board might ask for, so we may need to respond in the moment.

Spontaneity is a strength that's incredibly powerful in times of uncertainty. We can spend so much time though, rehearsing scenarios trying to cover all of the possibilities, to try to prepare for the future.

Do we fear we wont be able to handle things, that we will lose control?

Maybe we don’t trust ourselves to handle what happens.

But improvisers have known it for decades: we have incredible resources in us and we need to trust that we can handle so many situations. Could you be more spontaneous, you know, go with the flow? Responding to what happens rather than trying to control what happens?

🔆To build spontaneity, notice your response when things DON'T go as you hoped, expected or planned. What you do next is spontaneity. And it's a SUPER SKILL for the uncertain future.