A little more creativity please

You can see I’m a fan of regularly applying the skills of creativity: in thinking, writing and idea generation. 

The World Economic Forum said the top 3 skills we’d need by 2020 would be
- Complex Problem Solving
- Critical Thinking
- Creativity.

In their updated skills list for 2025, creativity features in half of the top 10 skills, in one form or another. 

And here we are… in a world where we’ve been adapting to a global pandemic, working from home, leading remotely, changing business practices, generating new products, serving customers in new ways and ... keeping it together!

Sir Ken Robinson said “...we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.”

It’s worth putting some of that creativity back in, and learning to be even just a little more creative! 

We need creativity now and for our future and it's worth asking for a little more creativity please, and being able to deliver a little more creativity. 

The need for ideas doesn’t end

Challenges still present themselves. 
Problems are still to be solved. 

Even when we are overloaded with life in general, we may still have to come up with some genius and share our thoughts and ideas. 

Oh but what if
- we don’t feel like it
- we’ve ‘got nothing’
- we can’t think of anything
- we aren’t ‘feeling it’?

We may expect genius to just show up magically when we require it. 

But the funny - or perhaps cruel - thing about ideas is they can arrive when we’re bored! 

As our brain begins to relax from the pressure we put it under, zoooomwhoosh, in comes an idea. 

‘Out of nowhere’, we’ll say. 

This week I worked with a team to help them get bored... and quickly. 

As boredom arrives from a mundane task, their genius fires up and their ingenuity helped solve the challenge they’d been working on. 

They’ve come up with so many resourceful solutions and surprised themselves about how useful boredom can be. 

We can become less frustrated about times or tasks that are ‘BORING!!!’ and instead use them as the space and place where your clever is bubbling away, working on the problem. 

Get bored and use boredom. It’s a valid, relevant and practical strategy. 

OMG so boring !! 😁😁🤣

Making things up as you go along

Not everything needs to be planned, controlled, organised and structured. Come on .. not everything!

We have an incredible resource in us: our experience, ideas and ingenuity. 

The thing is ... we may not trust ourselves to provide from that resource. 

Improvisation pioneer and playwright Keith Johnstone, says that we edit, censor and judge our ideas. And so much so, that our ideas may never make it out of our head! 

We jump in and criticize, stifling and stopping them from ever reaching the outside world. 

They may only ever live in our mind. 
It’s as if we don’t trust what we are really capable of. 

Sure, we may not have experienced the exact thing or have the exact answer from our history. 

But the resources of our mind are flexible, adaptable and malleable. We can make things up. Even as we we go along. 

We won’t know what we can do with our ideas unless we trust them. 

It may only take a few seconds - just long enough to put them ‘out there’. 

Strange times call for new ideas

When the Institute for the Future called out ‘novel and adaptive thinking’ as one of those skills we’d need right about now ... do ya think they knew just how much we’d need it?

The use of the word ‘novel’ may have become a little tainted (you know, the novel coronavirus and all).

So could we say unique? Or clever? 

The thing is, these strange times call for new and quite different ideas. 

We know the clichéd group brainstorming thing doesn’t work. 

We’re better off keeping an ideas book, capturing flashes of brilliance as they arrive. 

Or getting hands-on with an idea and prototyping it, to see how well it actually works. Although getting as practical as we can as soon as we can is a totally new concept for some people. 

- Part of a team? 
Know how to bring your clever. 

- Leading a team?
Know how to bring the clever out in others. 

- Running your own show? 
Look for opportunities to use your clever .... anywhere, any time. 

Almost anything goes!

These strange times need our unusual ideas and thinking. Be braver about that. 

Hold on the judgement that what you’re thinking isn’t ‘good enough’. 

We won’t know the value of an idea ... until it’s put into practice anyway. 

Too smart for ourselves

We are such clever beasts! 

We solve complex problems, generate ingenious solutions and juggle multiple roles to make our own world work. 

Yet I think we are also SO smart, that we can occasionally sometimes maybe ... over-complicate things. I know I can!

If something appears too straightforward or plain and simple, it couldn’t possibly work well ... could it? 

Isn’t anything worth doing supposed to be a struggle? 

As a mentor, I get to work with, guide and advise many talented people building and growing their own business or practice. 

When we’re all faced with a challenge or conundrum, often there is a simpler solution that we’ve considered, and then ignored or dismissed. 

In times like these, we’re experiencing plenty of overwhelm: both task overwhelm and emotional overwhelm. 

So choosing an easier path consumes less of our energy and effort ... and it’s less likely to add to the overwhelm. 

Conserve energy for the tougher stuff of life. There’s no need to make solutions, decisions and actions even more complicated. 

Choose the easier path. 
Burnout is no prize. 
Take good care.