Walter Vandervelde did a presentation at Professional Women International on creativity this month. He taught us how to kill our internal dragons to be more creative 😉
- NONO, the dragon of the criticism, prejudices and conservatism:
Change your automatic reply from ‘yes but’ to a ‘yes and’. That will stop criticism and you’ll feel the energy rising as you build up collectively a solution and your ideas get wider and wilder.
- HOHO, the dragon of fear of failure, lack of courage and uncertainty:
There is a quick solution to this dragon: just do it! “Doing is the new Thinking”. To begin things rolling, use gamification -that is using techniques of games for serious stuff. As example, Walter suggests to put 2 teams to compete, giving them basic instructions and restrictions to begin with, so that they are not stopped by uncertainty. Be sure to tell everybody that it’s ok to fail. - GOGO, the dragon of the stress, time constraints and lack of reflection:
To kill this dragon do your working place more attractive, an enjoyable experience and less stressful. - DODO, the dragon of resignation, habit and lack of curiosity:
To ovecome this, foster the creative thinking mind, the one that, in front of a question, tries to come up with many other questions instead of just a straight answer. In fact the creative thinker tries to find the best question to describe the problem.
When trying to come up with creative ideas, know how our mind works: after a while it becomes lazy and you cannot find more ideas, but if you allow it to rest just a few minutes and come back to your problem at hand, you ‘ll get more ideas and usually those will be the more creative ones, the first ones being the obvious ones. During the resting time your unconscious mind continues working, incubating your thoughts, finding new relations to the problem.
Some techniques Walter mentioned to open your mind is reverting a question or rephrasing it. You’ll be verbalising other ideas behind your problem : Ask “An examples of a car is…” and people will tend to name brands: “a Mercedes, a Ford, …”. Ask “A car is…” and you’ll get other definitions like the function ” a driving device”, the uses “a device for transportation” and other relations.
give examples of things, imagine new uses, different ways of doing the same thing
Thanks Walter for an entertaining event. I learned interesting tips and tricks to be creative, and even some swear words in different languages that I swear not to repeat 😉
