Tools to Spark Creative Thinking

Today's economy has a voracious appetite for innovation. This fast paced, highly competitive scramble to stand out demands creative drive…but what drives creativity? A brain nimbly primed for making connections where connections did not exist. Give yourself and your team a creative surge with one of these creativity tools.

Bombard Your Brain

The brain likes to conserve energy. The brain is wired to make connections and take shorts cuts. This means that you start thinking down the same pathways, making the same associations. In other words, our brains default to being stuck in a rut.

To be creative we must bombard the brain with novelty, with the un-encountered. A brain forced to re-categorize information is a brain that can imagine novel alternatives.  Innovation requires activities and actions that will challenge perceptions. 

To identify what makes innovators different, researchers studied the habits of CEOs such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos along with 25 innovative entrepreneurs and surveyed more than 3,000 executives and 500 individuals who had started innovative companies or invented new products.¹  One of the key differences was engagement in associating, in connecting seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. Fresh inputs trigger new associations. We enable our brain to make more connections the more diverse our experience and knowledge.

Here are two ways to bombard your brain and develop new associations:

Field Trips: First-hand experience is one of the best ways to shake up your perceptions. Engineer diverse experiences outside the office that directly confront the implicit or explicit assumptions. For example, if you are trying to come up with a new concept for a cosmetics line, visit chocolatiers, pet stores, jet-ski stores and observe how they market, deliver product and communicate with customers. Ask lots of 'why' and 'what if' questions.

Practice Lateral Thinking: Try the Random Word tool developed by Edward de Bono.  Random connections lead to novel solutions. By using a random word as a provocation to solve your problem you approach the problem from a different direction than how your brain typically wants to. Select a word from a random word generator, extract its underlying principles and then apply them to your problem to see how they can help. Do not choose an easier word and avoid changing the principles behind your random word to ones which are easier to apply. This defeats the novelty approach to finding true innovative ideas.

Example: Your problem is to come up with new ideas for toothbrushes. You pick a random word (nouns are best) -- in this example your word is fish.

Ask: What are the characteristics of fish? How do fish behave? Why? What else comes to mind about fish? What are some of the benefits? Avoid thinking "well this is stupid".  The best ideas come from left-field.  Now ask, how you can apply this principle to your problem.

Principles (fish):
Fish swim upstream with strong side to side body movements.
Fish gills are oxygen regulation organs and exchange ions necessary for fish health.
Fish have scales.

Ideas for toothbrushes:
Could toothbrush bristles have micro-scales that better capture plaque and bacteria?
Could toothbrush bristles be designed to undulate like a swimming fish, rather that the up-down or circular motion of battery operated brushes?
Could bristles deliver micro-pulses of oxygen to promote gum health?

Now you have some novel ideas to brainstorm around and to test for further development.

Fun Food

We love when easy things actually work remarkably well and it doesn't get much easier than to just have fun in order to stimulate creative thinking. In just two minutes, you can activate a creative surge for your brain.

Research by Dr. Mark Beeman at Northwestern University suggests that having fun eases tension and may facilitate greater mental flexibility by enabling neuronal connections.  He found that people had an easier time solving a puzzle after watching a short comedy clip, and in a brain imaging study, he found that activation of pleasure centres in the brain predicted successful puzzle-solving.²

If time is tight and you are unable to engage in a playful, fun activity, a quick way to stimulate neuronal connection for greater mental flexibility and creativity is to just think of something fun.

The best way is to do this as a guided visualization (or thought-alization for those of us who don't visualize in images). Record the following using the voice recorder on your smartphone to facilitate this exercise:

Sit comfortably and close you eyes. Take a few measured breaths, in…out…in…out.

Now revisit in your mind a time when you were having truly unfettered fun, a time that stands out as the best fun you'd had in a while. Picture what you were engaged in, hear the sounds, smell the smells, feel the sense of fun. Spend some time with this memory. Smile…..breathe.

When you are ready, thank your memory and open your eyes.Now you are ready to face the creative challenge in a new frame of mind.

We use this tool regularly with our clients and are always pleasantly surprised at how effectively it works spark creativity. 

Doodle-Dabble-Dream

Doodle:  The results are in! Doodling stimulates creative thought. Dr. Jackie Andrade, Professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, U.K. found that doodling enables our brain to maintain cognitive stimulation supporting focus and during an information exchange.³ Doodling is a very useful cognitive tool - it engages, it swishes the blood flow around the brain ('swish' is a very technical term which we won't try to define here), and it helps focus, helps manipulate and helps evaluate ideas - doodling is your imagining process writ large…or small, as the case may be.

When to doodle:

• when you are in the messy stages of ideation or problem solving
• when you are stuck and feeling uninspired.

Here is a fun video with more on doodling from Sunni Brown at TedTalks.

Dabble and Dream:  Several corporations known for innovation encourage their employees to take 10 - 20% 'dabble time" -- time and space to think creatively. Allow yourself and/or your team as little as thirty minutes of work time a week for exploratory thought. It could make the difference between being uninspired or coming up with ideas for innovation. Some very successful companies (Google, 3M) credit their dabble time as the source of many of their successful products.

What to do during this 'dabble time'? According to Psychology Today⁴, we do our most creative problem solving when we allow our minds to wander. In other words, daydreaming is good. Why? Because we are allowing ourselves to think uncensored thoughts which is necessary for truly original ideation.

¹Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's DNA, Harvard Business Review; December, 2009.
²http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/mbeeman/research.htm
³Andrade, J. What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology 23 (3): 1-7; 2009.
⁴Fries, A.  Sparking Creativity in the Workplace, The Power of Daydreaming Blog, Psychology Today; February 10, 2010.