Need a bit of Creativity in Your Business?

Do you sometimes seem to get stuck when you have a problem that needs solving or feel you need to add a bit of spark to your approach within your business or with your marketing? It’s also usually at this time that we start telling ourselves that we’re not creative and that’s always a bad start! Remember your brain is a goal striving mechanism so if you tell it you can’t it’s happy to accept that and stop having a go at being creative.

Now we know that some people appear to be naturally creative and come up with wonderful ideas and new ways of doing things, for the rest of us all we need is a little bit of help to get us started thinking differently. So here are some ideas for you to use.

Use some of the following suggestions to free up your thinking and improve your creativity. You may not immediately believe they will make a difference, just use them anyway as one of the elements of creativity is going beyond your normal boundaries.

1. Go for a walk, a change of scenery often helps clarify thinking.
2. Vary your route to or from work/the shops/the school as this keeps your brain active rather than letting you get into a driving/walking trance.
3. Change your routines, you usually do the same things for the first 3 minutes when you get up, start work, finish work/get home from work, so do things in a different order or do different things as this helps free up your thinking.
4. Remember how to be a child – daydream, play, be silly.
5. Use reverse brainstorming. We’re all familiar with brainstorming as a technique so reverse the problem. For example “how can we stop customers buying from us?” Then brainstorm that issue and when you have finished reverse all the answers.
6. Generate ideas before you know the problem.
7. Headline the problem with ‘How to’ or ‘I wish’ or ‘I need a way to’. For example “How can we find the products that will get our customers fighting to buy from us” or “I wish I could reach into the heads of our customers and get them to spill out their desires”.
8. Reframe the problem - different positioning. For example instead of thinking “Look at all this scrap material, what a waste” try “What can we make from this”.
9. Ask non-experts whose naiveté will allow them to generate different perspectives.
10. Always say 3 positive things about an idea before voicing a negative. Or have all the positive elements discussed first at a meeting before allowing concerns to be voiced.
11. Balance the need for information with creativity. When the problem owner states the problem, don't ask questions to understand the problem, stay naive, guess. Questions can be destructive, they can hide ideas, they can affect the climate of the meeting.
12. .Use metaphors to gain a different insight into the problem, for instance “How is this like climbing a mountain, or riding a bicycle or going swimming” and see if this frees up your thinking.
13. Learn from failure, remember there is no failure only feedback.

Remember if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got.