How Creative Ideas Come
Just the other day, I spotted a cool animation video that featured an awesome 3 minute wyteboard caricature depiction of Steve Johnson's "Where Creative Ideas Come From" . This 3-minute video clip on creativity and where it lurks in a person's mind led to the making of this blog post. In my present state, as part of an IT trouble-shooting team that fixes websites and their owners*. The year-end pressure for website owners to perfect their sites has tripled our work load this season. Good news, right?! We have no qualms about the pay-offs we get, what puts the pressure on is calling forth the creativity lurking in the recesses of each being of our team.
After pulling off 40% of our projects as far as this posting goes, below are some tips to call forth those hidden and often forgotten "hunches" which could help solve an office problem or a client requirement.
Forget the words NO, CAN'T, WON'T and DON'T
Aside from promoting negativity in a team, these words set up several road blocks in the brain which will cut short any spark of creative juice trying to connect to the problem. How irritating it would be while you give your idea in brainstorming session that someone interjects and says "No, it's like this... ". Sounds familiar? It may offend or not, it doesn't matter...it just killed any creative flourishing from others who have been waiting to speak.
Have a sense of humor
Some of the ideas often come from comical incidents or curious happenings that pave the way to a better solution to any problem. The microwave oven was initially experiments for a weapon's programs. Who would've known about that this household item was once an idea for a weapon? Another idea that became a lucrative venture is the Blue Man group which started as guests of the Alien Comic (Tom Murrin). Who said creativity is always a serious business? Besides a sense of humor can make work less of chore and more of an adventure.
Talk it out
Before the Internet, research and development departments kept everything super secret. Today, R&D involves an exchange of ideas, brainstorming, consumer ideas, test groups even contests open to the public. Not much can be accomplished with only one point of view. According to Steve Johnson, ideas are a collision of one hunch with another hunch. Several hunches have been stitched together with other hunches which form an idea.
Handy Notebook
Hunches, theories, questions can hit you any time of the day. Sometimes at the most unexpected situations, an incident would pose an important contribution to making a project possible. The forming of a good idea may have passed by all because you didn't have the writing implements to document it. Pen to paper notes and fragments of an idea help you store unfinished business.
The chemical which was supposed to be used for clearer gun sites was too sticky it stuck to the waste basket of the scientist. It was only after seeing how it had stuck there for several days (months?) that he found out he was onto something. The sticky compound turned out to be Krazy Glue. Let hunches or ideas stick around so you can come back to it (or have your kid continue where you left off, right?).
The chemical which was supposed to be used for clearer gun sites was too sticky it stuck to the waste basket of the scientist. It was only after seeing how it had stuck there for several days (months?) that he found out he was onto something. The sticky compound turned out to be Krazy Glue. Let hunches or ideas stick around so you can come back to it (or have your kid continue where you left off, right?).
Get enough sleep
Most best ideas formed in dreams during the the REM stage. To quote Seth M. Baker in a Happenchance post "sleep recharges, replenishes, and... defragments our brain". People who are exhausted and sleep deprived often go through projects with less to bring to the table.
Recreation
We have dart boards to vent out frustrations on. Things can't be perfect in a diverse team of IT trouble shooters. The idea well could get dry a bit or hit a blank wall, these are times to redirect the brains attention to something manual.
Creativity in any business and innovation oriented organization is as important as water to a plant. The importance of nurturing creative minds and maintaining the sparks of ideas and collisions of theories within employees or workers should be realized. Exhaustion and stifling surroundings would leave a company with burnt out husks of sheep to herd.
*Non-technical web site owners have a default skewed idea of how a website is and what it takes to get their websites together. They OFTEN mistake websites as paper with pictures on it and image content with text easily erasable with a virtual eraser. We always have to reset their way of thinking in terms of web-ese.
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