I came across the following article by Darren Rowse at Problogger. This is a great blog and back in 2007 he had a few posts specifically on nurturing creativity. As you try to develop your creative employees you should consider encouraging these ideas as ways to come up with new ideas. Some of these involve breaking old ways of thinking and they are likely to require some practice, but as you develop these skills in you and your workers you'll move ahead of your floundering competitors.
1. Evolution
When new ideas come as a result of building upon previous ones. This is very much a step by step process where at each step the progression in ideas very small but where over time it is significant.
A great blog related example of this has been the evolution of most blogging platforms, like WordPress which periodically updates it’s features - building each time on what they previously had.
Most bloggers enter into this evolutionary process every day with their blogging - taking previously expressed ideas (both their own and those of others) and extending them.
A good question to ask yourself when entering into this evolutionary process is - ‘how could I improve (insert thing to evolve here)….?’
Evolution isn’t the ’sexiest’ of the methods that I’ll talk about here - but it’s probably the most common way of creating new ideas.
2. Reapplication
When you look at something old in a new way.
The exercise that I did with participants in my presentation to illustrate this point was to give each person a fork and to tell them to come up with as many new uses for a fork as they could in 2 minutes.
Most people start that type of exercise somewhat paralyzed by their previous boxing of forks - but breaking outside the box can lead to some interesting (and sometimes useful )discoveries.
A question to ask - ‘how could I do XXX differently?’
3. Synthesis
Where two or more existing ideas are combined into a third new idea.
This is one of my favorite ways of being creative. I like the challenge and possibilities that it can bring.
This is what happened that fateful day that someone wondered what would happen if they combined the idea of a theatre and a restaurant together - theatre restaurant.
It’s this Synthesis that I think we’re seeing more and more of in the blogosphere at present as people combine blogs with other types of websites (forums, video, audio, job boards, chat rooms etc).
A question to ask when entering into synthesis - ‘how could I take the benefits of XXX and combine them with the benefits of YYY’?
4. Revolution
Where a completely new idea that is markedly different from a previous one is developed.
An example that comes to mind is of a blogger that I recently met who used to be an email newsletter marketer. He found that his newsletter lists were becoming less and less effective so decided to move from newsletters to blogs - reinventing (and enlivening) his business in the process.
His goals didn’t really change but his methods did considerably.
A question to ask - instead of asking ‘how can I make XXX better’ one might ask - ‘what could I do instead of XXX to achieve the same goals?’
5. Changing Direction
Where there is a complete change of focus.
This is a fairly radical process for a business or individual to take and generally involves wiping a slate clean to rebuild from the ground up.
A question to ask in this case - ‘if we could start over - how would we do things differently?’
I’m sure there are other ways to be creative (and I’d be interested to hear your suggestions below) but the above five might make a good place to start.
We often think that people are either creative or they aren't, but that's not entirely true. While there is certainly some innate talent, like any talent it improves with training and practice. Find ways to develop these attitudes in your employees and watch their creative skills improve.
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