Stretching Creativity Muscles

Creative types are often pictured in marketing think tanks and brainstorming meetings as people with unconventional taste in clothes and jewellery. In fact we are all creative. Most of the sentences you utter every day are completely original.

Belief has a lot to do with it. Placebo's, pills that contain no drugs, have been shown to help cure medical conditions just because the patient has been led to believe in the treatment. Past experience of finding solutions to problems sets our unconscious expectation of competence. If we believe we can, we do. Sounds too simple doesn't it. If you associate problems with failure you are sabotaging your ability to come up with creative answers.

You have probably heard the phrase; 'problems are opportunities'. Its truth is not much help when you can't find a way to resolve something. Here some of the practical methods I use to generate ideas if I am stuck:

1. Reverse the Question

Suppose you can't think of a good reason to get back in front of a prospect who is about to make a decision. Ask yourself "What reasons could I give to avoid speaking with them if they called me?" All kinds of excuses will occur to you. Pursue them and see where they lead. Amongst your ideas will be just the reason for talking to them that you are looking for.

2. Mentor

Call to mind the most successful sales person, business leader, entrepreneur, or guru whom you know something about. Imagine yourself in their presence, asking their advice. What would they suggest?

3. Brainstorm

Write your problem at the top of a piece of paper. Underneath write every possible solution that occurs to you. Make sure you include any silly or impractical ideas that occur to you. Record everything. The sillier the better. Don't stop to consider any of the ideas, just keep going until you have at least twenty-five. Don’t worry if none of them make sense. Put your list to one side until the following day. Now repeat the process. If you need to, refer to yesterday’s list for inspiration. It seldom takes more than a day or two before you discover just the idea you need.

4. Brainstorm in a Group

Even working with one other person can rapidly accelerate the process. I have found that five to seven people is the optimal range. First write your problem or challenge at the top of a piece of a flip chart. Have one of your number write down everyone’s ideas. Pick someone who can write quickly, so that they don’t interrupt the process in trying to keep up. Remember to lay down the ground rule and enforce them rigorously:

  • Know-one present may criticize any idea no matter how foolish it seems
  • All ideas must be treated with equal respect and recorded by the scribe
  • Don't allow any discussion of ideas at this stage. Keep everyone focused on the target
  • For two people, make the target 40 ideas
  • If you have three or more participants, try for 100 ideas
  • Postpone discussion of any idea until after the target has been reached

5. Create a Mind Map or Learning Map

Start with a blank sheet of paper. Draw an image that represents your topic or challenge in the centre. If you can’t think of a good picture, write it and put a circle around it. Identify the main possibilities and draw branches for each theme. Write identifying phrases of descriptions along the branches. Use sub branches to identify subordinate or related ideas. Draw pictures to represent your thoughts. This way you stimulate your visual thinking, which helps you to come up with more ideas. It doesn’t matter if your pictures have artistic merit. They don’t have to make sense to anyone but you. Use different colours to further stimulate your visual creativity. As you develop your mind map it will prompt you to think of more new ideas. Repeating the exercise, just to tidy up your map, will lead you to think of still more ideas.

6. Select a Word at Random from a Dictionary

Think, ‘how does this word apply to my topic or challenge’. Ask yourself, ‘what solutions does this word lead to?’ Edward De Bono, the famous scientist who has spent a lifetime studying how people think, invented this method and used it to help Sony design innovative televisions. Using his dictionary association method, he selected a word at random and practised his lateral thinking discipline using the word as a starting point. The word he had randomly selected was ‘cheese’. Soon he came to thinking about cheese with holes in it and from their he got the idea for picture in picture. Sony subsequently differentiated their televisions by including the ability to watch other channels in windows.

Creativity is much more dependent on practise and persistence than most people think. The brain is a muscle. It gets stronger the more you use it. It may seem hard at first however; if you spent just fifteen minutes brainstorming every day, within a few weeks, you will have more ideas than you know what to do with.

Article by Clive Miller
Questions and comments to clive@salessense.co.uk