Imagine a world where creativity is dying out. A time when we leave creative thinking to machines. When humans are just entranced, lardy skin bags full of offal sat in front of a bank of TV monitors neuronally connected to a computer terminal. Inhaling information and products like a crustacean scouring the ocean floor for plankton and mollusks.
Latest research out of Stanford University by Gerald Crabtree suggests that humans are becoming dumb to dumber rather than evolving super brains because our relatively safe, sanitized, civilized world has taken away the stress of Darwinian competition. This means our brains were much sharper when we were hunting the woolly Mammoth and gathering the mixed fruits and berries.
And yet a survey of 5,000 people across the US, UK, Germany France and Japan revealed that four out of five believe that economic growth in the 21st century will depend on our ability to unlock our personal creativity. But only a quarter of the people surveyed believe they are reaching their own creative potential at work.
So why is this happening? Why aren't people fulfilling their creative potential?
Apparently people feel under too much pressure to conform. To be productive and increase performance while maintaining the parameters of standardisation. In other words the people surveyed felt they were expected to prioritise conformity over creativity while there is still an expectation by business leaders that they should think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to problems. A clear case of cognitive dissonance.
50% of the people surveyed also said that the biggest barrier to thinking creatively was time. They are just too busy ensuring they attend to tasks that maintain profitability. So, what's the solution?
First let's flip this thought on it's head.
If time was the only barrier between you and increased profitability for you business wouldn't you try to find some extra time?
It follows then that if developing a higher capacity for creative thinking is vital for surviving the shifting sands of today's unpredictable market place it might be worth asking yourself this question.
Is there a gap between what you feel, think, say and do to produce the results required of you and what you feel, think, say and do to come up with innovative solutions?
If there is then where might you find some extra time to start exercising your creative thinking muscle?
Once you've worked that out you might like to try these 5 creative muscle builders:
1. Challenge some Assumptions - Have a long hard think and identify assumptions that you make day to day that both hinder and help you achieve success at work.
2. The Lotus Blossom Technique - Follow this LINKfor a cool creative thinking technique.
3. Random Word Technique - Define a problem then pick a random word. Now force an association between the word and the problem. For example your problem might be how to liven up your journey to work. The random word could be 'Frog'. List how many ways Frogs can move around. Hopping, swimming, crawling, floating on a Lilipad etc. How might you apply these ideas to come up with a more interesting route to work?
4. Polar Response - Look at your problem and create a list of ways you could make the problem worse. Sometimes a solution will emerge that you might not have thought of by thinking only about taking positive actions.
5. The See, Hear, Feel and Touch exercise. This is purely about developing your imagination by using your senses. Take a few minutes in the day to imagine an object that is personal to you. Using visualisation get a sense of how it feels to touch, it's weight and temperature. How it looks, how it smells and even how it sounds as you hold an image of the object in your mind.
So even though there's no wooly Mammoth left to chase and you've got used to grabbing a bag of mixed fruit and berries from ASDA, by practicing the exercises above for just 21 days you could start increasing the creative thinking capacity of your brain and help to close the gap between conformity and creativity.
Okay then?...Pass the remote!
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