Simple Trick for Better
Brainstorming Sessions
Need lots of ideas right now? Here's
how to get them.
The ability to generate good ideas
is perhaps one of the most valuable assets in business. But what if you're
feeling uninspired or blocked?
First, you need to understand everyone has the ability to be creative. It's not a special gift
only certain people--brilliant marketers, improv actors, serial entrepreneurs,
and the like--possess. But if that's the case, how do you turn creativity on when
you need it?
What
the Research Shows
According to HBR.org, a team of
researchers led by Sophie Ellwood at the University of Sydney recently found
evidence that incubation--taking a break from a problem to focus on something
unrelated--can increase creativity.
The researchers split 90 psychology
students into three groups and tasked them with listing as many alternative
uses for a piece of paper as possible.
The first group generated ideas for
four minutes straight. The second group was interrupted after two minutes and
told to generate synonyms for words (another creativity-related task) and then
given another two minutes to come up with alternative uses for paper. The
researchers also interrupted the third group after two minutes but asked
students to take the Myers-Briggs test, something unrelated to creativity or
the original task, and then gave the students two more minutes to get back to
listing odd uses for paper.
The third group--the one given time
for incubation--hatched the most ideas, an average of 9.8. The second group
averaged 7.6 ideas, while the first group came up with an average of only 6.9
ideas. In short, the numbers show an incubation period--even a short one--can
increase creativity.
"Taking a break from the
problem and focusing on something else entirely gives the mind some time to
release its fixation on the same solutions and let the old pathways fade from
memory," writes David
Burkus, assistant professor of management
at Oral Roberts University. "Then, when you return to the original
problem, your mind is more open to new possibilities--eureka moments."
Creative
Ways to Incubate
It's a strategy that works outside
of research, as well. One chief creative officer I recently interviewed says getting out of the office and walking around Manhattan
helps him make new associations. The idea for his hugely successful company
actually came from an old-fashioned 24-frame lenticular--one that uses a
sequence of images to create an animation--he found in a store in 1997 during
one such walkabout.
Playing with children's toys is
another variant of incubation that works well for a lot of folks. "I'm not
the least bit self-conscious about my toy collection," writes research
psychologist Keith Sawyer.
"If you walk into just about any supercreative company, you'll find toys
all over the place."
Cultivating mindfulness is yet
another way to step away from a problem and return to it later better able to
spawn good solutions. Book author and corporate consultant Michael Gelb helps
business people foster creativity by training them to appreciate beauty and do things such as listen to music, admire art,
thoughtfully taste wine or chocolate, as well as write poetry.
It's a matter of paying close
attention to what's happening right now. Not only can it help you be more
creative, it's the key to enjoying life, he says.
BY Christina DesMarais http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/this-simple-trick-can-make-you-more-creative.html?cid=em01020week13d
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