THINKing

Top 5 Posts

Here are the Top 5 Posts From THINKing this month, in case you missed one. Let us know which is your favorite.

The Rule Of Reciprocity

Twittering Journalists

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

Creativity 2010 - Week #7

Face Time

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Creativity 2010 - Week #10

Here are our creativity links for week 10 of 2010:

Three Enemies of Innovation - If innovation’s such a good thing, a good idea, the secret of success, then why isn’t everyone doing it?

The Levity Effect - Having fun with innovation.

 How far should you let people peek inside your creative process? - Should your creative process be transparent?

Does Stress Limit Creativity?  - A relaxed attitude boosts creativity.

Actions To Increase Your Creative Thinking -  Draw a picture, daydream: these are a couple of things that can help move your ideas along.

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Get Stimulated

Creativity is a major topic for us here at My Creative Team. So, we began a weekly series of posts that will run 52 weeks, providing five creativity links in each post. As you might imagine, we look through a lot of creativity-related material to find some really top-notch ones.

If you are an iPhone user, this creativity tool we ran across is for you. It’s caled the Idea Stimulator from creativity coach Nigel Collin.  According to the Idea Stimulator website, the .99 cent app is:

designed to help you come up with ideas and keep coming up with them.  So when you’re stuck for creative inspiration and just need something to help trigger your creative mind to inspire ideas, just open up the ‘Idea Stimulator’ and get going. There are over 100 different ideas and exercises which randomly appear to help you. There’s also an articles page with some great information and useful tips.

I have it loaded and am using it already. If you buy it, let us know how you like it and how you are using it.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #9

Here are our creativity links for week 9 of 2010:

New Creativity iPhone App -  A go-anywhere tool that you can use to catalyze ideas on demand is a compelling one.

The Mad World Of Innovation -  I feel I’m in good company as I observe the sheer insanity of companies and the way they embrace innovation.

Cultivate Your Genius (podcast) - Explore the 7 essential principles by which Leonardo Da Vinci lived.

Reverse Brainstorming - A different approach to brainstorming.

Design Tools From The American Creativity Association

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Creativity 2010 - Week #8

More creativity links for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Creativity & The Idea Grid -  The Idea Grid has been a staple at agencies to illustrate how a product or company can differentiate themselves by occupying or owning  position that no one else is currently exploiting.

What Is Lateral Thinking? -  Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means.

Creativity Is At The Heart Of 21st Century Work - Creativity in Business Thought Leader Series interview number 11 is with celebrated New York Times best-selling author, Dan Pink.

Freewriting - A Method For Unblocking Creativity - Freewriting is a personal creativity technique that is particularly useful when you have hit a mental roadblock.

Harnessing The Creativity Of The Individual - Creativity is at the same time robust and fragile. Bold ideas seem to speak with their own authority and stir the imagination and spirits of humans.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #7

The Walking Advert - Here’s another idea designed to harness businesses’ lust for exposure: make yourself into a walking advert. Is this something you could customize to work in your business?

Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography - The perfect infography must synthetize complex information in a simple visual representation, which is not easy. The following examples take information architecture to another level by making it beautiful.

Increasing Creativity and Memory in 30 Seconds? -  There is a folk tradition that someone with shifty eyes is considered untrustworthy – as being devious or sneaky. The truth is,  purposely shifting one’s eyes back and forth for 30 second intervals was found to increase creative output as well as memory recall.

The Many Forms Of Creativity -  I am not a creative snob, I don’t think it is reserved to one area of life. I love it in almost every form, the only thing I ask in creativity is that it is easily accessible to the masses.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #6

30 Seconds To Creativity - People who watched a target moving side-to-side for 30 seconds have been tested as producing significantly more ideas when immediately given a creative task. This technique is, “thought to increase the cross-talk between the hemispheres.”

Switch Off Your Social Self.  Switch On Your Creativity -  The paradox is that, when you’re being yourself, rather than trying to imitate success, you’ll be your most original and creative.

Were The SuperBowl Ads Any Good?  Let’s Ask Twitter! - Even in an age of social media there’s still something about Superbowl advertising that appeals to us all.

Need A Business Idea? Look For Pain - If you really want to innovate your business and improve your revenue look for the pain that customers face daily.

Why Design Matters -  All of the energy fed into the debate about the value of good design to the world of commerce would be better spent building ways to make holistic design a routine activity in business—and society.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #5

This week’s top creativity links from My Creative Team:

Alternative Scenarios - Scenarios are qualitatively different descriptions of plausible futures. They can give you a deeper understanding of potential environments in which you might have to operate and what you may need to do in the present. Scenario analysis helps you to identify what environmental factors to monitor over time, so that when the environment shifts, you can recognize where it may be headed.

Brainstorming: Mastering The Bad Idea -  Have you ever noticed that it’s always the other guy who comes up with the most creative idea first.

My Creative Team Custom Creativity Search -  We’ve set up a custom Google search to help you locate innovation-related links.

Innovation Blogs -  A directory of blogs focused on innovation.

BusinessWeek On Innovation -  A constantly updated source for stories relating to innovation in business.

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More Brain Exercises

In our past two posts we talked about pumping up your brain and we offered a couple of brain exercises. Here are a couple more for your little gray cells.

Group Think
Brainstorming in a group often does not work because people are afraid of speaking their ideas out loud. This is a way around that fear. Assemble a group. Write down three ideas on a piece of paper and pass it to the person on your right. That person reads the ideas and adds three more ideas triggered by the previous ideas. This continues until it gets back to the beginning.

Random Input
A random piece of information often can take your problem-solving process into hyperdrive. Once you have your question or problem clearly stated, open up a dictionary or a thesaurus to any page and select a word. Now, think about how this random item applies to your problem. There is some connection and your job is to find it.

OK, now you have some new tools to pump up your brain. Do some heavy lifting.

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Brain Exercises

We talked recently about pumping up your brain with exercises for the little gray cells. Today, here are two more to try:

Ignore The Rules
Now, I’m not suggesting that you should break laws. Rather, I am saying you need to look for approaches that fall outside the norm. Ancient prophecy said that whoever could untie the Gordian Knot would be king of Asia. Everyone, including Alexander the Great, failed when they tried to unravel it. Frustrated, Alexander took out his sword and sliced the knot in half. Mission accomplished.

Reframing The Problem
You can look at problems from different perspectives using what is called the Reframing Matrix. Take a piece of paper and write down your question in the middle of the paper. Draw a grid around it. In one grid you might ask, “how would a doctor approach this problem?” In another, “how would an engineer solve this?” In yet another, “how would a farmer look at this?”

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