Creativity and innovation

So What's New? - Update: 1st September **The IF Creativity Quiz**

The Creativity Quiz

Here at Impact Factory we don't ask 'How Creative Are You?' but rather 'How Are You Creative?'

There's no escaping it – we all are! You probably didn't wake up this morning thinking 'I must log on and do the Impact Factory Creativity Quiz'. But here you are. So somehow you created a path that got you here! We might even say that we're all constantly creating. Because we're all making choices all of the time. And when we make choices we're creating decisions.

So in what ways are we creative? What makes a behaviour creative, how can we identify these behaviours and then how can we use them to bring creativity and innovation into our organisations?

This is a quick and fun quiz to help you start to identify those creative behaviours in yourself and others. It's important to note that these are behaviours, not personality types. We might lean more towards certain behaviours at certain times but all of them are accessible to everyone.

So take our quiz and find out how you are creative...

 

Creativity News Article Update October 2009

The Who, What, Why, When and Where of Creativity & Innovation...

by Philippa Waller, IF Creativity and Innovation Team

It's Monday morning and you're sitting in the boardroom. The usual team has been gathered together for a brainstorming session. Innovation is required... a new product, service, way of operating but no one's quite sure what exactly the goal is.

The session begins with an awful lot of questions in the hope that everyone's creative juices will get flowing and bingo – the miracle that is creativity will descend, inspire and reap its rewards. What if a few more questioned were asked – and answered – before the session even began? Would the level of creativity needed have a bit more chance of meeting the  level of productivity needed if we asked five simple questions... Who, What, Why, When and Where?

Creativity, Innovation and Brainstorming - Who

Rather than gathering the 'usual team' to a creativity or brainstorming session you might want to ask who would be particularly useful for this session?

• Who's good at bringing all the facts to the table if that's what's needed?
• Who's good at thinking so far outside the box that we might just get an idea that's original enough for this leading edge, whacky client?
• We're on a deadline – who's the most efficient facilitator or organiser in the company that can collate and synthesize a wide range of ideas quickly and effectively?
• Who's realistic and understands budget constraints?
• Or who's the contrarian who might throw everything up in the air and get this party started?

Look at where you're at, the priorities in terms of your current position or what you need from this meeting and choose your team carefully.

Creativity , Innovation and Brainstorming - What

It's an idea to be very specific about what it is you'll be brainstorming around during a certain meeting. If it's a new product,

• is it the content of the product itself?
• Is it the packaging?
• The marketing?
• The brand value?

Let the team members know exactly what issues, problems, areas the meeting will be looking at and ask them to come along with a few thoughts and ideas.

Research has shown that the most productive and innovative brainstorming sessions arise through a combination of pre-meeting solo brainstorming and collaborative brainstorming within the session. By giving people a very clear 'what' before the meeting you'll not only save time but potentially expand and increase the creative potential.

Creativity, Innovation and Brainstorming - Why

Tell people why you want them there.
And why the session is happening.

Giving people that information not only empowers them by letting them know you value and seek their expertise but also reduces their anxiety levels or concerns. The more knowledge members of the team have the more part of that team they will feel.

You will have created more of an environment of trust. Trust and lowered levels of anxiety allow an individual to relax and frees up the brain to the creative flow that makes for a highly successful and fun brainstorming session.

Creativity, Innovation and Brainstorming - When

It might seem obvious but does your creative team function best at 9am on a Monday morning? Possibly they do – fresh from the weekend and bursting with new influences and ideas from the weekend.

Or perhaps they need a few hours to gear back up into the work environment.

• How about setting an evening aside?
• How would that feel?
• Annoying?
• Or special, focussed and slightly maverick within the dark and quiet of the office?
• Would the team work well over a working lunch?

You know your team and the 'when' could have a big impact on the feelings and energy levels brought to the table.

Creativity, Innovation and Brainstorming  - Where

Environment plays a huge part in any meeting and particularly in a creativity or brainstorming session. Sound and visuals will have a huge influence. If the default position is to book the same old meeting room; 

• Is there another option?
• Can the session take place outside?
• How about if the team went away somewhere completely different for the day?

If we're invited to a meeting to be creative, the environment we’ve been invited into will have a huge affect on how we feel we're valued and how relaxed we feel.

What if the session is held in an architecturally stunning building, London's design museum or a trendy basement den – might that make the team feel like they have to up their game?

And if the brain is visually stimulated into telling itself to up its game... guess what... it does just that. Even if you can't make it to some exotic alternative location how can you change people's perceptions or surprise their expectations by adorning, shifting or adapting the current meeting room?

So – get creative about how you get creative! Ask the Who, What, Why, When and Where before you even start a brainstorm. It means ideas will be generated and minds stimulated before you've even sat down in the meeting room, poured the coffee and passed the plate of biscuits…or is that squeezed the guava juice and shared round the star fruit platter on a beach themed roof garden...

Read More About Creativity and Innovation  

Creativity & Innovation feature in Ask the Experts

As a leader, how can I encourage networks of conversations within my organisation that go from top to bottom and back up again in a continuous feedback loop?

Read Tom's Ask the Experts article on A Creative Leadership - the leading edge

Hidden Resources of Creativity

It's a little known fact that on the morning after the creators of the universe ignited the energy and intelligence that became human beings they began to have regrets.

They realized that they'd put a little too much energy and intelligence into the initial mixture. As a result they feared they may have brought something into being that was even more creative and powerful than they were themselves.

Traditionally the creators of the universe had sole access to the 3 fundamental raw materials from which to create material things. Namely: energy, imagination and intelligence.

But the things they created: animals, minerals and vegetables would only have access to the material world and therefore always be under the power of the creators.

However with humans things looked a little different.

They seemed like a highly curious being and would soon want to know what was behind matter and the physical world. The creators decided they would have to hide the sources of energy, imagination and intelligence lest the humans found them and usurped the rulers of the Cosmos.

The creators had a brainstorming meeting to decide what to do and where to hide the resources for creativity. The ideas came fast and furiously from the minds of the creators of the universe:

In the vast deserts?

At the bottom of the deepest oceans? In the darkest reaches of outer space?

But none seemed to ensure that the resilient human beings wouldn’t find them.

Eventually one of the youngest creators made a suggestion:

“Just hide the energy, imagination and intelligence deep inside each human but make them think they don’t have any.

They’ll never look there!”

The Creative Factor

Is being creative simply coming up with a big idea?
Or is it something more?
A set of behaviours perhaps?
The way we see, feel, think and do stuff every day.

But when we see, feel, think and do things as we've always seen, felt, thought and done them, maybe our BIG IDEAS are always the same. Perhaps sometimes we behave too smart, too soon, and miss an opportunity to come up with a smaller idea that might be more unique and innovative.

However when we, see, feel, think and do things differently we begin to include a behaviour that we call the Creative Factor.

The Creative Factor - A vital Communication Skill

At Impact Factory we are committed to the craft and practice of effective communication. We also believe that human creativity is a communication skill.

Being able to communicate our ideas, beliefs and experiences in a way that both informs, engages and inspires others is at the heart of, and vital for our continued personal and professional development in today's competitive world.

Creative thought is also central to two key tenets of our philosophy:

Work with what you already do well

In other words identify your strengths and expand those qualities. This essentially means that if we continually focus on trying to behave in ways that are not natural for us we are missing an opportunity to improve and expand on the behaviours that really work well for us already. That doesn't mean that we can't develop new skills and address areas where we are less strong. It does mean that we can become more effective communicators more easily and quickly if we begin with what works about us.

Change yourself to change others

This second tenet centres around the idea of being mindful of how we react and behave when dealing with others. Self awareness is the key to this. Effective communicators are often able to think laterally or at least have a flexibility of thought and make choices based on what is required in a situation rather than reacting, purely from a place of emotion. This is primarily linked to our level of emotional intelligence and is also linked to our ability to think creatively.

Some may be surprised to read this sentence:

Creative thinking is not just confined to arts and crafts, performance artists or drawing and design.

We are beginning to understand that new perspectives and breakthrough ideas are actually the result of different types of thinking and behaviours that culminate in what we have traditionally called creativity and Innovation. We are also discovering that the lone, creative, genius working in 'one way' and coming up with all the ideas is proving to be a myth. (Read more on Group Genius Keith Sawyer)

It turns out that even Einstein had some help...

He is acknowledged as having said:

"A scientist must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist, drawing selectively on the views of the realist, idealist, positivist and Platonist as it suited the scientist’s purposes."

(Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,1949)

In the book from which this quote comes, Einstein is essentially saying that his ideas were often informed by a collation of perspectives and concepts. His genius was in bringing these perspectives together with his own ideas and coming up with the General Theory of Relativity.

Creativity as a combination of diverse thinking and behaviours

With our creativity and Innovation programmes we not only seek to provide delegates with the tools to think more creatively we also seek to surface each individuals unique way of being creative.

The phrase we often hear at the start of a creativity programme is

"I'm not creative!"

This is the central challenge. For the question we ask is not "how creative are you?" but rather "how are you creative?"

Generating Ideas – Five Windows™ of Creativity

Created especially for Impact Factory by Tom Bruno-Magdich, the Five Windows™ represent different approaches to the creative process and help to identify your individual style of creativity.

The Five Windows™ doesn't ask the question "How creative are you?" but rather, "How are you creative?" This process reflects Impact Factory's central principle of working with what already works about you.

The Five Windows™ unpicks the actual process of creativity and shows that you have far more choices available than perhaps you realised. The Windows help you see things from a different perspective and will also help slow down anyone who tends to fit into the 'too smart, too soon' category.

Human Evolution and Creativity

So how can we help those that believe they are not creative to see themselves from a different perspective? One that reveals that they are in fact more creative than they might realise?

The first thing we might need to acknowledge is that we human beings are inherently creative. From the level of our cells and DNA right up to the way our bodies and minds continually regenerate and adapt to our environments to the conscious and unconscious solutions to problems we face each day, during the course of our lives and work.

The process evolution itself, which has produced you and I, is a highly creative process that's working within and through us even now, as you’re reading this.

We might even argue that a human being is more part of a 'creative process' heading for an innovation rather than a final product. A work in progress.

Indeed in his latest book 'Creative Explorations' the sociologist David Gauntlett suggests that our ideas of a personal, self identity may be a little vague and abstract.

"Academics have found it difficult to establish what identity means, so that at times it has been reduced to a set of categories such as gender, ethnicity, and physical ability (each of which becomes more fuzzy itself, when inspected closely)."

Our Creative Journey

He discovered, through his research, that people seemed to be on a creative 'journey'. Even though we are heavily influenced by an increasingly globalised and mainstream fashion-led culture we seem to want to assert our own distinctive sense of self. We each seem to be creating meaning through a narrative of ourselves and our lives:

"with each person as the hero of their own story, often moving away from historical ties towards greater stability, fulfilment, and engagement with the world. Despite the dominance of consumer culture - of which popular media is a part - peoples goals were not about possessions gained, but about social connections, inner happiness, and a life well lived." (Buy the book here)

So even in the act of participating in the a culture we will create. The world needn't just happen to us, we can be and often are co - creators. The suggestion by George Bernard Shaw that "Life is less about finding yourself and more about creating yourself" may in fact prove to be true.

The IF Innovation team

The IF Innovation team consists of associates and partners who have completed 2 years with Impact Factory and are expert facilitators able to lead any number of our programmes around several issues.

The primary focus of everyone who joins the Innovation team is how the behaviours and processes of creativity and Innovation can be applied, for both professional and personal development.

Read more on Creativity and Innovation below

20% Thinking Creatively

Just 20% of your people thinking creatively will begin to generate both innovation and a culture of creativity in your organisation.

Creativity and Innovation Quiz

This is a quick and fun quiz to help you start to identify those creative behaviours in yourself and others. It's important to note that these are behaviours, not personality types.

Creativity and Innovation Seminar

This 90 minute Creativity and Innovation seminar for up to 100 participants can help you come through these challenging times.

Diffusion of Innovations

Diffusion of Innovations is the theory of how, why, and the pace at which an innovation spreads through different cultures.

Head of IF Innovation team - Tom Bruno-Magdich

Creativity and interpersonal communication have been the abiding themes of Senior Partner, Tom Bruno-Magdich's eclectic career portfolio.

The IF Innovation team - Dannie Carr

Actor, director, acting coach, college lecturer, voice-over artist, writer, events coordinator. The list of Dannie’s skills is extensive and a natural fit for Impact Factory’s eclectic array of Associates.

The IF Innovation team - Philippa Waller

Having worked in both the arts and in business as well as a screenplay writer for both Hollywood and the British Film Industry, Philippa has an understanding and a passion for how creativity is fundamental to both.

What was Current Last Week?

This is where you can browse the archives of the latest news and articles on Creativity and Innovation, from the IF Creativity and Innovation Experts here at Impact Factory.