Creative Caffeine

"A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." John A. Shedd

Celia and I have recently returned from an exciting and eye-opening trip to Hyderabad, India. We were invited by  My Choices Foundation to deliver training to their team of 60 leaders as part of their 10-Year Anniversary celebrations. My Choices Foundation (MCF) is an NGO that aims to give women, children and families choices to live lives free from violence, abuse and exploitation. 

We thought we were going to share our creative thinking, innovation and Insights Discovery learning with the leaders of MCF.

But we were wrong.

We were going to learn from them.

Here are three of the many lessons in creative thinking that we’ve learned over the past two weeks in India that you can apply to any problems you may be trying to solve.

(If you are wondering how My Choices Foundation (MCF) works and how we ended up in India, read on to the end!)

Creativity lessons we can all take from MCF

1.    Be brave a...

Are you lingering in the curtain wings of your life’s stage because it’s not probable that you will achieve your big creative dream?

If we look at statistics, it is probable that you will stay in your comfort zone. Most people follow a similar and predictable path. When they try something new, there are typically lots of challenges and setbacks. These tend to discourage another try. Given these probabilities, it is more likely that you will remain in your comfort zone. It’s logical.

Friend, I was lingering there for a long time.

But then I decided to leap out into the lights.

Step onto your stage

Something that helped me to take that leap, was learning the difference between probability and possibility. I learned this from my mentor and friend, Lisa Linfield, author of Deep Grooves: Overcoming Patterns That Keep You Stuck.  

Lisa explained that we tend to get stuck on whether or not something is probable. Is it probable that I will build a thriving business/ create a lasting le...

The first time I received a personality profile report, I was amazed at how accurate it was. Before completing the assessment, I was concerned about having my personality "boxed". Having worked with personality profiling for many years now, I understand better that, far from putting us in a box, a personality profile is a tool with broad-stroke themes to help us to get out of our self-created boxes. There is much value to be gained in holding up a mirror to our preferences, decision making tendencies and personal style.

Personality profiles can help us understand ourselves, understand others, and make the most of the relationships that affect us at work and at home. 

They also help us understand our potential creative strengths and weaknesses. 

How your personality impacts your creativity

Your creativity plays out through the lens of your personality. So, the better you understand your personality, the better you will understand your potential creative strengths, weaknesses and opp...

If you're asking this, you're not alone. It's a good question.

In answer, let me tell you a (true) story.

Nope. It's not about the cute little construction worker below. That's my daughter, a few years ago, getting ready to fix/ break something (we are never sure. I don't think she is either.)

My story is about a group of workers (many in hard hats) who were facing layoffs before creative thinking saved the day.

A small municipality in Orange County California was struggling. There were issues everywhere and not enough funds to resolve them (sound familiar, Joburgers?) The city manager realised that the problems weren't being solved by committees in board rooms. He wanted to involve more staff in finding solutions. He wanted workers from every deparment involved, from Roadworks to Parks & Recreation, from Police to Human Resources. The idea was to get those closest to the problems to apply their own thinking to the solutions.

So, the city manager put 173 employees (nearly hal...

How NOT to start the year.

I had great intentions for the first week of January.

We had returned from a refreshing and happy family holiday at the coast. Johannesburg was blissfully quiet and bursting with green life from the abundant summer rains. The blank pages of my new year planner waited patiently to be filled with mind maps, plans, tasks, ideas, and doodles.

I love fresh starts and the promise of renewal that a new year brings (even if it is just in my own mind.) It feels like a Great Cosmic Control-Alt-Delete. I couldn’t wait to get started. During my down time away, ideas had been popping into my head: ways to grow our business, books to read, content to create, people to connect with, technology to acquire, updates to make and so on. My first priority was to get writing and to create a truckload of content from all my fresh ideas before business in South Africa kicks off again mid-January.  

Then a peculiar thing happened.

Having spent hours clearing out my office, movin...

We have entered an exciting new age of civilisation. We have moved from the Agricultural and Industrial Age to the Information Age where factory workers from the Industrial Age moved into the knowledge economy and services took over from products as the main activity. Now, in the Imagination Age, knowledge work and analysis is being left to the machines. People are working in areas that can’t be done by computers –  these include power skills such as imagination, creativity, and emotional and social IQ.

Imagination is far from a whimsical indulgence. It is essential for progress and for finding new solutions. Top business minds around the world are recognising the importance of imagination and creativity. Harvand Business Review authors, Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller write,

“We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new p...

I'll never forget what he said.

I heard him say it on a podcast. It was a talk about getting to where you want to go. The voice coming through my earphones was Andy Stanley and he was talking about how to achieve your goals. He said something so profound that it changed my behaviour immediately. Yet, when you read what it was that he said, you may be surprised at how simple it is (or how simple I am!)  

What he said was, and I'm paraphrasing: if you want to get to Cape Town, no matter how fast you drive or how determined you are, if you are on the road to Durban, you are not going to arrive at Cape Town. 

Drop the mic. 

No seriously... it suddenly made so much sense to me. What it comes down to is getting yourself onto the road that will take you to your destination. It seems so obvious, but so many of us have dreams and hopes and desires, but have not yet steered our car onto the road that will take us to the place where we achieve them. We procrastinate, we hesitate, we don't k...

Nina and I were excited to receive an email from Professor David Gill, telling us about his new paper that clearly demonstrates that creativity measured in childhood predicts future success.

Professor Gill wrote to us saying, "I've just finished writing a new paper where we show that creativity measured in childhood predicts educational attainment and success in the labor market, over and above the effect of traditional cognitive ability. Incredibly, we are not aware of any other work that links creativity in childhood to labor market outcomes!"

This is indeed extraordinary given society's huge interest in childhood creativity. Sir Ken Robinson's talk "Do schools kill creativity?" is the most watched TED talk of all time and has been downloaded more that 71 million times.

We would like to thank Professor Gill for sharing his excellent paper with us and would like to share his key findings with you. The quotations that follow are from his academic paper entitled "The Creativity Pr...

In celebration of Women’s Day in South Africa, we would like to shout out to some of the incredible women in our network who inspire us. These creative thinkers are using their skills and insights to help women around the world grow and by showing us what is possible.

Kgomotso Matsunyane, One Man Studios

Kgomotso is a multi-talented producer, writer, director, editor, businesswoman and television presenter. She hosted the late-night TV shows Pillow Talk and  Late Night with Kgomotso, and afternoon drive radio show, Uncaptured, on Kaya FM. She is a serial entrepreneur and director of production company, One Man Studios. 

Kgomotso uses her influence and network to advocate for Positive Sexual Health through her Golden Triangle Initiative. She has also established a free, public, multimedia Feminist library that archives, documents and celebrates feminism, especially African Feminism.

Kgomotoso introduced us to the THNK School of Creative Leadership, where she attended an Executive ...

Everything in nature is part of a system

When it comes to creativity, we have a lot to learn from nature, especially when it comes to working together to achieve a better outcome.

German forester, Peter Wohlleben, shone a light on how trees work together in forests his 2016 book, The Hidden Life of Trees. Over a period of 20 years, Wohlleben studied the lives of trees whilst managing a forest in Germany. He learned that trees communicate complex information to one another via smell, taste, and electrical impulses. Rather than standing as lone organisms they form a strong community sharing nutrients via their root systems, ‘nurturing’ younger trees, supporting sick or aging trees, and warning each other of danger.

Wohlleben describes this incredible warning system:

“Four decades ago, scientists noticed something on the African savannah. The giraffes there were feeding on umbrella thorn acacias, and the trees didn’t like this one bit. It took the acacias mere minutes to start pump...