Creative Caffeine

How to stimulate your creativity out of a slump

From MEH to WOW in 3 easy steps? If you’re into Wordle right now, your brain is no-doubt whirring into action. No, the answer is not  

MEH

MEW

MOW

WOW

But I like the way you think!

The formula I’m going to give you combines three incredibly powerful creativity catalysts. So, make sure you get out your goggles and protective lab coat for this.

Time required: This exercise will take 10-15 minutes.

Here are your ingredients:

1. A mindset: Self-belief
2. A skill: Mind mapping
3. A competency: Pick one of 4 proven trainable creative competencies (more below)

Step 1: Believe that you can do this

The starting point of any creative endeavour is a creative mindset. Your mindset is the environment in which your creative experiment takes place. Think of your mindset like a chemistry lab. You can’t test the vapour pressure of gas if it is baking hot inside the lab or if a gale is howling through the open windows.

Similarly, when ...

Do to others as you would have them do to you

It’s a Golden Rule. I love its universality and its simplicity. In our recent Insights Discovery workshop in India*, with delegates from a mixed bag of faiths and traditions, this rule stood its ground and resonated with everyone.

However, when it comes to communication, we need to take this rule a step further.

Improve on the Golden Rule!? I hear you gasp. Don’t worry. I’m not talking about changing the essence of the rule, just its application. Stay with me. Our different personality preferences cause us to want different things out of our interactions. People who are action-oriented, extroverted, and direct want you to speak up, cut the fluff and get to the point. People who are analytical, precise, and reserved would rather you send them an email with all the detail laid out in a logical manner.

So, the tweak to the rule is, “Do to others as they would have done to them.”

Are you giving them what they want or what you want?

Last w...

"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...