Sales Representatives, Marketing Teams, Customer Service Centers, Doctors, Consultants, Trainers, Leaders,… they all have to be creative in one way or the other. They are inventing new products, meeting the same client for the hundredth time, facing an unknown situation that needs to be solved… They need ideas.
When I asked people what their understanding of creativity is, they said: “Having good ideas, finding a brilliant solution, doing something different.” Nobody said: “Generating a lot of ideas”. Being creative means for most people to get to an idea that is not ordinary but new, that is not just different but as well useful. Being creative is for most people connected to the result, an uncommon yet usable result. What if creativity is not about the result but about the process?
When creativity leads to a novel and usable product, we speak about innovation. Creativity is one part of the innovation process. But creativity is also more than that. Creativity means intentionally generating ideas. Creativity refers to the process of producing ideas – a lot of ideas.
And this is where trouble starts for most of us. We come up with three or four ideas and then nothing. We feel blocked. Ideas just don’t want to flow. The problem here lies in expectations. We expect greatness or nothing. When producing ideas we tend to judge the output immediately: this idea is good, this one is not useful, that one is too expensive, the others are not feasible, and so on. We are limiting our creative process. This can happen with individuals as well as with teams. Edward de Bono, creativity guru and author of more than forty books on the topic, explains that the blockade arises when we are mixing two steps: generating ideas and evaluating ideas.
First, we have to concentrate on generating ideas. And therefore we can use different techniques. If now brainstorming comes to your mind, you are close. But it is a quite limited creativity technique. Done in a small group of people it works for who has ideas. But when we have only a few ideas we will sense an insuperable barrier and be watching the brainstorming passively. Have you ever been in such a situation?
We have good news for you. Creative thinking can be learned. There are powerful creativity techniques that help to break exactly these barriers. Some of the most known are probably: Random Input, Metaphorical Thinking, Provocation, Reversal, or Attribute Listing. If you are interested in a customized training for your marketing team (Creative Marketing), sales representatives (Creative Sales), top management team (Creative Leadership) we’ll find a creative solution for you.
Artigo originalmente publicado a 7 de Dezembro de 2018
