Eight Suggestions for Better Brainstorming

Brainstorming has a bad reputation, mostly because most people have no clue how to run a brainstorming session. Gregg Fraley offers us “Eight Suggestions For Great Brainstorming/Ideation.”

Is It Time to Break Up the Band? When Creative Teams Lose the Spark

Mike Brown has written a thoughtful essay about creative teams who burn through their creative energy. He cites a couple of opposing examples:

• The Beatles, who broke up when it was obvious that the magic was gone,
• The Rolling Stones (and a couple other bands) who keep on rolling. Yeah, they make money and fill stadiums, but most critics agree that their later works are not nearly as good as their early hits.

Brown says it’s best to “break up the band” when the spark is gone.

Sometimes creative energy gets used up, never to be replenished. That’s part of what was magical about The Beatles. We didn’t have to live through (much of) their crappy output. We have their best work to remember them by without years of subpar filler.

Take this lesson to heart in your own creative life. You may be a part of a magical creative team, but chances are it will run its course – which is completely normal. When it happens, enjoy your memories, and let your former creative partnership be.

I have to wonder if there’s perhaps another way: Doing the hard work of rekindling the spark. How one would have done that with a pair of personalities like Lennon and McCartney, I haven’t a clue. But I tend to be an optimist who loves happy endings—especially against-all-odds happy endings.

Six Facets of Individual Creativity

Perhaps we’ll never nail them all down, but here’s some research that identified six facets of individual creativity:

The research showed that the test used could predict a person’s ability to come up with new solutions, collaborate with others, sell and communicate ideas to others and think creatively under stress.

The top six variables that emerged were:

• Openness to Experience – The inclination to seek out and appreciate new experiences and have a high level of curiosity
• Creative Self Efficacy – Basically if you believe you are creative you are more likely to be creative
• Resilience – The ability to bounce back from tough situations (my own experience in the world of innovation would support this)
• Confidence in Intuition – Ability to trust your gut feel.
• Tolerance of Ambiguity – Dealing in the murky world of uncertainty and incomplete information where the path to the solution is not very clear
• Cross Application of Experience – The ability to connect the seemingly unrelated dots from across your life experience to solve problems at work.

Read more about this research over at Deloitte.Digital.

Openness to Experience – The inclination to seek out and appreciate new experiences and have a high level of curiosity
Creative Self Efficacy – Basically if you believe you are creative you are more likely to be creative
Resilience – The ability to bounce back from tough situations (my own experience in the world of innovation would support this)
Confidence in Intuition – Ability to trust your gut feel.
Tolerance of Ambiguity – Dealing in the murky world of uncertainty and incomplete information where the path to the solution is not very clear
Cross Application of Experience – The ability to connect the seemingly unrelated dots from across your life experience to solve problems at work.

Your Math Skills Are Useless Here

Stolen from Dr. Mark’s Business Psychology Blog:

What’s interesting about this number: 8,549,176,320?

PS. And it’s not that it contains all the numbers between 0 and 9.

Any ideas?

Dr Mark’s Business Psychology Blog

The Evolution of an Idea

The Google home page, 1998 to 2010.

High Ceilings Help Creative Thinking

The height of your ceiling can either help or hinder creative thinking.

The Power of Doing Nothing (UPDATED)

Want to become more creative? Try doing nothing for a while. Stephen Shapiro explains:

Cloudy with a slight chance of . . .

Brainstorming has been given the Savage Chicken treatment. Check it out.

Quote of the Day: “…one small step for man…”

I remember sitting on the linoleum floor of our living room, in my pajamas, transfixed by that grainy images. We had set foot on another world.

We need to go back. We need to go farther.

And I believe that we will.

Good ideas must die

If you’ve every had an idea, you’ve wrestled with this. We love our ideas. Even the ones that suck.

Most of us understand that we should kill off our bad ideas. (If you don’t understand that yet, you will after suffering the consequences of your bad ideas a few times.)

To kill our good ideas? That is hard.

But necessary.

(Image credit: Hugh MacLeod.)