Thoughts

Unthinking creativity

by Christian Markow, Creative Director

Do you remember when you learned how to ride a bike? It was probably intimidating and exciting at the same time. Maybe your father put training wheels on at first, so that you could get used to balancing yourself so high up in the air. Maybe you rode up and down the sidewalk in the back yard for hours one afternoon. A few weeks later, your dad took off the training wheels and it was time to take that leap of faith that you could do this on your own.

That was scary. Would you fall? Would it hurt when you fell? Would your brothers or sisters laugh at you? And worst of all, would you fail?

Those fears, though, quickly gave way to determination that grew more resilient each time you fell off your bike. After you got over the initial fears, you kept trying until you finally made it across the yard. And, WOW! What a great feeling. The world had been conquered, because you had become an official bike rider! Of course, it would take many more hours and many more attempts before you could ride faster, learn how to break, go down hills, and launch off of the dirt hills at your friend’s house without crashing. But eventually, you didn’t have to think about how to ride a bike anymore. It was just fun.

Learning to become more creative undergoes the same process. It is not a gift that is bestowed on select individuals. Sure, some people are more in-tune with creative thinking. You could say they learned more quickly how to ride their bike. But with practice, we can all learn to re-tap our childhood creativity and use it in our everyday problem solving.

Improving group creative output requires that you change the way you think individually and as a team. It requires that you turn brainstorming sessions, be them as a group or alone, into exercises that stimulate our minds. And above all, it requires that you stop trying to be more creative and instead learn how to have fun in the process.

Being more creative is a lifelong practice
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Unfortunately, as we become more experienced in our jobs, we have a tendency to allow knowledge to guide our creative thought process.

– As our experience grows, our imagination slows. –

In order to change that, you must pay attention to the way you think about problems in order to improve our ability to come up with ideas. As a creative thinker, you must change or improve your mindset in two ways.

• Stop looking for ideas in your head. Use your brain to make connections between your problem and the use of stimuli. A stimulus can take the form of anything from research data and products to music, images, and mental exercises. It can be relative to your problem, or completely foreign. (e.g. Trying to name a new fruit drink, you use a bowl of fruit to experience textures, tastes, etc. and you use a stack of paint chips from a hardware store to sift through the names of different colors.)
• Become a voracious learner. Learning and experiencing new things adds to the overall arsenal of information that you can turn to when trying to make connections. That learning process should never stop. (e.g. A book you read on the many different kinds of nests birds build led you to a great idea for a trade show exhibit.)

This change of mindset will lead you to environments of information that are completely unrelated to your problem. In those environments, you will make unusual combinations, connections or modifications to ideas. You will come up with unique ideas. 

The elusive “big idea” is not in your head. It is waiting to be generated from the infinite amount of stimuli around you. It is waiting for your brain to act as the catalyst that will reveal it.