I recently downloaded a great little ebook from Nigel Collin’s website. It’s a collection of 21 articles from Colin’s Weekly Bits -The Early Years.

 One of the first articles suggests setting up an Idea Board in a common space either at work, or at home. Then you write up a problem and invite others to contribute to the solution. I’m going to give this a try.

Colin makes the point, and I totally agree, that this is a great tool to foster creativity and  collaboration in an organisation. The phenomenon of blogging, the likes of twitter, other online networks, and commenting in general on the “net” have set the expectation that it’s quite ok to anonymously or publicly contribute. Of course it helps if you have something of value to say.

So perhaps the time is good for this very simple and low tech idea to produce some really creative outcomes.

Tags: collaboration, ideas, Problem Solving, tools

So you’ve got a great idea! Now you need to share it with others to give it real life and power. This might mean a speech or presentation to your Peers, a Manager, or an Investor.

How do you take your ideas and transfer your passion and enthusisum in such a way that it is understood and shared by others?

A two part podcast by Lisa B Marshall, the Public Speaker (Quick and Dirty Tips) gives a great “starting with a blank sheet” technique for preparing a speech. While your presentation will not be a speech as described in these podcasts, the process that Lisa describes could easily be adapted and is a great starting point. During the Podcast Lisa covers the following points:

1. Step One - Brainstorm Descriptive Adjectives
2. Step Two - Defining Your Descriptive Adjectives
3. Step Three – Telling Your Stories
4. Step Four – Fleshing Out Your Stories
5. Step Five – Pulling It All Together

Listen to Lisa B Marshall’s Quick and Dirty Tips Public Speaker’s Speech Making Podcasts Part 1 and Part 2  (these will open in separate windows.)

Now - go share your ideas with the world.

Tags: ideas, presentation, speach, toolbox

I’ve been reading two books recently and picked up a theme from both that’s worth mentioning.

In Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Made to Stick” they talk about the Curse of Knowledge. In short this is the assumption that other people know what you know, or the inability to see things as other people might.

In Edward De Bono’s “Thinking Course” he talks about the Intelligence Trap and two ways that it manifests it’s self. The first is that intelligent people take a position and use their intelligence to defend that point of view. Equally, the speed in which an intelligent person can dispose of another’s argument simply reinforces the original position. And there’s the trap!

Does this imply that creativity and innovations come from those who are less intelligent? Not really. What it does say is that you need to look out for embedded attitudes that might be inhibiting your creativity.

Have you ever listened to or read an interview of a successful person where they’ve said “If I’d known then what I know now I probably wouldn’t have done it.” What got them through the hard time and past the failures? Was it simply naivety, was it just guts and determination, or was it a grand vision. It was probably all of those things and more. They certainly broke out of the Intelligence Trap and shattered the Curse of Knowledge.

How did they break the trap and shatter the curse? I think it was Openness. They were able to look for and consider alternate view points. They did it by challenging assumptions about the current state. They did it with passion, not for their current position but for finding something new, something not yet discovered.

Tags: creativity, thinking

Mind mapping has been around for years and it’s a terrific tool for expanding ideas. They are great for working through all the thinking associated with a specific idea and putting it into some sort of order.

What I’ve been looking for though is something that allows me to collect a bunch of related ideas and organise them. I’ve needed something that allows me to get the thoughts out of my head and on to something I can work with. For that task Mind Maps don’t quite work for me. In the past I’ve tended to use paper and pens or Post-its (nothing wrong with that), and sometimes PowerPoint.

I’ve recently discovered a great (free) tool that allows me to collect my ideas and organise my thinking into a concept map - a new term for me. From the concept map I can take the key concepts and expand and refine them as mind maps. The mind maps allow me to sort, categorise and expand sub-ordinate thoughts; I can document these into very specific outputs and actions.

The following is a concept map that shows the process and the relationships between Concept Maps and Mind Maps.

InnovationTools provides entrepreneurs and innovators with a focused, growing collection of the best resources on business innovation, creativity and brainstorming. Our goal is to help you to learn more about the tools, strategies and techniques you can use to be more creative in your business — and to help your company to increase its capacity for innovation and change.

Tags: brainstorming, concept maps, ideas, mind maps, toolbox

In two recent posts I introduced very different examples of innovations - one was very practical, the other a very powerful concept.

The first was SPIN Farming which is a very practical, powerful, and profitable approach to small scale farming. The second was a short video introducing the Girl Effect; which is the concept that improving (saving) a girl’s life has exponential effect on her, her family, and her community.

What is interesting about these two innovations is that they have been arrived at from two completely different directions.

SPIN Farming is the build up of one concept upon another. The innovation comes as concepts have combined and been adapted within their new environment. In this instance the innovation is cumulative.

If we look at the “Girl Effect” I think that the starting point was a mass of research, observations, data and overwhelming everyday problems. The Girl Effect is a distillation of all of that until a single succinct diamond of a concept was exposed - save a girl, change the world.

That single line ties everything else together. Examine any element of the Girl Effect material and that single phase jumps out at you.

So why is this helpful? It illustrates that inspiration, ideas, creativity, and innovation can come from everywhere, from every direction. It can be a sequential building of a core idea or it can be refinement of much information down to a core concept.

What is valuable here is to acknowledge that innovation has many sources. Perhaps opening up our awareness and improving our skill at recognising those sources is one of the key tools in the innovator’s toolbox.

Tags: creativity, toolbox

We’ve all done it, scanned the shelves of an airport Bookshop looking for something life changing to read while trapped up in the air. Last week I flew between New Zealand and Australia which took 3 and a half hours. Before I boarded the flight I brought a book called The Idea Accelerator by Ken Hudson.

Physically it’s a smallish book but it’s really packed with fantastic easy to implement approaches to quickly generate, build, and evaluate ideas.

The essence of Ken’s book is fast paced idea generation, of thinking as quickly as you can without judgement. Evaluation does come later and the book contains 10 tools for doing so.

The Idea Accelerator focuses on problem solving and if you think about it - anytime you have an idea or need to be creative it is to solve a problem of some sort. Problems are not all the same of course, and there are lots that are not even urgent or important to solve. Regardless of the size or shape of your problems generating ideas to address them does not have to be time consuming or hard work.

During my flight I worked my way through each of the sixty idea acceleration tools frantically making notes on how I’d apply them in my work environment. If you see this book grab it. Take a look a Ken’s the speed thinking zone website too.

Speed Thinking
How to Thrive in a Time-Poor World
The Speed Thinking Zone is a space where you can learn more about, practice and use your Speed Thinking Skills to help you thrive in a time-poor world. Learning how to think better and quicker is a far better option than working longer or attending an old-fashioned time management course. This means that you can achieve more in a shorter period of time.

Tags: creativity, ideas, inspiration

Ideas may seem like strange things to collect but if you’re interested in creativity and innovation you’re probably subconsciously doing it already.

Somewhere in your brain (probably scattered about) you already have the memories of things that intrigued you. Remember all those times you’ve tried to recall a great idea and wanted to share or apply it and couldn’t recall where you saw or heard it.

I borrow an idea from the advertising world and it’s called a Swipe file. It’s a pretty simple idea – just write down the idea, the website name, the book name, or whatever and keep it so you can refer back to it. So do I have a messy pile of scrap paper and curled up Post It’s in the corner of my office? Yeah, sometimes, but I regularly sort them and put them in a folder.

I have a blank form that I transfer, staple, or stick the original notes to. I refer to my folder regularly and I’m always surprised how a solution manifests from the least likely connections.

So why should you collect ideas. Here are a few reasons that spring to mind, though I’m sure there are plenty more.

• It prompts you to think differently about the things you see and hear.
• It allows you to look at seemingly unrelated things and make a connection.
• It helps develops your sense of what is a good or useful idea.
• It allows you to see how your thinking “maturity” grows.
• It gives you a ready source of inspiration and problem solving triggers.
• It trains your thinking and creativity “muscles”.
• It can help you to spot trends.
• And, once you’ve recorded your idea it “releases that brain space” for something else.

Happy collecting.

Tags: connections, ideas, inspiration

thinking how is a journey, though the destination is not quite clear yet.

It is a journey to look at how ideas become ideas, and what do we do with them.

It is a journey that will ask -

• Is creativity and innovation learnable?
• How do we leap from thinking to doing?
• Can thinkers “do”, and can doers “think”?
• Are ideas, creativity and innovation spontaneous or are they a process.

I suspect that the answers will lie somewhere in between the extremes. I’m sure too that the questions will evolve as the journey progresses.

Come join me.

Tags: creativity, ideas, innovation, thinkers