Automatic Creativity: How to Make Creative Thinking into a Habit

In the 21st century, ideas are valuable. That's because we live in an information economy.
A century ago, value was created through manufacturing. You took raw materials and used them to create a product. You then sold the product for more than you paid for the raw materials. By turning raw materials into a product, you created value and thus you made money.
In the information economy, value isn't created by shaping raw materials into products. It's created through ideas. As such, the better you are at coming up with effective ideas, the more value you create.
In an information economy, it makes sense that many of us work in roles that require us to be creative every day. It's our job to come up with new ideas.
The problem? Creativity is a fickle beast. That's why the imagination is often called the muse. The muse is coy and catlike. She comes and leaves as she will. It can feel like there's no way of calling on the muse on demand.
Or is there?
Throughout history, the most prolific creators haven't sat around waiting for the muse to grace their presence. Instead, they've established a habit of creative thinking. Through this habit, they cultivate an environment where the muse feels comfortable. Thus, they have access to creativity on demand.

Creating a System

Back in the early 20th century, Henry Ford discovered that he could manufacture cars more quickly, and at lower cost, by establishing a production line. The production line was his system for car manufacture.
Systems may seem like the opposite of creativity, and that seems like a fair charge. After all, a system:

• Is a set of things working together as part of a mechanism.
• Has clear procedures by which things are done.
• Follows a routine.
• Has inputs and outputs.
• Is repeatable.

Even thinking in these dry terms is enough to turn off anyone's creativity!
That said, you can set up a system to turn creativity into a habit. Using this system, you'll integrate creative thinking into your daily life.
In this tutorial, we'll show you the steps you can follow to make that happen.
Before we dig in, note a couple of things:

• This tutorial is a jumping off point, not a definitive guide to creativity. Everyone's situation and personality is unique, so what works for one person will be different to what works for another. Don't be afraid to get creative as you set up your own system that makes creativity into a habit.
• Throughout the tutorial, notice that although systems can appear dry and boring, they actually create an environment that's conducive to creativity.

Let's find out how to put your creativity into auto-magic mode!

Step 1: Work to a Routine or Ritual

The novelist Somerset Maugham famously quipped:

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

In other words, just by working to a set schedule, and getting on with his work at that time, Maugham found that creative inspiration came his way every day.
The psychologist William James claimed that following a strict routine makes what we do each day into a habit. Once we've established this habit, many of our actions are automatic, so we "free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action".
Many of history's famous writers and philosophers have followed a set routine:

• The novelist Anthony Trollope woke up in darkness every day, and wrote from 5.30am until 8.30am. If he finished one novel during this time, he took a fresh piece of paper, and started the next.
• Simone de Beauvoir started her day with a cup of tea. She began writing at 10am, and stopped at 1pm for lunch. She then worked from 5pm until 9pm in the evening.
• Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, took a walk every afternoon at 3.30pm. He was so punctual in his walking habit that his neighbors could set their clocks by checking when he passed their window.

If your life circumstances leave you unable to work to a routine, then consider using a ritual instead.
Rituals are a set of actions you follow before you sit down to be creative. Following the same ritual everyday sends a signal to your brain that it's time to get creative.
For example, bestselling author Stephen King always has a glass of water or a cup of tea before he sits down to write. He then takes a vitamin pill, puts on some music, and sits in his writing chair. Finally, he arranges his writing papers.
Why does he do all this? In King's own words:

The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.

Blogger and copywriter James Chartrand follows a similar ritual, which she calls her "click-whirr" approach. She explains:

Our brains have built-in, automatic responses to fixed-action patterns activated by trigger features. That means if something triggers our pattern, we run through a sequence of behaviors as predictable as snow in the Arctic.
Here’s an example: Every day, I follow the same, fixed routine. I wake up. I grab a cup of coffee. I sit at the kitchen island and read my email. I wake up my daughter and get her ready for school – iCarly, cereal, clothes, prepare her lunch, brush her hair, walk her to the bus stop. I walk back, breathing deep, feeling grateful and thinking only about the writing task I’ve chosen to work on when I arrive home.
I refill my coffee, sit down and – “click!-whirr” – hit the keyboard.

As you can see from these examples, rituals don't have to be complicated. Rituals work best when they incorporate behaviors you'd probably be doing anyway. The point is to make sure you follow the same ritual each time you need to activate your creativity. The more reliably you follow the ritual, the better the results you'll get.

Step 2: Adopt the Mantra "Little and Often"

Creativity is like muscle. Use it regularly, and you'll make it stronger. That's according to Josh Linkner, author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity. Linkner explains his theory as follows:

We all have the capacity to build muscle mass if we exercise. If we fail to do so, our muscles atrophy. The same is true with creativity. By embracing and exercising our creativity muscles, we unleash a wellspring of insight.

What's the best way to grow muscle? A small amount of exercise once or twice a day is far better than a one-off intense exercise session once per week. The same is true of creativity. It's far better to do a little bit every day to grow your creative muscles than to push extra hard once a week, or less frequently.
Expressing your creativity daily—even in small ways—not only helps to grow your creative muscles. It has the added bonus of helping you to develop a habit of creative output.
Small actions every day are the best way of building a habit. Dr. B. J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab, explains how this works:

If you pick something that's so small and so simple, like flossing one tooth, then it's really easy to do. And things that are easy to do don't require lots of motivation.

It's also worth pointing out that the second part of Fogg's method for creating new habits is ritual. In his own words:

Sequence the [new] habit after something that you already do habitually... so you're triggering the new behavior with a behavior that you already have"

See how this ties in with Step 1?

Step 3: Carry a Notepad Everywhere

No matter how much you try to tame your muse, you'll find that creative inspiration strikes when you least expect it. In fact, the more you invest in your creativity, through routine and ritual, the more ideas will strike you in usual times and places. So it's best to be prepared, whether you're out walking your dog, taking a shower, or commuting home from work.
How can you prepare yourself? Adopt the habit of carrying a notepad everywhere. With smartphones, this is super easy—just install a note-taking app such as Evernote. Alternatively, go old school and use pen and paper. You'll never be let down by a dead battery.
Having a notebook to hand means you can jot down your idea as soon as it arises. There are few things more frustrating than remembering you had a great idea, but not remembering what the idea was.
Carrying a notebook everywhere, you'll be in good company. Entrepreneurs and business leaders who are known to carry a notebook include:

• Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.
• Aristotle Onasis, the Greek shipping tycoon.
• Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins.

Step 4: Don't be Afraid of Bad Ideas

Ideas beget ideas. The more ideas you write down, the more ideas you'll have.
Unfortunately, that means taking note of even your bad ideas, so they stop blocking up your brain. When you let go of bad ideas, you free your creative energy to focus on creating good ideas.
That's why you should embrace rather than ignore your bad ideas.
And there's a second reason to pay attention to bad ideas. Bad ideas can become good ideas, through a process of iteration. As the folks over at the digital magazine WhiteSpaces explain:

Ideas are a journey. They start at one point, travel this way and that and usually arrive at a destination that looks nothing like where they began. The trick is too keep traveling along the road with the bad idea, to keep refining and moulding and reshaping until, pretty often, the bad idea has blossomed into a good one.

In other words, start with bad ideas to get to the good ideas.

Step 5: Have Nothing Space, Every Day

If I asked you what Warren Buffett spends his life doing, what would you guess:

• Back to back meetings...
• Traveling...
• Playing golf...
• Not a whole lot?

The truth is, Warren Buffett has an almost empty calendar. He's a man of many good ideas, because he allows the time and space for them to grow.
Creative ideas need space to emerge. If your work life is constant hustle and bustle, and you want to be more creative, then you need to take your foot off the gas pedal. By giving yourself space to relax, you'll allow creative ideas to bubble up inside you.
Yes, spending time doing nothing is scary. That's why we often fill our lives with tasks or noise, even when there's not a lot to do. But if you can sit with the discomfort for a short while, every day, you'll soon discover that your effort reaps dividends.
So, schedule yourself a date with nothing, and see what grows.

What Are Your Creative Habits?

You may use other systems for turning creativity into a habit. Let us know your creative tricks and tips in the comments section, below.

Read More

How to Bring Out Your Team's Creative Best

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.

So said the early 21st century columnist and New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry.
The early 20th century columnist, G. K. Chesterton, took a similar view of consensus-based decision making when he said:

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

And Sir Alec Issigonis, the British car designer who designed the Mini famously said:

A camel is a horse designed by committee.

(Perhaps missing the point that camels are extremely adept at surviving in arid conditions.)
Teamwork has a bad rap, especially when it comes to creative projects. However, the truth is that teams can be incredibly creative. Products we use every day—from lightbulbs to iPads—were created as a result of people working together.
Even Steve Jobs—notorious for being a "dictator" knew that he could only create cutting edge products as part of a team. In what's known as "The Lost Interview", Jobs explained:

I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street, and he was in his eighties. He was a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he might have paid me to mow his lawn or something. And one day he said to me, ‘come on into my garage I want to show you something.’ And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit - powder - and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said ‘come back tomorrow’. And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.
And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this [clapping his hands], creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.
That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other…and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

How can you bring the best of your team, so that their differences rub against each other to polish one another rather than harm one another?
In other words, how can you turn your business meetings into creative spaces? After all, you've got to deal with team dynamics, and people can be reluctant to take creative risks in front of others.
Here are seven steps you can follow to make your meetings more creative.

Step 1: Remember that Creativity Thrives in Constraints

In his book Keys to Drawing With Imagination, the artist Bert Dodson tells the story of how he struggled with art assignments at school:

I actually never liked those grade-school art assignments in which I was told "Draw anything you want." I was overwhelmed by the possibilities. My mind came up blank. There was nothing to push against -- no problem to solve. The experience left me with an early and intuitive appreciation for the value of constraints... Creativity likes constraints and specifics.

Dodson's point is that to be creative, we need constraints.
You'll get the creative best out of your team if you set constraints on every meeting you have together. This can be as simple as:

• Giving every meeting an explicit purpose.
• Having an agenda for the meeting.
• Having a set time when you'll start and finish the meeting.
• Choosing a specific problem that you'll focus on during the meeting.

Along these lines, Sean Blanda, managing editor of the online creativity magazine 99u, explains that all Fortune 500 companies follow three universal rules when it comes to meetings:

1. All meetings must have a stated purpose or agenda.
2. Attendees should walk away with concrete next steps or action items.
3. The meeting should have an end time.

Blanda continues: "Of course, there’s no need to stop there. Truly productive companies always continue tweaking to suit their specific culture."
And you can create more constraints that suit your specific business culture when you...

Step 2: Set the Ground Rules

As we've established, creativity thrives in constraints. Some constraints can be established by how you set up meetings—for example by starting and finishing on time. Other constraints can be set within the meeting space itself. The aim of these constraints is to create a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing their creative ideas.
These constraints you set are the Ground Rules of your meetings. They should be mutually agreed, and written down, so they don't need to be re-stated at every meeting. Ground Rules can always be changed or added to if you discover that they're not working.
Start by asking your team the ground rules they'd like to have. If they struggle for ideas, you might suggest the following:

• All ideas are welcome.
• Listen. Let others speak without interrupting.
• Be careful not to dominate the meeting.
• Challenge others respectfully by asking questions.
• Speak from your own experience. Use "I" rather than "they" or "we."

With mutually agreed ground rules in place, you'll find that your team are more relaxed in meetings, and that they share more creative ideas.

Step 3: Appoint a Neutral Facilitator (Optional)

If you're having a one-off creative meeting or creative day, it can be really helpful to call in a neutral facilitator. This is someone who's skilled in facilitating meetings. Additionally, they should be from outside your organization, so they're not invested in office politics and the power dynamics between team members.
You may decide that you want to facilitate meetings yourself. If this is the case, bear in mind that the role of a facilitator is to create a space where others can share ideas, and to bring together those ideas into a coherent whole. As a facilitator it's not your role to share your own ideas.
Alliteratively, if you're running a series of meeting, you can rotate the person who facilitates. That way each team member gets a chance to lead a meeting.

Step 4: Memorize the Phrase "Yes, and..."

Let's say someone shares a design idea in a meeting. You really like their idea. It's got a lot going for it. However, you'd like it if their design had more color. So you say:

I like your design idea, but it needs more color.

What will the person who shared the idea hear? Something like:

Your idea is terrible. It's not nearly colorful enough. Why did you even bother sharing?

You've squashed their ego and made them feel small. There's a chance they won't share anything else for the rest of the meeting.
How did a positive comment with a small suggestion turn into such a big drama? It's because you used the dreaded "b" word. "But" cancels out anything you said before you added it to your sentence. As the public speaking experts at Message Masters explain: "When we say 'but' we negate everything before it."
So get your butt out of the way!
What should you do instead? Remove the word "but" from your vocabulary. In the example above, you could have said:

I really like your design idea, and I'd love to make it even more colorful.

You've kept their ego intact, helped them feel affirmed, and you've shared the exact same idea.

Step 5: Allow for Movement

New research has found that sitting down is not only bad for your back and your posture. It also inhibits creativity.
Sarah Knapton, Science correspondent at the Daily Telegraph summarizes the results of the research:

Although chairs may seem like a good idea in lengthy meetings, they actually make people territorial and lethargic.
In contrast, standing up was shown to stimulate employees both physically and mentally, keeping them alert and focussed.

The study's author, Professor Andrew Knight, adds: "Our study shows that even a small tweak to a physical space can alter how people work with one another."
Standing up sends more oxygen to our brains—which gives our brains more energy. Hence more creativity.
If you're not yet ready to hold a standing meeting, then at least arrange for a walking break every 30 minutes. That way participants can stand up, walk around, and send a new flow of energy to their brain.

Step 6: Give Everyone a Chance to Share

Even when you're working as a team you can hit a creative wall, where every idea anyone comes up with is a flop.
Or you can arrive at a situation where one strong personality repeatedly shares weak ideas, while others who potentially have better ideas don't have the space to speak.
What can you do in either of these situations? Take time out. Restate the objective for the meeting, then ask everyone to go and find their own space. Everyone is asked to bring back three solutions—no matter how good or bad. After ten minutes of alone time, everyone comes back to share their three best solutions. Make sure everyone's three ideas are shared before any of the ideas are analyzed.
Sure, some of the ideas will be terrible, but that's okay. The aim is to give a chance for everyone to share. And chances are, there will be a gem in there somewhere.
An alternative to this strategy is to use post-it clusters. For this, you get everyone to write down all their ideas on large post-it notes. The page-size post-it notes are then stuck up onto the wall, and clustered into groups of similar ideas.
Bear in mind that the biggest cluster of notes isn't necessarily the best idea. In fact, the bigger the cluster, the less original the idea is likely to be. So pay as much attention to the outliers as you do to the most frequently suggested ideas.

Step 7: Take Very Detailed Notes

Taking detailed notes ensures that you capture every idea that's shared. This is important for two reasons:

• It shows participants that every idea is important. Good ideas are often built on the back of bad ideas, so anything you can do to encourage sharing is helpful.
• It prevents good ideas from getting lost. The best ideas may be shared then passed over for many different reasons. As long as you've recorded them, you can go back to them (and you'll kick yourself if you can remember there was a great idea shared, but you've no idea what it was).

You can't facilitate a meeting and take notes, so make sure you've appointed a notetaker. Ideally, this is someone who won't be contributing to the meeting.

Go Be Creative

Now you know how to bring out the creative best in your team, go do it! You'll be surprised at the change it makes to your team dynamic when everyone gets a chance to be heard and share their ideas.

Read More