This sounds impossible. Unless you spend time in meditation every day, then you probably never do nothing. You are always moving from one thing to the next – wake up, use the bathroom, make coffee, eat breakfast, check your email, drink coffee, work, eat lunch, work stop working, have dinner, watch tv, read, go to sleep.…
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They say that good artists borrow, but great artists steal, so consider this taken from the great dancer, Twyla Tharp. In her book, The Creative Habit, she outlined a creativity exercise which she asked her students to go through to help them break through their barriers of conformity. She would scrounge around the university before…
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Blending Signals To Envision The Future In a previous post, I mentioned that for some, foreseeing the future is challenging. Not sure why, since the signals of the future are all around us. Every day and in every way, we see glimpses of the future in everything around us – like the Canadian Shield poking…
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Here is an interesting exercise in judging your companies employee engagement. It requires a few days of effort and keen observation. First, block out your calendar for weekday mornings and afternoons, preferably a half hour before your typical workday starts, and until a half-hour after your workday ends. Sure, this might mean long days throughout…
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With all of the new technologies and ways of doing things seemingly better and faster, do you ever wonder why we sometimes cling to the old ways of doing things? Why even if much better options are available, we still do things a certain way? Why do we hesitate to innovate?
When we ran our first enterprise-wide innovation program, we were gathering all sorts of great ideas from our client employees, but there was something missing. After launching the program and running it for a while, it became pretty obvious that most of the ideas which were being generated were incremental features which were simply new add-ons to existing products – extensions which would make products better, improve the customer experience, make a little more money and refinements, so to speak. Thre was a category for out-of-the-box ideas, and mashups (where they would blend two or more ideas – see the idea blender) but we didn’t get a lot of really hugely disruptive breakthrough ideas. They didn’t think further out.
One of the most effective exercises that we use in our innovation sessions is to actively take an object – any object – any object with a current purpose – and ideate around other purposes for that object, other situations that it could be used in.
When it comes to new, innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, you can’t beat kids. I mean, not all kids, but those fearless try-anything-because-they-don’t-know not-to kinds of kids. I think you know the kinds of kids I’m thinking of:
Disruptive new and innovative products need not be created through completely new thinking. In fact, completely new thinking can sometimes be difficult, requiring a completely different growth mindset, environment, and team. It’s something you may not have access to, or be able to whip up at a moments notice, when you need some innovation to occur, or a challenge to solve.
Recently, I read an article in the latest Wired magazine about tidying up – there is a Japanese author named Marie Kondo who wrote the bestselling “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” which, I hear, is still on bestselling books lists everywhere, it also seems to be in every airport bookstore I’ve been in lately. This and her other books discuss how your life will change if you would only just tidy up. I’m assuming that with this, and more and more shows like Hoarders, we are seeing a backlash against clutter. She is really against clutter, in fact, discusses in which order you should get rid of stuff (books first, then clothes, then papers, then sentimental objects) and you should only hold onto whatever “brings you joy”. Her method is to take everything in the house of that one type, say books, then pile them up in one place, then physically pick up each book and hold it in your hand. If it brings you joy in some way, when you see the book or hold the book, you should keep it, if not, get rid of it.