Five Easy Steps to Supercharge Creative Thinking Right Now

No matter what career path you pursue the expectation to reinvent innovate and deliver outofthebox solutions weigh heavily on your ability to succeed In fact a group of international CEOs recently ranked amp8220creative thinking as the No 1 leadership quality required for success in business todayamp8221So what if you donamp8217t consider yourself a creative typeamp160 Can creativity be learned How can you enhance the idea generating skills you haveamp8220Anyone can learn to unlock their creative problemsolving genius so essential to successamp8221 says Mitchell Rigie a creativity trainer and founding partner at SmartStormingamp160 Mitchell is the coauthor of a book chocked full of easytolearn approaches he believes anyone can leverage to generate ideasI asked Mitchell for his best tips for coming up with big ideas under pressure Hereamp8217s what he sharedAlways clarify your challenge and goals before you begin Understand the nature of the challenge you are tackling be precise without vagueness or ambiguity and be sure there are no imporamp173tant missing facts or pieces of information that might make it more difficult to effectively solve the challenge Consider if thereamp8217s an underlying issue that needs to be addressedThen set a clear goal in mind for your idea generation efforts How many ideas would you like to generate Define the nature of the ideas youamp8217d like to produce whether they are simple conversation starters or fully fleshed out concepts strategies or tacticsStock your creative pond before fishing for ideas And preferably daily Take the time to obamp173serve explore discover be curious and take note of things that inspire you or that you find interesting fascinating or provocative Seek out new and different types of stimuli to help spark your brainamp8217s power of associative thinking and trigger the spontaneous leaps that foster new connections Stimuli can be anything from information data pictures moviesvideos magazinesbooks web surfing museums performances nature history etc The more stimuli you have to play with the more connections youamp8217ll makeUse a variety of ideation techniques to stimulate new ways of thinkingIdeation techniques are novel imaginationstimulating activiamp173ties designed to help you tackle challenges from a fresh perspective Here are four of Mitchellamp8217s favoritesAssociative Thinking A process where one idea spontaneously trigamp173gers another which triggers another which triggers another and so onAdaptive Thinking Based on the theory that virtually every new inamp173novative concept product service or process is really in one way or another an adaptation of something else that already exists or has existed in the pastCounterintuitive Thinking Sometimes a really bad radical or impracamp173tical sounding idea can contain the seeds of a big gamechanging idea within itChallenging Assumptions A powerful way to question the status quo and move beyond any perceived limitations or barriers By doing so you can imagine bold new solutions never before thought possibleManage your amp8220divergentamp8221 and amp8220convergentamp8221 thinking processesWhen generating ideas your thinking either diverges outward in a 360degree blue sky exploration of a variety of ideas employing curiosity imagination and intuition with no regard for quality or converges inward in an effort to evaluate judge and select ideasItamp8217s vitally important not to mix these two modes of thinkingamp160 Convergent thinking will shutdown brainstorming with selfjudgments and critiamp173cisms And divergent thinking will sidetrack critical logicbased converamp173gent thinking with distractions brought about by new ideasAs a simple rule says Mitchell only when youamp8217re 100 finished generating ideas should you switch to conamp173vergent thinking to evaluate them amp160Always predetermine objective criteria for evaluating ideas Mitchell encourages you to visualize what the perfect solution or result would look like and then before you even begin brainstorming create a short list of objective standards to judge it After you generate as many as you can rate each idea based on how well it meets your criteria And voila you have your solutionYour mind is a wonderful incubator and if you learn to stimulate it optimally the ideas youamp8217ll produce will be both limitless and groundbreakingThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageMyersBizNet management or associated bloggers

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Five Easy Steps to Supercharge Creative Thinking Right Now

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Kristi Faulkner

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