Tips and Tricks to get Creative Juices flowing

Experts discuss tips and tricks to let loose your inner ingenuity...

Some excerpts:

"...There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Your morning pages, Julia, are a perfect example of a capturing technique. There are many ways to capture new ideas....The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become..." (Epstein)

"...When I do seminars on creativity, I teach stress-management techniques to help people cope with the rejection that goes hand in hand with creativity. You have to learn not to fear failure and even to rejoice in it. When I’m failing, I say to myself, “I’m in good company. I’m in the company of some of the most creative and productive people in the world....In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence—the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation—that leads to a competition among behaviors and to new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly. It really is valuable.”

"...[one] example of an exercise I do with people that boosts group creativity is called “the shifting game.” In this exercise, half of my teams stay together for 15 minutes to generate names for a new cola. The other teams work together for five minutes, then shift out of the group to work on the problem individually, then come together for the last five minutes. Even with all the moving around, the shifting teams produce twice as many ideas as the nonshifting ones. This happens, I think, because groups inhibit a lot of creative expression. Dominant people tend to do most of the talking, for one thing. But when people shift, everyone ends up working on the problem."

"One thing I like to do is make all problems open-ended. Never say, give me three ideas for this; always say, give me at least three. When tasks are open-ended, a lot more ideas are generated. I also like to use what I call “ultimate” problems with kids. Those are problems that have no real solutions. Children have great fun with problems like those. Ask them questions like “How could you get a dog to fly?” or “How could you make the sky a different color?” You can also supply your kids with idea boxes and folders—special places for putting drawings and poems and scraps of anything new. That encourages capturing on an ongoing basis and tells children that their new ideas have value."