A primary theme in our Creative Instigation presentation is how you can use structure to help people expand creativity. Essentially, it's structured creativity.

We show how everyone can draw a “gator” by using letters and a couple of characters of punctuation (the gator at the right is drawn with a different color for each letter if you'd like to give it a try). Structured creativity can allow people to write and perform blues songs, draw comic strips, or write Haikus all within only 10 minutes.

Structure can be powerful in helping anyone get a faster start on thinking and performing creatively.

Here’s a challenge: think about your best talents, stepping back to see how you successfully apply rules, heuristics, formats, and other structural elements to perform well. Then identify how you can teach and share that structure with others so that they can experience new talents that they didn’t know they possessed.

They’ll appreciate it and maybe even show you how to use structure to start experiencing their talents!

A side note: The objective of the exercise above is to have people exorcise past negative people or interactions that said "You can't do that" or "You can't be creative." During a recent creative instigation session, the examples ranged from someone being told she couldn't be in a university music program without completing a piano recital (even though she was making money performing music already) to a young woman who was denied playing soccer with boys.

Interestingly, just a few days later, reading the current issue of "Men's Health," it turns out that even David Beckham had a similar experience, being told that he was too small to play English football. Just goes to show that any of us have to be on the watch for "creative disintegraters." – Mike Brown

 

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative ideas! For an organizational creativity boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.