Posts tagged Fences

This is about creativity. It’s about our ability to innovate and what’s interesting is that most of us don’t think that we are creative, because maybe we didn’t do art at school or we weren’t good at music but here’s the news – all human beings are creative otherwise we wouldn’t have come out of the cave, we wouldn’t have invented fire, villages and towns, post-it notes and the best invention of all, the i-phone. We are innately creative.

There’s a few reasons why we struggle with this sometimes in our day to day life though and it’s because we get taught as we grow up with our with school, with our parents, with society, with our workplaces not to dream too highly for fear of disappointment. We get taught that knowing what’s wrong with stuff, being a critic, a cynic is a measure of how smart we are and perhaps more importantly of how smart other people will think we are. We get told there’s a right and a wrong answer. I was with a friend of mine’s four year old little girl Sarah the other week and she was colouring-in in her colouring book and she was getting to the fence, and I said “Sarah you’re going to do the fence now, what colour are you going to do the fence, you can colour it anything you want” and Sarah said “brown” and I said “no Sarah you can do the fence any colour at all, it could be blue with yellow dots or anything” and Sarah went “no fences are brown” and that’s what happens to us, right? We learn that there’s a right and a wrong answer. Well actually, if you think about innovation, if you think about solving your problems, if you always follow the right answer, the thing you’ve done before you don’t create a new way round. As the cliche goes ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’. So what’s important to be able to figure out how to get what you want, is solid creativity.

One thing is more fundamental than anything else for driving creativity. It’s our ability to separate the generating of ideas from the judging of ideas. Forget whether you believe you are creative or not, just know that if you can separate the generating of ideas from the judging of ideas you will be able to invent things. Here’s how you do it. You think of a bunch of ideas, anything at all and you write them down (without caring if you could do it, if it’s stupid or genius) and then afterwards you judge them. You decide which ones are good and which ones are bad, you mark them out of 10. What you don’t do is have ideas and decide which are good at the same time. You don’t do what we do most of our lives, which is “oh I could do this but no that’ll never work because of this reason,” you don’t judge them because very rarely does a fully formed idea ever come out of our mouth. It’s the combination of lots of thoughts and lots of half formed ideas that allows us to see possibility and gets us to the big idea which really works for us.

Try it for yourself. Don’t judge which are good or bad. Just make a list of a loads of ideas, possible ways you could get something you want, build them up, mess with them, without caring if what you are saying is right or wrong… then when you feel like you’ve exhausted your creativity for now, mark each of the ideas out of 10 based on, ‘there is something about that idea that could work’. Don’t judge it based on “is it perfect and can you do it right now” ‘cos ideas usually need building, but judge it based on, “‘is there something in this idea”. See which ones come to the top, which ones you really like and then look for how you can build or take forward the best 1, 2 or 3 ideas… NO MORE… everything else you have come up with was just your way of getting to the best 3, your working out, like in maths. One thing people often get wrong is having lots of ideas, saving them all and building none of them. What makes this work is identifying the best of the best, throwing away the rest and developing the great ones.

So when you generate ideas, don’t care whether they are good or bad or stupid or indifferent, just think of as many things as you can. If you can do this with other people, all the better, the more brains in this process, the better your outcome. When times are hardest we can be great at this ‘cos we are forced in to it, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ but all that shows is we can invent, it’s a choice we can make any time we like.

I promise you, you’re a human being you can invent a way to get anything that you want!