Creativity At Work: 6 Ways To Encourage Innovative Ideas
rvard's Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, says there are three components to creativity at work: Expertise (People who aren't any good at physics rarely come up with relativity theory.) Creative thinking skills (Are you even trying to think outside the box?) Motivation (Personal interest like curiosity beats monetary bonuses.) Her research produced 6 things that companies and managers can do to support and inspire creative work: …
4 minutes
Creative Thinking Exercises: 8 Steps To Workplace Creativity
while back I rounded up a lot of the research and posted my four fundamental rules for increasing creativity. But those aren't all easy to do at the office. The list includes getting drunk, taking naps and showers, and other stuff that could lead to a visit from the HR Hitman. What are some research-backed creative thinking exercises that address the challenges of the modern workplace? Here are 8. They're unconventional, but they work. #1) Hide From The Boss Yeah, you heard…
5 minutes
Genius And Insanity: Do You Need To Be Crazy To Be The Best?
search says experts practice for 10,000 hours. That's a lot of hours. A crazy amount of hours, one might say. I've posted a lot about "deliberate practice" and the work habits of geniuses. They're relentless. Via Daily Rituals: How Artists Work “Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.” Here's the question: Is that just something that obsessed, crazy people do? Does this prove the often-theorized…
7 minutes
Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas
ere do strokes of genius come from? Keith Sawyer tells an interesting story about breakthrough ideas in his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. Researcher Vera John-Steiner wanted to know "What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?" She interviewed over 70 living creative geniuses and analyzed the notebooks of 50 dead ones (including Tolstoy, Einstein, etc.) to look at their work habits. She assumed this was going to end up as a review of Eureka! moments in the…
3 minutes
Can a messy office make you more creative?
at messy office might be inspiring great ideas... New research shows that an organized office might make you behave better but a messy office can lead you to more creative breakthroughs: Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention — and that both settings…
4 minutes
Achieving your dreams: Here’s how a lousy day job can turn you into a great artist.
ur day job is not stopping you from achieving your dreams. It's teaching you everything you need to know. Steven Pressfield's book The War of Art is all about achieving your dreams and accomplishing your creative goals. He takes a very craftsman-like attitude toward becoming great -- and argues this is what is lacking in many struggling creative people. Where does he feel you can learn the most about what it takes to succeed in an artistic profession? Your day job. This idea…
3 minutes
Creative companies: What are the 10 secrets of innovative offices?
What do creative companies do right? Keith Sawyer got his PhD studying under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the researcher who coined the idea of Flow. I've posted about his research on top creative teams and how brainstorming is broken. What did he find when he studied creative companies? 1) Keep Many Irons in the Fire Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration: In 1997, Shona Brown of McKinsey and Company, working with Kathleen Eisenhardt of Stanford University’s business school, compared three collaborative organizations…
5 minutes
Brainstorming: 3 reasons why everything you know is wrong.
ainstorming is broken. We all know the standard method of brainstorming: Get a bunch of people together. Generate lots of ideas. Don't be critical. There's one problem with this system. It's totally wrong. 1) Don't work in a group The research consistently shows that individuals who generate ideas on their own and then meet afterward come up with more (and better) ideas. Via Imagine: How Creativity Works: There’s just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn’t work. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington…
4 minutes
