Tag: ideation

5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity

Creativity, UncategorizedPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity 
Hello there! Welcome to the Dialogic Learning Weekly. It’s Friday, February 20. I’m Tom, writing to you from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Reach out with comments, questions and feedback at tom@dialogiclearning.com or on Twitter at @tombarrett. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe to get the Dialogic Learning Weekly sent straight to your inbox.
0*ItY857kThmoJK6vD
Photo by jet dela cruz on Unsplash

In our last issue, we explored the notion of innate creative thinking. Today, we look at mental models associated with ideas, creativity, and originality.

  1. Divergent Thinking
  2. Convergent Thinking
  3. The Innovation Jolt Model
  4. The Creative Habit Model
  5. The Creative Process Model

Regardless of the model, we use to understand creativity, at its heart is a desire and an intention to be creative. Our focus will be: how we can create the right intention to be more creative.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking involves exploring lots of possible solutions to a problem. At the same time, convergent thinking looks for the correct answer to a specific problem.

Culturally, we are trained to think in ‘right or wrong’ terms and that the only way to be creative is to come up with new ‘right’ answers. When we feel like this, it is impossible to be genuinely innovative.

I often describe Divergent Thinking as a mode when we generate lots of different options. It is an expansive and open mode of thinking.

Convergent Thinking

We narrow down the options in convergent thinking, finding a smaller selection of possibilities.

Convergent thinking is often described as a more analytical and closed mode. Usually, this is done by filtering or voting on collections of ideas or datasets.

When we think in convergent thinking mode, we are not open to new ideas because we attempt to make decisions.

Example questions to encourage convergent thinking:

  • Which five ideas have the most potential?
  • Which of the questions sums up your current challenge?
  • Put a sticker on the three words that resonate with you the most?
  • Of all the places we could start, what feels like the most appropriate?
Sometimes there can be a clash of people thinking in opposite modes. Which explains much of the conflict and idea squashing that can happen. This is a dynamic to look out for and facilitate with care.

The Innovation Jolt Model

The analogy is that the moment you get a great idea is like getting hit with a large jolt of electricity — your mind becomes excited and can’t wait to get started.

When looking for ideas, this is the feeling you want, so if it doesn’t happen right away, don’t worry. Keep asking questions until the jolt happens.

The more you can get in touch with your feelings of excitement about an idea, the closer you are to being creative.

The Creative Habit Model

According to this model, creativity is a habit that requires dedication and effort. This means while great ideas may come naturally to some people, they can also be developed by anybody who knows how to practice regularly.

By practising our creative thinking every day, we gradually retrain our brains to think in new ways, increasing our ability for originality and increasing the number of ideas we can develop.

A simple exercise you can use every day is to ask "What if…" and to follow with any question you feel inspired to ask. Some examples:
> What if I didn't have to work?
> What if we didn't have to travel?
> What if the students chose when to learn?
> What if we could harness energy from the wind?
> What if we create an app that makes it easy for people to water their gardens?

The Creative Process Model

This model suggests that creativity isn’t only about understanding when and how to be creative and learning the correct type of thinking for a given situation.

Thinking of creativity and idea generation as a process also helps us manage and understand what we are doing and where we want to go.

We need to learn how to apply different types of thinking to different situations.

Your Talking Points

  • How can you use these models to bring out greater creativity in yourself and other people you communicate with?
  • What specific practices can you do daily to increase creativity in your life/work/studies, etc.?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with my Atomic Essays: Solution Siren Call, Walt Disney Creative Strategy, Feedback is Oxygen For Your Ideas, Willful Blindness, Counter Wooden Headedness.

Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett

Feedback Is Oxygen For Your Ideas — Start With A Minimum Verbal Prototype

Design Thinking, FeedbackPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Feedback Is Oxygen For Your Ideas — Start With A Minimum Verbal Prototype

Drafting or prototyping is one of the later stages of the design process. Our approach and mindset have the potential to influence anything we create.

The key to success: share your ideas early and often.

Activate the feedback loop as early as you can — Photo by ThisIsEngineering

Minimum Verbal Prototype

One of the simplest prototypes you can create is to describe your idea to someone else.

  • What if we
  • Why don’t we
  • Imagine that we

Your Minimum Verbal Prototype or MVP is a more rounded description of your idea — not just one of many ideas on a list. Your verbal outline creates the first impression and helps someone understand your initial intent.

The MVP is the kick to begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.

The Word prototype is from Greek prōtotypon “a first or primitive form,” from prōtos “first” + typos ‘impression, mould, pattern.”

Prototyping is not the goal. Feedback is.

A different way to approach prototyping is:

To engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can.

Feedback is the main reason we share drafts. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t.

And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.

Feedback is oxygen for your ideas.

When you share a First Verbal Prototype, you activate a feedback loop to develop your creative ideas.

Remember, the only thing worse than a bad idea is to isolate an idea from feedback for too long.

Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on a weekly basis.

⚡️ Subscribe now and get started this week.

Tired times are good for my brain

CreativityPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Tired times are good for my brain

Half asleep and still travelling. That usually describes me at the end of a day with a leadership team or a client group. And it is in those moments when I know I should force myself to think harder about some creative challenges or development I am doing. It is often when my brain is tired that it begins to make interesting and unexpected connections.

This is something I know about myself and I consciously choose to think harder and act during those tired times. They are typically moments we feel an aversion to more work. For me, it tends to suit developmental work or creating stuff. As a result, when I decide to pick up my notebook and scan through some half sketched ideas, a rough workshop flow or explore the way a new resource is looking, something typically falls into a different place.

Work when your brain is tired and see what new connections you might make.

Dear Mr Judgy Pants,

FeedbackPublished onUpdated on4 Comments on Dear Mr Judgy Pants,

Thanks for squashing my idea. You cut me off as I was sharing it and threw it on the ground. You trampled on my idea. You made me watch as you extinguished that precious little spark and yeah, you squashed it.

We obviously approached the chat from different places. You see, I thought we were there to share some ideas. You know, like new things we hadn’t considered yet. It seemed you had just brought your pre-loaded high calibre idea sniper rifle. Those ideas didn’t stand a chance; I mean they barely had a moment to breathe.

But did you hear that other sound? No? Well, you were busy dropping and squashing ideas, so how could you. That was the sound of a crack in my creative confidence. It’ll be a while before that gets fixed. I hope it gets fixed.

When you look around the room and notice others, yeah, those other quieter voices. Or even the silent ones. You know why they are silent, right? The cracks in their confidence haven’t been fixed. Creative cracks just grew. They still have ideas; I know that. They just keep quiet, choosing not to participate in the fortnightly Idea Duck Hunt.

I just wanted to let you know that there are thousands of idea headstones carved because of people like you. We mourn those precious little sparks, those little glimpses of something new, different and unexpected. We still think about those ideas and the fleeting moments we had with them.

Although our gradual creative grief makes us not want to share, our ideas keep coming. They brim up when we least expect it — entrusted to our notebooks, napkins and daydreams. We know they will have their time in the sun probably when you and your shadow have moved on.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Nobody told me what to do

LeadershipPublished onLeave a Comment on Nobody told me what to do

For maybe three years now I have been listening to a particular Daft Punk track and mulling over the lyrics. Whilst I am writing now I have the track on, take a few moments to listen to it.

https://open.spotify.com/track/0oks4FnzhNp5QPTZtoet7c

Giorgio by Moroder is a documentary song about the early life and musical influence of the Italian musician Giovanni Giorgio Moroder. It specifically refers to his pioneering work in electronic music composition and use of the synthesiser. He refers to his choices in creating a “sound of the future”, about adding a synthesised click on a track, a choice which eventually heralded a new era in music.

It is his latter comments (4:58) that are captured on the track that have, in turn, captured my attention for so long.

Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.

It is this fascinating reference to a deliberate freeing of his mindset which resonates with me so much. The awareness of the “correct” musical theory and deliberately unshackling himself from it in order to be creatively free.

The final words uttered on the track are also telling and seemingly refer to a lack of precedent, an untrodden path yet to be explored. Moroder explains there were no leaders in those moments, no plans to follow, no guidebook — just rules to break.

1*F1F1JkJJ1Ijy3fYlEyK NA
New ideas may come from others but trying new stuff can still be isolating

It reminds me of something Phil ‘dm’ Campbell recently shared about his desire to not be a repeater or relay station, but to find something in himself that is powerful and true and unique.

Being a repeater or relay station is holding you back from tapping into your true self and creative core. I firmly believe that.

Perhaps Moroder was able to strip away the reference bias others were relying on and steer clear of relaying and repeating musical styles. He made creative choices with no precedent, choices that took music to a different place. Not just repeating, relaying or even remixing.

Phil goes on to challenge us all.

So ask yourself, what moment today could you have changed to instead of relaying and repeating could you have done something that was really worth relaying or repeating, something that came from your core of concern.

Let’s temper some of this with a different perspective, a comment from John Hegarty and his book Hegarty On Creativity, There Are No Rules:

the truth is that everything we create is based on something that’s gone before. It has to be. Nothing happens in a vacuum, least of all creativity and ideas.

Maybe for Giorgio in his creative exploration he had discovered a vacuum. An ill defined musical space that was ready for better definition. He was the first there, when everyone else was repeating, remixing and relaying something else. It would make sense that in the 70s there were fewer musical ideas and so more vacuumous space to discover.

It takes creative courage to be in such a place on your own, to test ideas with little or no waymarkers or sense of correctness. It is both freeing and burdensome, as you know, soon others will follow.

I wonder about how that creative isolation is true of other breakthrough ideas or pioneering souls.

Just a footnote about the Daft Punk track I discovered from the associatedWikipedia article:

When Moroder arrived in the studio to record his monologue, he was initially perplexed that the booth contained multiple microphones; he briefly wondered if the extra equipment was a precaution in case one of the microphones broke. The recording engineer explained that the microphones varied with origin dates that ranged from the 1960s to the 21st century, and that each microphone would be used to represent the different decades in Moroder’s life. The engineer added that although most listeners would not be able to distinguish between each microphone, Thomas Bangalter of the duo would know the difference.

Now that is attention to detail.