CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DISCIPLINE OF CREATIVITY
“You have more potential than you could use in one hundred lifetimes; there is no problem you cannot solve, no goal you cannot achieve, by unlocking the power of your mind.”
—Brian Tracy
Creative thinking skills are vital to your success. The average manager spends 50 percent or more of his time solving problems, either alone or with others. Your ability to deal with difficulties and solve problems will, more than anything else, determine everything that happens in your career. In fact, it is safe to say that an individual with poor creative thinking skills will be always relegated to working for those with developed creative thinking skills.
Creativity is a skill, like riding a bicycle or operating a computer, that can be learned and developed with practice. Creativity is a discipline that you can develop with practice and repetition, until it becomes a natural extension of your personality and your skill set. Often a direct relationship becomes apparent between the quantity of new ideas that you generate in your work and the level of success you achieve. One new idea or insight can be enough to change the direction of an entire company. The profitability, income, and future prospects for you and your company depend on your creative contribution.
Remember, everything that you are or ever will be comes as the result of the way you use your mind. If you improve the quality of your thinking, you improve the quality of your life.
Let’s begin with a whole new way of looking at the world.
Defining Creativity
The best single definition of creativity is “improvement.” Every single idea that improves the way we live and work, in large or small ways, is an act of creativity. The more you look for ways to improve activities and circumstances on a day-to-day basis, the more creative you become. Your creativity is a latent force deep down in your intelligence. You can become more creative by placing more demands on your creative capability.
Every single person has what is called a “line of sight.” In each organization the line of sight is what you see when you look up; it’s the job you do and everything that is going on around you. And everyone can find ways to improve what is going on in their line of sight. Success in business life is directly proportionate to the quantity of new ideas that you come up with on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Someone who comes up with a continuous stream of good ideas, or even average ideas, is destined for great success in business. People who come up with few or no ideas are usually stuck where they are. Look in your line of sight. How can you improve the way you are doing your work? How can you increase your results or lower your costs?
Ask for Suggestions
In 1975, Mazda Corporation of Japan had been decimated as a result of trying to introduce and perfect the rotary engine. Its profits were down to $5 million. In desperation, it introduced a program that encouraged people in the company to give suggestions on how Mazda could do things better, faster, easier, or cheaper. They were astonished at the results! In the first year, they received more than 200,000 suggestions and implemented 60 percent, or 120,000, of them. Mazda made another interesting discovery. Although it had an excellent reward system for good suggestions, the greatest satisfaction the employees received came from coming up with an idea and seeing it applied.
Five years later, in 1980, Mazda Corporation had made an astonishing turnaround; its profits were up to $95 million, the suggestions were running at 2 million per year at an astonishing 60 percent implementation. Profits had increased 1,800 percent. Officials at Mazda said that the reason for these results was the suggestion system that encouraged each person to contribute his or her creativity to the well-being of the company.
When researchers measured the level of implementation of suggestions in North American corporations, it ran about 10 percent, which means that for every 10 suggestions collected, nine were rejected. What does it do to a workforce to have 90 percent of its creative input rejected? Employees eventually conclude, “What the heck! Forget it. It’s not worth it.” Even worse than that, many companies encourage suggestions and then simply ignore them if they are inconvenient or if they cost any time or money to try out. What these companies are missing is an awareness of the apparent direct relationship between ideas and profitability. The greater the number of ideas submitted, the greater will be the quality of the ideas implemented. Small incremental improvements to cut costs, increase quality, and boost customer or employee satisfaction can translate into huge increases in profitability.
Because of the dynamic and competitive nature of our society and the acceleration of obsolescence, the more and better ideas you can generate in your organization, the more likely it is that you will survive and thrive in the years ahead. An organization that does not continually come up with new ideas is doomed.
The Root Source of Creativity
Creativity is a natural, spontaneous characteristic of positive individuals with high self-esteem. Companies that create positive corporate environments receive a steady flow of ideas from everyone on staff.
Three factors influence the number of creative ideas a person generates. The first is past experiences, which have a lot to do with how creative you are. If you’ve been in environments in the past where ideas have been encouraged, you’ll probably have a positive attitude and aptitude for coming up with new ideas. If you’ve been in a negative environment, your creativity will likely be dulled.
The second factor is your current situation. Do you find a lot of encouragement for new ideas in your present circumstances? Do people laugh and get involved, or do they ridicule or criticize?
The third factor is your self-image. Do you consider yourself to be a creative person? It is thought that fully 95 percent of people have the ability to come up with good ideas. In fact, the work done by Howard Gardner at Harvard University suggests that each person is a potential genius in at least one area. Therefore, the starting point of unlocking your creativity is to for you to begin to think of yourself as a highly creative person.
You Are a Potential Genius
Repeat this statement to yourself over and over again: “I’m a genius!” At first, it may sound and feel a little silly. Initially, your subconscious mind may resist the idea. But your subconscious mind has stored away every single bit of information and experience you have ever had in your life, like a massive data base it can draw upon. After continually repeating “I’m a genius,” over and over, your subconscious will eventually begin to reassemble data in the form of ideas to help you solve the problems you’re wrestling with today. Even if it feels funny at the start, just keep repeating, “I’m a genius, I’m a genius!”
I’ve had hundreds of graduates of my seminars come back to me and say they were amazed how smart they became when they began to deliberately change their self-images and affirm repeatedly that they were creative and innovative.
Move Out of Your Comfort Zone
A major barrier to creativity is “the comfort zone.” People have a natural tendency to resist new ideas, to say no to anything new or different. Does your company encourage people to take risks and to suggest new ways of doing things? Do you as a manager?
A direct relationship in an organization connects happiness, on the one hand, and optimism and creativity on the other. Happy, valued employees and executives are always more creative. Whenever people feel valued, important, and respected in an organization, creativity bubbles forth naturally. Optimism, cheerfulness, positive expectancy, and laughter all trigger creativity. What do you do to reward, recognize, and reinforce your staff when they come up with new ideas?
The fact is that everybody is inherently creative. It is a gift provided to you by nature to deal with the problems and challenges of life. The only difference is that some people use a lot of their creativity, and some use very little. On average, a person driving to and from work probably has about four ideas per year, any one of which could make him or her a millionaire if he or she were to pursue it. The reason we don’t pursue our ideas is because we don’t believe that they could be of any value. The fact is that you may have forty ideas every year, any one of which would enable you to fulfill all your dreams.
The quality of calm confidence in your creativity is one of the most powerful forces you can develop to stimulate your subconscious mind into giving you good ideas. Your job is to accept that you really are a genius and that ideas come to you naturally and in abundance.
Three Triggers to Creativity
Normal creativity is stimulated by three factors:
1. Intensely desired goals. Intense emotion of any kind is a stimulant or trigger to creativity. The more you want something, the more likely it is you will find creative ways to accomplish it. That’s why it is said that there are no uncreative people, just those without goals that they want badly enough. What are your most intensely desired goals?
2. Pressing problems. If a problem or an obstacle is stopping you from achieving something that is important to you, you’ll be amazed at how creative you become in your ability to remove it.
3. Focused questions. The more precise and focused the questions you ask yourself and others, the more rapidly the creative reflex operates to generate workable answers.
Testing your assumptions can be a more specific way of asking focused questions and getting at the heart of your goals and the obstacles to them. Continually ask yourself, “What are my assumptions?” Question not only your obvious ones, but also what may be your hidden assumptions. Most importantly, really look at where your assumptions might be wrong. False assumptions lie at the root of every failure. Whenever you are facing real trouble or difficulty, ask yourself, “What are my assumptions in this situation?”
Problem Solving Made Simple
Any organized method of problem solving is more effective in generating higher-quality solutions than no method at all. Here are six steps you can follow:
1. Define the problem clearly—in writing. Accurate diagnosis is half the cure. What exactly is the problem? Fuzzy definitions are major obstacles to problem solving.
2. Read, research, and gather information. Get the facts. Many problems exist because no one has gathered sufficient information. Often, with enough information, the solution becomes obvious.
3. Ask questions of informed people and consult experts. Go to the Internet. Do a search with Google’s Keywords. Almost every problem you will ever have has already been solved by someone.
4. Try consciously to solve the problem. Think of everything you can possibly do, and then, if you don’t get an answer, simply let it go. Release the problem completely and get your mind busy elsewhere. Turn the problem over to your subconscious mind; it will work on it 24 hours per day.
5. Review the problem just before sleeping, and ask your subconscious for a solution. Take a few minutes before you go to sleep to write out your next day’s schedule and think about the problems or difficulties you may have to face, and then turn them over to your subconscious mind. You may wake up in the middle of the night with the answer, the “eureka factor.”
6. Write it down. If you don’t write down your ideas when they come to you, or dictate them quickly into your smartphone or recorder, you can easily forget them.
Sometimes one good idea can save you years of hard work. One good idea can be all you need to start a fortune. Capture it on paper.
The Mindstorming Method
Mindstorming is one of the most powerful ways ever discovered to solve problems and achieve goals. It provides a way of using focused questions for concentrating the power of your mind. More people have become wealthy using this simple method than any other type of creative thinking or problem-solving technique. It is often called “the 20 idea method.”
Take a clean sheet of paper. Write your most pressing problem or goal at the top of the page in the form of a question. For example, if your goal is to increase your sales from $250,000 to $350,000 in the next 12 months, you would write “What can we do to increase our sales to $350,000 in the next 12 months?” The more specific the question, the better quality of answers you will stimulate.
You then begin writing answers to the question. You discipline yourself to keep writing until you get to 20 answers, or more. You can do this on your own or with a group of people using a whiteboard or flipchart.
When you first use this method, the first five answers will be fairly easy. The next five answers will be more difficult, and the last ten answers will be really difficult. But over and over, we have found that often the twentieth answer is the breakthrough idea that changes everything.
Generating Ideas
Write down the first idea you think of, and then write down the opposite of it. Then write down a synthesis of the two. Write down even ridiculous answers. Just force yourself to write a minimum of 20 answers, and surprisingly enough, sometimes an answer will leap off the page at you. One of my students found that his seventeenth answer was the solution he had been seeking for more than six months. When he implemented it, it changed his business completely.
Once you have generated at least 20 ideas, select at one (or more) idea from your list and implement it immediately. This action keeps your creative juices flowing. If you use this technique first thing in the morning, you will more likely be functioning at a higher level of creativity and intelligence all day long. And the more you practice this method, the more creative and alert you will become.
Questioning to Stimulate Creativity
Your creative mind is stimulated and triggered into action by focused questions. The more questions you ask, and the more provocative they are, the more accurate and creative will be your thinking. Focused questions are the mark of a truly intelligent person. If you learn to ask focused questions of yourself, you can then ask focused questions of other people.
Some of the best questions you can ask in business are:
• What are we trying to do?
• How are we trying to do it?
• What result or outcome are we trying to achieve?
• What would be our perfect result or solution?
• What are our assumptions?
• Could these assumptions be wrong? (Remember that errant assumptions lie at the root of every failure.)
• What do we do now?
Developing the Qualities of Genius
Genius is not a matter of IQ. It is more a way of acting and thinking than of inborn intelligence. Studies of geniuses throughout the ages indicate that they all have three habits of mind in common.
First, geniuses have the ability to concentrate single-mindedly, 100 percent, on one subject, to the exclusion of all else. Today, the greatest enemy of creative thinking is distraction, of all kinds. Because you are surrounded by so many technological devices, it is increasing difficult to focus, but focus you must if you want to tap into your amazing creative powers.
Try this: Write down every detail of the problem you are working on right now. “Swarm all over it.” Sometimes the very act of writing out all the details stimulates ideas and solutions.
A second characteristic of geniuses is their ability to see causal relationships among various factors. They can see the big picture. Geniuses retain an open-minded, flexible, and almost childlike attitude toward examining every possible way of approaching a problem, without rushing to a conclusion.
Try looking at your work, yourself, and your business as part of an organic system. This approach means considering how each factor affects and influences other factors. Instead of looking at the event as a discrete and separate experience, look at all the things that might have led up to the event and all the things that might occur after the event. Think of your situation as part of a bigger picture and consider all the different interrelationships.
Avoid the tendency to develop an attachment to a solution or idea. One of the factors that puts the brakes on creative thinking is becoming attached or falling in love with an idea we’ve come up with. Then we invest our ego in selling the idea to others. Instead, resolve to stay detached from the idea initially, and consider as many other ideas as possible with an open mind. Stay flexible, even with an idea that seems fantastic. Avoid the natural tendency to embrace your idea until you’ve looked at all possibilities.
Third, geniuses use a systematic, orderly approach to solving each problem, as they teach in mathematics or physics. All geniuses approach problems systematically rather than in a random or haphazard way. They ask questions such as: Why? Why not? Why not this way? Could there be another way? They have the ability to suspend judgment and to avoid becoming attached to, or enamored of, their own ideas until they have explored them completely.
Mind-Stimulating Exercises
Here are some key questions to stimulate your creativity. Take a few minutes to write your own answers to each question before moving on.
1. What are your three most important goals in life right now?
2. What are your three most pressing problems right now?
3. Describe the ideal outcome you desire from a problem facing you right now.
4. What one thing would you dare to attempt if you knew you could not fail?
5. And my favorite, “What do you really want to do with your life?”
These questions stimulate your creativity and open your mind to greater possibilities.
Identifying Key Obstacles
On the path to achieving any goal there will be obstacles; some of which you can see and others you cannot. Your creativity should be focused on removing the biggest obstacle to your success at the moment. This obstacle is a “rock” on your road to success and happiness. You must somehow get around, over, or through this major rock in order to achieve your most important goal.
Identifying your major rock and focusing all your creative energies on moving that obstacle out of your path will help you make more progress than if you were to remove all the other smaller obstacles in your way. The biggest mistake that people make is to do what is fun and easy rather than what is right, necessary, and difficult. They focus on the little obstacles and small day-to-day problems. They ignore the massive rock that is the primary obstacle holding them back. This obstacle is often called the “limiting factor.”
In every process, the limiting factor is what determines the speed at which the goal will be accomplished. You have to ask, in your work and business, what is the limiting factor? It may be education or knowledge. It may be money. It may be a key skill or ability. What is the one thing standing in the way of you achieving the successes you desire? Once you’ve identified it, swarm all over it. Devote your energies to getting rid of the major obstacle, before you do anything else.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a powerful technique for developing synergy in an organization. A chief responsibility for effective managers is to conduct regular brainstorming sessions focused on business improvements.
The process of brainstorming is simple:
• The ideal number for a brainstorming session is four to seven people.
• The length of the session should be 15 to 45 minutes long. Thirty minutes is optimal.
• Define the question or problem clearly so that everyone knows and agrees.
• Write down the idea so everyone can see it during the session.
• Strive for the greatest number of ideas, without evaluation. Don’t stop to judge or question them, just try for as many ideas or solutions as you can generate in the time allocated.
• Accept every idea without comment, except to say something like, “That’s a good idea!” to encourage more ideas. The more people laugh in a brainstorming session the more likely you are to come up with great ideas.
• Appoint a recorder who writes down every idea no matter how wild the idea may sound, for evaluation later.
• The leader acts only as the facilitator and does not dominate the conversation. The facilitator encourages everybody to contribute. If you’re the manager and leader, the less you say the better.
• If you’re also the recorder, just add your ideas silently to the list.
At the end of the brainstorming session, gather up all the ideas for evaluation at a later time, preferably by someone who is not a participant in the session. This step helps to keep ego out of the process.
Nominal Group Technique
This technique is used in brainstorming or mindstorming to elicit creative answers to specific problems. The simplest example is sentence-completion exercises. Complete the following three sentences with as many different answers as possible.
1. We could double our sales if …
2. We could cut our costs by 20 percent if …
3. We could defeat our competition in the marketplace if …
Regular practice of this method will greatly increase the quality and quantity of creative thinking of everyone. This process is a good way to find solutions that are right under your nose, but you might not have recognized them yet.
Lateral Thinking Methods
Lateral thinking forces the mind out of comfortable or conventional ways of thinking. It was pioneered by Edward De Bono. The best way to describe this process is that when people find themselves in a hole, the natural tendency is to dig the hole deeper, when actually the correct solution may be to dig a totally different hole. Lateral thinking is a way of breaking yourself of the tendency to keep doing things the same old way.
You can reverse key words or phrases. For example, you can call a problem an opportunity. With that in mind you look into it and seek the opportunity it may contain. Instead of saying, “Sales are down,” say, “purchases are down.” It’s not that we are not selling enough, but our customers are not buying enough. This twist changes the whole focus of the discussion.
Random association requires that you select words and force them to fit a particular situation. Take a word such as orange or artichoke and describe your business, product, or problem as that word. “Our business is like an orange because….” On the outside, it looks quite smooth, but as you get closer, you see a lot of bumps. Inside you find a lot of seeds and separations. There are also some juicy parts. In what way does your business look like an orange, inside and out?
Identify the dominant idea. If the dominant idea is that “we have a real problem here,” maybe the dominant idea should be that “we have a real profit opportunity.” Shift your thinking away from the dominant idea. For example, rather than saying, “We need to sell more,” say, “Our customers need to buy more.” Maybe a loss that you’re suffering will enable you to make a profit by doing or changing to something else.
Look at the other person’s viewpoint and try to see and describe the situation through that person’s eyes. Lawyers use this approach when preparing a case for court. They will think about arguing the case from the opponent’s point of view before preparing their own case.
Finally, fantasize. It is a wonderful way of thinking creatively. Imagine that you had a magic wand you could wave to remove all obstacles to achieving your objectives. If that were to happen—you waved it and all your problems disappeared—what would your situation look like?
Value-Engineering Principle
Value engineering is a simple method of evaluating the usefulness of a new product by asking some key questions.
1. What is it? Describe it through the mind of the consumer.
2. What does it do?
3. What does it cost?
4. What else will do the same job?
5. What does that cost?
Often such an examination will lead you to outsourcing. You may find that instead of doing something in-house, you could find another company that has better capacities or facilities and save money by having them do the job.
Evaluating Your Ideas
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Eighty percent of new products introduced after research and testing fail, and 99 percent of ideas are impractical. Before falling in love with your ideas, subject them to rigorous evaluation. First of all, is it effective? Will it work? Will it make a meaningful difference? Is it a good enough idea to make a meaningful improvement? Is it compatible with human nature? Is it compatible with the way people like to shop?
Today, people will shop online for the things they want, and then get in their car to pick them up at the retailer. Why? Because people like to touch, handle, taste, smell, and feel things. They like the experience of live shopping. Conversely, today people visit retailers to see the product personally and then go home and buy it online. This approach is called “showrooming.” How will these behaviors affect the shopping patterns of customers in the future? How will it affect your customers?
When you think about your idea, is it compatible with your goals? Is it an idea to which you or someone else can make a total commitment? If it is not compatible with what you want to accomplish in your life so that you can commit yourself wholeheartedly, maybe you should pass it on to someone else.
Is the timing right? Is it practical now? Sometimes an idea is too soon or too late. A great idea for a luxury product is likely to have trouble catching on in the middle of a recession. Similarly, a discount item may flop in a boom time.
Is it feasible? Is it worth it to engage in the activity and cost to produce and deliver it? What other opportunities are available that will require the same amount of time and money to develop and test?
Finally, is it simple? In the final analysis almost all great innovations are simple. They can be explained in 25 words or less. The customer in the marketplace can hear a description of the innovation and say “Yes, that’s good. That’s what I want. I’ll take it. That’s what I need.”
Simplicity is the key because it has to be sold by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not necessarily competent. It has to be bought by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not geniuses; they may not easily comprehend the product or its true value if it cannot be explained simply.
Each person becomes a genius to the degree to which he exercises his creative faculties. Regularly applying the questions and exercises in this chapter to your personal and business activities, you will develop within yourself the discipline of creativity, which you can then use for the rest of your career.
Action Exercises
1. Write down your three most important business goals right now.
2. Write down your three biggest business problems, challenges, or obstacles to greater sales and profitability right now.
3. Practice mindstorming on one of your problems by defining it as question and then generating 20 answers to that question.
4. Assemble a group of four to seven people in your business to brainstorm on one of your problems or goals for 15–45 minutes.
5. Complete the sentence, “We could double our sales (or profitability) over the next 12 months if we …” with as many answers as possible.
6. Identify your limiting factor to greater business success. What one factor sets the speed at which you achieve your most important business goal, and how could you remove it?
7. Identify your assumptions about yourself, your business, and your products, services, and markets, and then ask, “What if these assumptions were not true?” What would you do then?