Strategies for breaking your usual pattern and sparking innovation.
You can't tackle innovation and creativity like you would finance management and expect to come up with the "next big idea." Innovate. Create. Transform. Invent. These are verbs; they require personal action. In other words, you have to do something to innovate. Take action, maybe make some mistakes, and learn from the experience. Here are a few ways C-level execs can make innovation a habit in their day-to-day workflow.
Take a new path, literally
A recent focus for neuroscientists is the study of whether people can train their brains to think innovatively. Although the data are inconclusive, many experts agree that we can compel our brains to think differently. How? The answer may be as simple as changing our daily routines.
A notable way to consciously marshal innovative thought is to disrupt predictable behaviors and patterns at least once a day. "Make a habit of forcing yourself out of autopilot," advises David Livermore, author of Driven by Difference. Take a different route to work, hold a meeting in a different office, or order something new for lunch. The point, according to Livermore, is that altering your everyday experience can spark fresh thinking.
Start an idea journal
Journals aren't just for teenagers or authors struggling with writer's block. You can use one to pinpoint problems and chronicle new ideas. When you're stuck, flip through the journal and revisit an old idea that may address a current problem. Scott Berkun, author of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, notes that idea journals also can help you identify your own creative rhythms.
Don't limit yourself to words, adds Lisa Bodell, founder of futurethink and author of Kill the Company. Instead, use your journal to draw ideas. Drawings add insight because C-level execs can spend a lot of time writing down lots of words or getting caught up in "corporate speak." So, the next time you have a brainstorm, "use visuals to really tell you the essence of a story," Bodell recommends. "Make it very powerful. Get behind the emotion and the real reason why you want this idea to take hold."
When journaling, the main concept to keep in mind is to write down any idea that pops in your mind—at any time. Don't leave out anything, and don't judge your ideas at this stage. "There are no inhibitions: Any idea for anything goes," says Berkun.
Find a partner
Although the popular myth persists that innovation typically originates from a lone genius, that's rarely the case in reality. Rather, insights often come through thoughtful, nonjudgmental sharing of ideas. Simply stated, people are most creative when they're with other creative people. "Partnering up on a project, or even being around other creative people who are working on solo projects, keeps energy levels high," says Berkun.
Even better than looking for like-minded partners, you should try to seek out people with dissimilar backgrounds who can evoke a novel perspective. You can start by making a list of 10 people outside of your traditional cohort that you can spend some time with this month. Meet with colleagues in a different department or industry. If you're working on a particularly challenging project, seek out input from eccentric connections and mavericks. When you let go of your need for agreement and approval from the people around you, you can catapult yourself into new ways of seeing and thinking.
Invert the problem
Borrowing from the marketing world, one strategy for wresting out new ideas is to focus on the opposite of what you want. Specifically, the inversion marketing technique says to take away the components of a sales promise and envision how the consumer would be affected—in some extreme way. So, if your goal is to design the best new recruiting app, for example, switch to designing the worst app.
Bodell explains why inversion works: "Some people want to come up with new ideas, but with so much on their to-do list already, getting rid of things can be very cathartic and can lead to more new ideas because people have the space to actually think and create change."
Similarly, imagine that the problem you're trying to solve belongs to someone else—not you. Think about their expertise and how they might approach the issue. You might not actually get it right, but at least you will approach the problem from a different viewpoint, which can spur inspiration.
Take a break
If you want breakthrough inspiration, you may just need to take a break from the project at hand and do something that relaxes you. Why? Renowned neuroscientist Alice Flaherty explains that dopamine is a critical element of the creative process. Dopamine is released when people are relaxed; during exercise, meditation, or a shower. "People vary in terms of their level of creative drive according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system," she tells Psychology Today.
But dopamine isn't the only factor. Harvard University researcher and psychologist Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain, adds that distraction also plays a part in fostering innovation. Case in point: Seymour Cray, who many call the "father of supercomputing." The story goes that Cray used to divide his time between building the next-generation supercomputer and digging an underground tunnel below his house. When stumped in his lab, Cray would go to the tunnel and dig for a while.
So, if you have thought long and hard about a problem, jumping into the shower—or digging a tunnel—can create what scientists call the "incubation period" for your ideas. The subconscious mind has been working extremely hard; if you let your mind wander, those ideas can surface in the conscious mind. "A distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution," writes Carson.
Learn something new
Innovation is limited to your frame of reference. When you have that "Aha!" moment after working on a particularly difficult problem, it's probably your brain finding a creative match to something in its long-term memory area known as the hippocampus. You may not even realize the information was there, but through lightning-fast processing, your brain is able to access that data.
Here's the best part: You don't have to do any conscious work; you just need the experiences that produce the information. In other words, you have to learn and absorb new things. All. The. Time. Follow passions and interests that might not make sense to your career, and dive into topic areas you know nothing about. You can do this by attending conferences unrelated to your work, reading magazines from different industries, or participating in a massive open online course that has nothing to do with your day-to-day tasks. The best innovators are some of the biggest learners, and not just about fields directly related to their work.
What's Your Creativity Quotient?
Even though creativity is one of the most intangible assets in the business world, it is still linked to necessary leadership and business skills like problem solving and innovation. But can an organization assess whether it has creative talent with innovation skills? Enter SparcIt (pronounced "spark it"), a Berkley-based pioneer in automated psychometric creativity assessment.
Founded by Farzad Eskafi and Kenes Beketayev, SparcIt measures the four elements of creativity, as determined by the four factors of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking:
- fluency: the quantity of generated ideas
- originality: how novel those ideas are
- flexibility: the variety of ideas, and how different they are from each other
- elaboration: the level of detail that ideas have.
Eskafi told Inc. that he got the idea to assess one's aptitude for creative thinking after watching his nephew play with Legos, ignoring the user manual and using his natural creativity. Soon after, the two partners began reading every piece of research on creativity and sought out a grant from the National Science Foundation to build the online tool.
To develop the assessment, SparcIt's development team combined expertise in creativity research, natural language processing, computational linguistics, and statistical data analysis to devise a scalable algorithm for computerized automated testing. The result is a creativity quotient (CQ), an assessment of one's creative intelligence based on a set of online divergent thinking and problem-solving tests. Think of it like knowing what your IQ is, but instead of measuring your intelligence, it hones in on your creative intelligence.
The bad news is that the SparcIt online creativity assessment tool is available only to organizations and not directly to individuals. But for a limited time SparcIt is offering free access to its proprietary tool. This is a timed exercise that lasts 25 minutes, and participants will go through a series of five open-ended exercises. All individuals who complete the test will get a comprehensive CQ test score.
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