Have you ever noticed how you come up with your ideas? Have you noticed how others come up with theirs? I’ve been thinking about this lately and seeing how on Twitter there’s no shortage of people tweeting ‘x ways to innovate’ back and forth (myself included!) it makes me think non-innovation people will get confused with so many ‘techniques’.
So how many ways are there really? infinite. This is a problem because most techniques are just designed to stimulate your brain to get it thinking in all sorts of ways but they don’t naturally come to you.
We must also remember that most people are put off by all of this ‘innovation’ talk, they just don’t care about the latest and greatest technique, they just care about the outcome and our job is to help them get there. So where do people like us who are trying to spread the religion of ‘innovation’ around start teaching the non-innovators? With what comes natural to us.
We all have the creative capabilities, everyone has eyes, hands, mouth, nose, ears and a brain, it’s just a matter of finding out what comes natural to each of us individually and then just being aware of it at all times. For me personally observation and challenging assumptions is what comes naturally to me while other people I know are more associative in how they come up with ideas. Both ways produce different outcomes and insights but the principle is the same, we need new perspectives to get new ideas and mixing and matching is what our brain does best.
How do you help someone find their creative style? I’ve found that the best way to do this is by paying attention to someone when they’re inspired and look for patterns of where and how they’re coming up with ideas and then asking them how they got their idea. If they say something vague like ‘oh I was watching tv the other day and I remembered…’ dig deeper and then tell them what you spotted in their behavior, it works well because we’re all naturally curious about what others think might help us.
Bottom line is we all have a natural way of coming up with ideas and it all comes through our senses.
Which is you dominant way of coming up with ideas? Do you think that having a large arsenal of creative techniques gives us a better chance of innovating?