Creativity dos and don’ts: Simple hacks to kick start your brain

By Chris Griffiths

In a world where we’re taught from a young age to learn to memorize for an exam and un-learn creativity, it can be hard to get that flare back. However, it’s important to remember that creativity is a skill, not a talent – it can be relearnt.  

Despite quite often being seen as a ‘soft’ skill, creativity can be harnessed into an ability to produce some hard hitting results. That’s why the simple hacks below to kick start your brain and how to keep it creatively flowing is important for individuals, groups and leaders.  

Creativity dos and don’ts: Simple hacks to kick start your brain

Creative Do’s

1. Brainstorm with structure

Giving your team set meetings every week to bounce ideas off of each other will encourage new projects, solve problems and motivate everyone to constantly improve on their work. However, it’s important to have a structure to these meetings. This can’t be understated with research by the State University of New York finding teams given guidelines for brainstorming produced three times as many good ideas as the teams that were given nothing.

2. Individual brainstorming

It is important to encourage both collective and individual brainstorming to grow a business. This might seem at odds with the stereotypical vision of everyone sat round a table sharing ideas but brainstorming often becomes most effective when a person needs to solve a problem on their own. In such a format, individuals can generate independent ideas without being influenced by the thinking of others, coming up with more creative, diverse solutions. 

3. Create in a safe environment  

You must create a safe environment for creative ideas to flow, whether that be removing job titles from the equation so no one person’s idea feels more valuable, or coordinating discussions outside of the regular work environment. The best thing to remember is that you will have to be flexible when finding a safe creative environment in order for your team to find the right creativity path that suits them. By practicing flexible creativity you’ll be able to kick start not just some people’s brains, but expand the thinking of more people in a bid to reach higher levels of innovation. 

Creative Don’ts

1. Don’t get discouraged

There are going to be many creative ideas that don’t succeed, but this is all part of the process. What’s important is that you persevere. It’s essential to remove the barrier of thinking in our comfort zones, and to be curious on a constant basis. Every learning curve comes from carrying on and moving forward when things don’t go your way, but the real creative growth comes from learning from these mistakes and kicking your brain straight back into action.

2. Don’t exclude

Don’t forget that others may do things a certain way as it is the way it’s always been done, so they may need some encouragement on coming out of their creative shell. This is not something to rush, so take your time, encourage conversation around creativity and the new opportunities it can spawn, and people will start to open up to more creative ideas.

3. Intense ideation

A top tip for brainstorming is to always take breaks. Intense ideation can be tiring so you need intervals to keep your creative spark alight. This will allow for the incubation process, allowing the unconscious mind to rest and more ideas can emerge.  

Without a healthy and consistent supply of ideas, most organizations will pass their sell-by date for usefulness. Making a conscious effort to get rid of selective and assumptive thinking patterns which block our creativity can change this. According to research by Yale School of Management, the average life expectancy of a company listed in the S&P 500 index dropped from 61 years in 1958 to just 18 years by 2012.

It was also estimated that 75% of top US firms will be replaced by companies we haven’t heard of by 2027. There’s a stark lesson here – if companies refuse to encourage innovation and reinvent themselves, they are at risk of being taken over by entrants to the market. There’s not a second which passes by where we aren’t influenced, assisted or interacting with a company, so make sure your companies are those which do creativity, rather than don’t. 

Chris Griffiths is a keynote speaker on learning creativity, author of The Creative Thinking Handbook and founder of ayoa.com, the mind mapping app helping professionals unlock innovation together.