Develop These Creativity Skills for Breakthrough Thinking
- Beatrice Coron
Are you looking to improve your creativity skills so as to impact your breakthrough thinking? Don’t believe you are creative? Creativity is often defined as the ability to connect ideas that are seemingly unconnectable. Connecting ideas are how new ideas originate … it is the basis for creativity.
Contrary to what most people believe, creativity is not limited to the gifted ones of the population. It can be taught, nurtured, and enhanced. So what are the creative skills you need to acquire and/or develop to improve breakthrough thinking? Consider these five:
Observing
Carefully watch things around you to help gain insights into, and ideas for, new ways of doing things. Pay particular attention to areas outside your natural areas of interest.
Pick a business you admire to observe and follow. Learn all you can about the what and the how.
What ideas can you transfer and enhance?
Questioning
Ask questions to understand how things really are, why they are that way, and how they might be changed or disrupted.
Brainstorm questions about the problem.
Create a list of 50 questions and pick the best 10 to explore further.
Associating
Connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields.
Imagine how someone from a different industry would look at your challenge from an entirely new perspective. What is different?
Experimenting
Constantly visit new places, try new things, seek new information and understanding, and learn from new experiences.
Join new social / professional activities beyond your normal groups and spheres of influence.
Networking
Go out of your way to meet people with vastly different backgrounds and perspectives from your own. Examine different views as a means to expand your knowledge and stretch your thinking.
Go to breakfast or lunch with someone new every week.
Remember to practice these creativity skills as well as creative convergence, the ability to discover new relationships between different ideas to form new ideas.
Look for ways to combine these skills in new and different ways. Don’t be afraid to fail … stretch yourself and your thinking.
Practice often.
