Career progress and performance is an important area in life and through my experience in striving to improve my performance I’ve learned to find many ways to perform well in my career.  It’s not been without its share of hard work though!  And as a manager, I also have insight and perspective from the other side of expectations and performance improvements and so these career tips come from that mix of experience and from my own study and practice in my career.  Please comment below if you have related experience or any stories where you have used this tip!

Building on Others’ Ideas

Ideas are an important aspect of change and change is what drives any organization closer and closer towards excellence.  If ideas are not used to feed the company’s progress, then growth will typically halt.  However, ideas need to be shared in a way that reinforces that ideas culture, not destroys it.  Ideas are often very personal and the reaction to an idea can easily have a lasting impact that influences future behavior quite strongly.

When an idea is presented some people criticize that idea and others ignore it and come up with another idea or change it. Saying something as simple as, “Here’s a better idea, blah blah blah” is very common but in actuality, it is harsh criticism about the original idea and a way to claim the new idea selfishly.  It is subtle but very destructive.  This tip is to change your working and approach when it comes to ideas and that is to always build on others’ ideas instead of criticizing or replacing them.  Changing your response to, “That is a great idea AND we could add this or do that also” is an easy way to build on others’ ideas.  Supporting people’s ideas instead of judging them is important to promote cooperation and collaboration to work together instead of against each other.

Replacing ideas or criticizing them builds competition and quickly has people learning that when they share their ideas, they are criticized, which leads quickly to people NOT sharing their ideas anymore.  This is the last thing you want for any organization and its especially not something you want for your own reputation either.  So, support others and their ideas and build on them, adding value and leaving them the credit instead of looking to take it or replace their idea with your own.

Posted by Mike King under Business | 4 Comments »

There are 3 main areas of the brainstorming process.  They are to generate new wild ideas, to build/expand on existing ideas and to capture all thoughts around the brainstormed topic.  I last wrote that doing this has 6 steps to setup an effective brainstorming session and then a number of rules to follow or use for the session itself.  That is what I will explore here:

1. Defer Judgment

This is the one thing that will or break a brainstorming session.  It’s so hard to do and absolutely must be a rule you follow to keep ideas flowing and to allow people to contribute in their way without a filter applied or any kind of judgment on their ideas.  You shouldn’t moderate anything in brainstorming and really anything goes.  All ideas.  Weird, difficult, unrealistic, and any other ideas must be allowed.  These in fact allow people to be comfortable with the creative process and you want to promote and encourage ideas, not instill a fear of blurting out a dumb idea.  There is no reason to have any criticism in a brainstorming session and if you see that or moderation of ideas at any time, put an end to that and reinforce that you welcome weird and even what seems like bad ideas.

2. Everyone Participates

Make sure that everyone has a chance to participate and to be heard.  The facilitator should ask each person for their ideas and to expand on things.  Take note of the group, some people will start to lead and share more which is great but you don’t want any one person to dominate the session or you lose the value of the diversity in the group.  If the environment and tools tailor to audible, visual and kinesthetic people (as I outlined in the first article) then you should be able to easily have everyone participate.  You just need to make sure that is happening in the session and limit how much you let the dominate vocal styles contribute without leaving room for others.

3. High Energy

Energy is important to activate the mind and so keeping the group alert, energized and active helps with creative thinking.  You can do this with expression, motion, positive encouragement on every idea, toys and physical objects, and of course the facilitator should be as energetic as possible.  Speak with passion about capturing ideas and push the group to participate, keeping everyone’s energy levels up.  Provide candies, or juice or other energy foods.  You can provide wheatgrass juice, too but for that you’ll need a wheatgrass juicer. Some groups might like to brainstorm in an environment that energizes them.  Perhaps music on will help, or holding a session outdoors.  Add something to the session to ensure keep a high energy level.

4. Faster is Better

Faster is related to high energy in that if you run the session quickly, you must do this with high energy to encourage people to be quick.  However, faster also means that you want the initial ideas and reactions from people as soon as they come to mind.  You don’t even want individuals filtering or moderating their own ideas before they share them (see #1).  Spontaneity and speed is what makes brainstorming really work so do everything you can to keep the group moving quickly and going fast!

5. Quantity versus Quality

If you encourage everyone to work fast, it’s more likely that you will get more ideas.  More ideas mean more options and generally this leads to much better results.

6. Encourage Wild Ideas

Wild and audacious ideas are often needed to break from a rigid problem that has no immediate or useable solution.  Since that is where brainstorming sessions are typically needed, it only makes sense to encourage

7. Build on Each Other’s Ideas

Every idea created has the potential to build more ideas.  What one person starts with can easily be shifted or modified into a whole new idea so always encourage people to modify ideas in order to keep generating more.  If you have a low point in a session without a lot of new ideas, ask people to add ideas and changes on any of the items already captured in the session.  Ask people to think of opposites to certain ideas just to spark their thinking.  Ask questions differently even when after similar results.

8. Keep on Track

This one requires a delicate balance.  You must allow ideas to diverge to new areas that might seem off topic (at least a bit) in order to let the creative process thrive and to not stifle people’s participation, yet, at the same time, you must control the group to stay on tasks so that the focus is to solve the problem at hand.  Depending on the group and individuals, things can often lead into other problems, design work on an idea or even to evaluating what will and will not work with any of those ideas (which is also judging them again).  Anytime things diverge too far, ask the group to come back to a previous idea or new ideas back on the original problem and don’t allow any further discussion on those areas off topic.  It is the not the time nor place for that and so you must keep things on track for the brainstorming itself.

9. Short Discussions

Inevitably, the will be some discussions going on for some of the ideas and while you can’t eliminate these, you can ensure they are brief.  Discussion generally leads to designing solutions or confrontation between individuals, neither belong in a brainstorming session.  Use discussions with the purpose of exploring a subject further and to lead only to new ideas and things to capture, instead of any evaluation of an idea.  Remind the group of these items when it happens and bring it back to generating ideas.

10. Capture Everything

Capturing and recording the ideas is critical to a good brainstorming session as well.  The way you do this first of all is important and you must have a method that works live in the meeting.  You want everyone to see it as many will require that visual aid to help their own creative thoughts.  I recommend using a flipchart or whiteboard as well as sticky notes for individuals to add thoughts onto that can quickly be put up in front of everyone.

When other point of capturing ideas is to capture EVERYTHING.  This again goes back to the most important rule of deferring judgment because if you choose what to capture and not to capture from people’s ideas, you are really filtering them out and you impact those who’s ideas that were not captured and they will be less likely to keep contributing if you have “filtered” out their ideas.

11. Organize and Filter AFTER the Brainstorm

Don’t attempt to organize or filter anything while you are looking for ideas and in the brainstorming session.  This turns on logical thinking and will suppress the creative mind from producing more ideas.  Stay focused on the brainstorm and wait to do any organizing and filtering of those ideas afterwards.  If you need the same people or plan to do it in the same session make sure you have some break because switching modes as you want the ideas to stir in the minds of those involved before switching back to task mode.  Give people a chance to add more ideas in that break and to think on them individually.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 7 Comments »

Several weeks ago, I wrote a few articles on Creativity (Mental , Social and Innovation ) and there are many other tools and processes related to creativity that deserve attention.  Brainstorming is one of them and in this article, I’ll look at how to set and prepare for an effective brainstorming session and in my next article, I’ll explore the rules to follow in the brainstorming session itself.

Suit ALL 3 Learning and Communication Styles

Every individual learns differently and communicates in different ways but there are three distinct types of learners and communicators:

• Audible
• Visual
• Kinesthetic

You need to ensure your brainstorming environment and process will tailor to all three by providing an audible setting (this is obviously most common in a meeting style of environment).  Also visual aids can boost the creative thinking.  Provide additional tools and visual guides like white boards, flipcharts, sticky notes and even toys or gadgets can help people be more creative.  For kinesthetic participants, they need to interact with things and have feelings during the meeting so plan to include interactive participation and ask specifically to brainstorm about feelings things will generate as well, as those feelings will lead to even more ideas!

Optimize the Environment

The environment should have the space it needs to allow people to flow around the room, just like you’ll expect from the ideas being generated.  To encourage the creative process, let people decide how to arrange the room themselves if at all possible.  Not everyone works based facing others as it’s confrontational, while others will excel from that if competition is their nature.  Some will need to see the ideas, some just hear them, so its best to let individuals arrange themselves so they are comfortable and ready to participate in their own way that works best for them.

Facilitator

A good brainstorming facilitator ideally is experienced with the process and needs to easily handle and follow the rules to ensure the brainstorming session is effective.  All these rules will be explored in the next article but in summary, the facilitator is required to engage everyone, capture notes and lead the process to ensure ideas are flowing, explored for branching and not holding up the process.  The facilitator doesn’t need to participate in the creative brainstorm but any good facilitator will do so, since they are likely a very creative thinker themselves if they’d been involved in a lot of brainstorming sessions.

Provide Background Ahead of Time

Brainstorming is about sharing, expanding and building a set of ideas on some topic.  However, not everyone will have immediate and spontaneous ideas so you should always provide some background information about the problem or topic before the session itself.  This ensures it gives attendees time to process and think about it before the session.  It will stir in their subconscious and likely, they will come to a brainstorming session with several ideas in mind to build on with the group.  Not everyone needs this but it ensures that people are prepared and comfortable with the topic before hand and it gives them a chance to ask questions prior to the session so it can be used for brainstorming without distractions and delay.

People Diversity

This is an important one for creative thinking.  You need to have a diverse group of people, with different styles, experience levels, positions, backgrounds or any other way to diversify a group for brainstorming.  The last thing you want for brainstorming is a group of like minded individuals who all think the same.  You simple won’t get enough variation or “outside the box” thinking without diversification.  Sometimes people who don’t know much or anything about the topic can have the best idea so you want to ensure you diversify the group.

Creative Warm-up

And finally, the last step you should do in preparing for an effective brainstorming session is to be kick start the creative thoughts in the group by having a creative warm-up exercise. Something simple and fun works well to gets warm up for a few minutes with an exercise anyone can participate in.  One I like is to have a common everyday simple object and have the group list all the uncommon things that could be used for.  Use a pencil, rock, plant, shoe, door, toothbrush or any other common object people interact with and list out other uses.  This gets the mind thinking on NEW ideas and it quickly encourages weird ideas,  which is important to allow for brainstorming.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 10 Comments »

Please jump back to the first two articles in this series if you missed them.

• The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity
• The Imaginative Mind: Social Creativity

This article explores how the mind and it’s imagination is useful for innovation.  Innovation to me is about the pollination of ideas. Not only that they are spread to others but also how that innovation provides gains and benefits compared to what was used or available before hand.  I’ve explored how your own mind’s creativity can be enhanced as well as the creativity powered by a social atmosphere and now this explores how that kind of creativity can be put to use for improvement through innovation.

Incremental

The first area of application where creativity from an imaginative mind can drive innovation is in incremental improvements and change.  This is a popular one for me and obviously through my writing here at LearnThis since personal development is largely about incremental change.  Those active in it strive to innovate new methods and teaching styles to reach and expand their influence to bring that incremental change both into our own lives and the lives of those we connect with.

Many businesses also look to gain from incremental innovation by building continuous improvement programs and training.  It’s a crucial part of change and adaptation that every strong business should have.

Radical

The next level of innovation intensity is that involving more radical change.  This is needed when larger systems / beliefs change or when a change has a much bigger impact to a person or organization.  The radical aspect of this is sometimes seen as shocking or unexpected as well since it requires outside the box thinking and improvements to be put into place.  It is much more than simple or continuous incremental changes and it requires a major step change to jump from one way of doing things to another.

Radical innovation is something that is risky and requires some courage to create.  It’s far outside any comfort zones and it isn’t something you can hide under the surface whether its a personal innovation or not.  Radical innovation will be seen by others and have enough impact on your life that the change will be a significant one.

Revolutionary

The final kind of innovation is a revolutionary one.  This level of innovation is so large that it causes change well beyond your direct environment or self and causes a wave of change well beyond the circle of direct influence.  Revolutionary thinking is of course thinking that encompasses each of the other types but what sets it apart is that it is for an innovation that affects a wide group of people, an entire region or perhaps a whole industry or market.  It is such a massive change that once it is in place, its very difficult to go back since the new innovation engrains itself into society and the lives of those within.

Take Creativity Personal

So, I hope this short series on the imaginative mind and creativity sparks you to look at where you allow your creativity to surface in your life but also how far you are willing to take it.  We all have creative thoughts and so its what you do with them and how you let them work in your mind that will drive change around you and in your life.  Don’t settle in and suppress your imagination, instead, embrace it, activate it in your own mind, in your social sphere around you and turn those innovations into action!

Please, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic or any of your own creations or innovations.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 14 Comments »

This article continues with the topic of the imaginative mind and today I’ve cover another look at creativity, but from the social aspect this time.  If you missed the last article, here it is:  The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity

Cycles of Creativity

Creativity is very much a process, not a single event and so there are cycles of creativity in our actions and thoughts.  Some days creativity just flows and others, it seems so distant.  These cycles exist within our minds in all the same areas covered from the previous section on mental creativity but now we’ll look at it these cycles in a larger social environment.  The same type of cycles where creativity is obvious, encouraged, built on, extended and heavily supported occurs in all kinds of social arenas.

• friendships and relationship
• organizations and clubs
• businesses and work groups

Even larger segments like geographic regions, industries, municipalities or media exposure groups can experience these up and down cycles of creativity.  All of these cycles occur because of creative influence that either inspires or suppresses creativity throughout that social sphere and it cascades the effects.  The same reasons why brainstorming is useful to the mind to spark new ideas and keep associations active in the mind applies here to social creativity.  Each idea feeds the ideas of others, expanding the creative impact to larger groups.  Things that stifle creativity make a similar impact by slowing down or eliminating the connections for creativity to grow.

Impact on the Mind

Understanding how these cycles impact our work, lives and environment gives us a more accurate model to predict and control the swings that social creativity is impacted by.  Keeping active with the actions that spread creativity and avoiding some of the typical problems areas that kill creativity works in a social environment to ensure the imaginative mind has a sandbox to explore.  I believe the mind is at its best when learning, growing and building itself and it can only do this to its fullest when the imagination is active with as many options for creativity as possible.

Contributing to Creativity

There are a number of ways to contribute to socially boost your creativity.  The ones I think have the biggest impact are the following:

Eliminate Criticism and Complaining

Criticism and complaining are really the quickest things that kill creativity.  Criticism can emotionally shut down a person so quickly that the only creative thoughts they will have is of escape or revenge.  It is something that naturally transforms our minds into a completely new state unless we learn to handle criticism and control our response and state of mind consciously.

The social impact this can have can reach many people at once and unfortunately this bad behaviour can also be quite contagious.  The best thing you can do with these items to contribute more to social creativity is to eliminate criticism of others, of ideas and of actions.  The same goes for complaining since it encourages a very negative thought process not helpful in activating the imagination in any way.  Obviously eliminating these is not easy, but they can certainly be reduced and they can definitely be done in private at least in order to minimize the influence to any audience available.

Brainstorming

While I covered this in the previous article on mental creativity it is certainly applicable here in a social atmosphere as well.  Brainstorming in a group activates the imagination of the whole group and quickly allows ideas to germinate with each other and spread between everyone’s minds.  It can be done as a group on purpose with a specific topic or goal in mind or it can happen through other media with no initial intention of doing it!  Social media and viral systems are perfect examples of this as a group gains access to shared thoughts and ideas, they become enabled to share more themselves which continues to feed the process.  This type of social brainstorming happens a lot with online social groups like twitter and stumbleupon , as with all the other social networks.

Asking Questions – Question everything

Questions come about from curiosity and of course curiosity broods creativity.  Therefore, questions are a powerful action to contribute more to creativity as well.  Everything a person questions, they can learn from and gain some kind of insight from.  Questions about how and why something is how it is, leads to seeing more pieces of any puzzle and that puts the mind into a state where it has to think beyond the logic to imagine the solution before all the pieces are understood.

Questions are a huge part of a healthy learning process and they will trigger the mind to explore and wonder with curiosity at things.  I’ve written about using questions for learning and training others in this article here, Using the 5W Questions to Provide Training .  Questioning the things around you has other benefits as well, it is a useful tool to expand your relationships as well.  This is because it shows curiosity to another person.  Read about that here, Open Ended Questions .

Avoid Perfectionism

My final point in looking at social creativity and the ways to contribute to it is to avoid perfectionism.  Perfectionism slows down any creative process and it quickly strangles any new ideas from emerging as it keeps the attention on an original subject or topic while it is closely scrutinized and perfected.  There is some room to explore perfecting something with a creative look, but it is usually too focused on one thing where new ideas have no place to be explored until the first topic or item is first perfected.

Getting past perfection so that more ideas can be explored gives way to identify more possibilities and have more options to approach things with.  This applies in everything from simple day to day life plans and tasks, to complex engineering design problems or even social planning. The Pareto principle is useful with social creativity as well and that is where you apply the 80/20 rule.  Perfectionist try to get things to that 100% level and they spend most of their time and effort making very little progress once past that 80% point.

So, next in my next article, I’m going to explore how the imaginative mind is applied for innovation, which I consider to be the application of creativity.  If you are not signed up yet and don’t want to miss any future articles, please sign up for my RSS feed here or by email here .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 15 Comments »

Creativity is one of my most favored traits and any activity with creative components is one I can easily value.  My engineering role in designing software, developing others as a manager in new and creative ways and my writing and 3D graphics I create on the side are all examples of how I enjoy letting creativity spill out in life.  I personally believe I’ve been crafted with the gift of creativity (as is everyone) and so there is great purpose and value in employing creative tasks in your life.

There are many ways to boost your creativity and it really is a part of any learning experience and new task so its an endless topic, which excites me a great deal because ultimately, the exercise of writing about it is also a creative exercise.  This article looks specifically at how one can build an imaginative mind using creativity.  An imaginative mind is one that can visualize beyond direct input and one that can explore things outside of the immediate reality and vicinity.  To me, this is a great ability and one I am quite passionate about so, lets explore it a bit deeper!

Initializing Thoughts

Our thoughts are nearly continuous and tuning in to them can be done specifically for creative juices.  Often we suppress our own ideas or thoughts in a split second without ever letting it surface to a voice or considered item.  We often put a validation screen on our thoughts and bias everything we let surface by the judgments we assign or expect others to assign to that thought.  This limits our mental creativity and kills a thought that would otherwise become the start of a great associative linking of thoughts and advanced creativity.  We need to let any thought be developed and explored as our mind makes the neural connections and associations with more and more thoughts.  This can happen in moments or it may take hours but it most imaginative if you let a thought continue to build and linger, don’t dismiss it or kill it on purpose.  Ever.

Brainstorming

Putting the mind to an exploratory session like this is also known as brainstorming.  Brainstorming is often considered something you do in groups and while that is true, it needs the same guidelines in your mind to let the imaginative mind explode with its full capacity and creativity available. Brainstorming at its best means that anything thought of on a given topic is valid.  Anything goes. Any idea is considered no matter how obscure or off-base it may first seem to the logical mind.  Logic is often the nemesis of creativity as we tend to judge our ideas and thoughts the moment they begin and we simply don’t give our imaginative mind a chance to develop them.

1. Explore as many possibilities as you can
2. Any idea is worth exploring at least for a short time
3. Sometimes you need to give ideas time and let the subconscious work away

Outside the Box

The other effect our logical mind has is to keep us bounded into what seems reasonable.  This unfortunately has a very negative consequence on our imagination as its very difficult to explore outside this box of reason or box of logic.  The logical mind is bounded by what we know as well so anything outside this box is suppressed by any logic at first consideration.  It’s important to get by this and let the creativity and idea be unbounded and originated from well outside the box.

The imagination is an amazing thing and you can certainly allow it to take hold of you in visualizing, day dreaming or full on dreaming.  We’ve all experienced the power of the mind’s creativity in dreams and its possible to enable that same creativity in waking life if it’s practiced and repeated instead of suppressed.  Let your mind wander, have fun with it, just imagine what that seemingly crazy idea might actually be like if you explore it further in your mind.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 17 Comments »