Creativity techniques II - How to allow creativity: 16 tips for creative problem solving

Allow creativity in your daily (working) life by following tips:

1. Try out different things.
2. Motivate others (such as your employees) to try new things. Routine kills creativity, because there is no need to be creative when doing routine tasks.
3. Be curious. Complacency, indifference and disinterest disable creativity.
4. Take failures and errors into account.
5. Isolate your creative sessions from your usual work.
6. Provide a relaxed environment, so that creative ideas can flourish. Avoid bad conditions, such as creative sessions in the office or a meeting just before lunch break.
7. Avoid bad structures in your company, such as when the right conditions are missing to incorporate creative innovations or when transparency and internal communication are poor or absent.
8. Sharpen your attention and look at things unbiased. Set thinking blinds you and will keep you from seeing variations.
9. The problem itself should have priority.
10. Track your goals persistently and stay tuned for ideas. Having an idea does not mean that it is also useful. Ideas must be developed first, which can take time.
11. Focus on one idea and work it out.
12. Put faith in yourself and also in your employees. Lack of confidence prevents creativity, because anyone who does not have confidence in himself does not take a risk and is convinced to fail.
13. Do not rest on your success. Instead, follow developments and trends.
14. Turn off competition. Competitive pressures make it difficult to collaborate and communicate and therefore creative work.
15. Do not offer rewards to your employees. Rewards only raise the interest in the premium instead of solving problems.
16. Do not work under time pressure. Instead, plan for enough time and take enough breaks. Time pressure can be deadly for creativity, since ideas need time to mature.

Creativity techniques I - Brainstorming

With creativity techniques and creative problem solving techniques you can boost your creativity. You can promote your ideas and develop new ideas that may help in solving your problems.

There are hundreds of different techniques. Some of them require groups with several people others can be executed alone. There are written exercises, word games or improvisation.

One of the most known creativity techniques is brainstorming. Brainstorming can produce a variety of new and unusual ideas within a short period of time. If you are at the very beginning with your problem solution, but you have a fairly specific question, then brainstorming can prove very useful. You can actually use this technology in all areas. Brainstorming works especially well when experts from different areas have to work together. However, complex problems cannot be solved easily with brainstorming. Also when having tension within the group, brainstorming is not appropriate.

You need four to 20 people and a moderator, who will record every suggestion and idea. You also need a flip chart or a board to list all ideas.

The brainstorming session consists of two phases, the production of ideas and the evaluation phase.

It is important that no criticism is allowed during the phase of idea production! No idea can be evaluated here. All suggestions and ideas are welcome, no matter how wacky they are. Ideas that were already mentioned can and should be recombined. The phase of idea production should not take more than five to 30 minutes. In most cases, however, after five to ten minutes people make less suggestions. Do not stop the production of ideas yet! After a short time, more ideas that might be even more original will come up.

All ideas are written down immediately by the moderator. He/she should not be involved in the brainstorming and under no circumstances should he/she make own suggestions. However, the moderator should make sure there is a pleasant atmosphere. He/she should also encourage the group to participate. The moderator has to ensure that ideas are not actually evaluated during the idea production phase. All ideas have to be recorded by him - without hanging anything and without making comments.

After producing idease, you should take a break. This break can be a few minutes or even an entire day.

During the evaluation phase objective criticism is welcome. All ideas are evaluated and are studied regarding their feasibility. The moderator must ensure that the evaluation stays objective.

You can decide at the beginning, if you want to make a pre-seleciton or if the group will evaluate every single idea. You can also choose an order or choose only a single idea and have it developed by the group.


Variations of brainstorming:

• Stop and go brainstorming
  Go back and forth between idea production and evaluation (each phase should last five to 10 minutes).
  
• Destructive/constructive brainstorming
  Divide the phase of idea production. First, negative (destructive) suggestions are made that prevent a solution. Then, constructive ideas are produced.
  
• Single brainstorming
  Here you do the entire brainstorming session alone, without a group. The process remains the same. Do not evaluate your ideas during the first step. Before evaluating, take a break - even one or two days is fine.
  
• Sandwich brainstorming
  Change between phases of collective and individual production of ideas.
  

What is creativity? - 4 tips for creative problem solving

Everyday, you do a lot of different tasks - many of which are routine. However, sometimes all your knowledge and skills do not help you. That's when you have to get creative. If you are not able to solve a problem in a conventional way, you will have to find a new solution by getting creative.


There are different kinds of creativity:

• People who make a groundbreaking invention and come up with a brand new product are creative in a different way then people who create a text for a website.
• New inventions and new trends require engagement with the topic for years.
• Changes of existing things, such as improvements or modifications (great ideas everybody has once in a while)

Here are four tips, that can help you with solving problems in a creative way:

• Some people are more creative then others, but everybody can be creative!
• Do not make the mistake to press your ideas into a tight system immediately.
• If you are not able to move forward with a problem, it may be helpful to involve outsiders. Non-professionals see things in a different light and judge them differently than professionals. In order to really be creative, you need at least a little clue in the area that you want to be creative in.
• Younger people are not necessarily more creative than older people. Young people might have more ideas. On the other side, older people are creative in a different way. They have more ideas that are usable and more useful.

Marketing for NPOs: to suceed you need a strategy - Greenpeace as an example

More and more organizations rely on social media to attract attention, such as the NPO (non profit organization) Greenpeace as already mentioned.

The organization targets a corporation that is not acting the way it should (Nestlé in the past, now BP) and goes against the corporation's work with activities in different media.

Also in its latest campaign against the company BP, Greenpeace connects social media very effectively with real actions - mainly guerrilla actions.

Greenpeace currently has graphic designers and other creative people rebrand the previous BP logo - in a competition on their webseite. The logo of the company is to be redesigned to match the dirty business of the BP-group. The previously submitted logos are all very creative.
So BP (British Petroleum) is changed into beelzebub profits, broken pipe, pollution business, big profit - it's never enough, best practices, big problem, best pest, poison black, yellow fever, british predator, big pollute, or peng bum. Slogans were changed as well, for example "BP - we oil the world", "SBP - silent but deadly", "not so slick actually - BP", "BP - burn our planet", "BP - PB - planet breakup", "children could run it better - probably "," RIPBP "," BP - we united drill. It's definitely worth taking a look at the picture gallery of submitted work! Should BP ever think of a rebranding, it would be easy for them to draw from the pool of logos of Greenpeace. However, whether these logos are good for BP's image is rather questionable.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace activists attached a flag with BP's new logo (BP - British Polluters) at the BP headquarters in London. Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyEWwsm7wfQ

A few days ago, Greenpeace activists were arrested in the US, because they painted oily messages on a ship loaded with oil. At least, this gets the organization in the headlines and focuses attention on the real problem - the oil spill.

Greenpeace is doing its best to draw attention on what BP is doing. At the same time, the organization also makes the public aware of the real problems of the oil spill. Greenpeace is currently taking water samples and documenting the devastation in the Gulf of Mexico - with employees, scientists and volunteers.

Behind all these efforts by Greenpeace lies a well-developed strategy. However, just like many other NPOs, Greenpeace has to respond quickly to emerging problems. That means, there is a risk that even though a strategy has been worked out, you have to improvise.

Therefore, NPOs have to develop a basic strategy in order to be able to react quickly. The strategy should include many (different) media: guerilla actions, documented and distributed through the Internet and social media, as well as hands-on activities, which can also be distributed online. Then, of course, the organization should also ensure that the cooperation between employees and volunteers goes smoothly.