Bringing creative thinking to your organization provides you with a focused thinking framework to generate solutions. An investment in creative thinking allows your company to reduce costs, increase your team’s productivity, and increase revenue.

Creative thinking requires a mind shift on your part. First, you must understand the nature of creativity. Creativity means maximizing the potential of your brain. By deliberately using structured creative thinking systems, processes, and techniques, you can learn to generate many, many ideas in just a few minutes and hundreds of ideas in a few hours.

Our focus is on business creativity for the corporation. You must come up with a new idea before you can innovate. Innovation then is the implementation of a good idea that is successfully brought to the market and creates economic value.

Reverse Your Thinking – Reduce Costs by Spending More

How can you reduce costs and still justify your investment in creativity development for your organization? Perhaps we should listen to a creating thinking champion who has real world corporate experience.

David Tanner, former Director of the DuPont Center for Creativity and Innovation, gives examples in his book, Igniting Innovation, Through the Power of Creative Thinking, of how to reduce costs through the use of creative thinking techniques.

An information technology team posed the question, “How can we reduce costs in the information systems function?” They used a lateral creativity thinking technique and specifically applied “reversal.” This required thinking differently with a resulting provocation. “Reduce costs by spending more money.” Spending more money on fewer vendors allowed them to obtain larger discounts with each supplier. They were also able to negotiate better prices on their high volume orders.

They saved over $300,000 annually. This concept saved a similar amount when it was applied to maintenance. Now think about this accomplishment. They spent money but at the same time they reduced their corporate costs significantly. By their investment in a two-hour lateral creative thinking session, they positioned themselves to save more than $5,000,000 over a ten-year period.

For most corporations the entire focus seems to be on cost cutting. We have already demonstrated you can cut costs and still make money by investing in creativity development for your organization.

Increase Revenue Stimulation by Increasing Team Productivity

However, imagine shifting your focus to revenue stimulation. How does creativity development support increasing your revenue?

One way to increase revenue is to increase your team’s productivity by identifying your employee’s thinking styles. By a better understanding of how our brain works, you can align teams to enhance their collaboration and therefore increase their productivity. By taking specific and deliberate steps to increase productivity through the diversity of thinking preferences, it has been scientifically proven that a team’s productivity can increase from 20% to 80%. (Source: The Whole Brain Business Book, Unlocking the Power of Whole Brain Thinking in Organizations and Individuals by Ned Hermann)

You can also increase revenue by developing a focused thinking framework for your sales department. As your sale’s team draws up their strategic account plans and strategies for the coming year, do they wait and hope a good idea will come to them on how they will reach their sales objectives? If you use deliberate creative thinking techniques to generate ideas, you will discover that the ideas come quickly and much more easily. You now have a creative process to generate ideas when you need them.

Creating New Markets and Business Models

Perhaps you want to develop new markets for existing products. Have you considered developing new markets where there is currently no competition? How about new processes or new applications? Creativity development can help your company discover these new markets and new sources of revenue.

Invest in Developing Your Organization’s Creative Thinking

It is now time to bring creative thinking into the corporation to maximize your organization’s ability to thrive. It is a time to design new business models, to develop new markets, and enhance your competitive advantage.

You are currently faced with important business and functional problems with no easy or obvious solutions. The solution is to invest in creativity development. Creative thinking generates the ideas for strategic corporate success by developing the thinking infrastructure needed to spark bottom-line innovations for thriving in today’s new environment.

Are you planning on investing in developing your organization’s creative competence this year?

 1.)    Keep blue slips and colored pens on the night stand next to your bed.  You can then capture your random thoughts as soon as they occur even while half asleep.  Otherwise your insight may be lost forever.  I like the color blue because it reminds me of the blue sky and unimagined possibilities.

2.)    Create a loving mindset and assume the best in others.  You will then attract ideas and people into your universe who inspire you with new possibilities.  Lie in bed and think about those you love and their gifts that make them truly unique.

 3.)    Breathe deeply and relax.  Let go of your fears and anxieties.  This will allow creativity to flow through you.  As your thoughts float use the language of what is possible.  Think “I will ……….…….” you fill in the blank, smile, and then drift off to sleep.

4.)    With your eyes closed reflex about whatever it is that makes you feel gratitude.  When you feel gratitude, you create an inner life that attracts even more abundance into your life.  More gratitude leads to more creativity.  Breathe deeply and slowly.  Think and feel gratitude about what is going well in your life.   It can be about people or small events and things.  If you have difficulty thinking of something, then express gratitude because you are lying in a warm clean bed.

5.)    If something is troubling you, then think about something totally unrelated, it is helpful if you think of someone or something that makes you smile.  Now go to sleep, when you wake up in the morning you may find that you have some insight into that nagging problem because you distanced yourself from it.

6.)    When you awaken in the morning, stretch and express gratitude because you have another glorious day to be creative and to innovate as you move forward to face the challenges of this new and special day.

Creativity does begin in the bedroom.  Sleep makes you more creative.  What are you going to do when you get into bed tonight to become more creative?

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What are you doing to develop your competence in creativity?

Creativity Expert, Alan Black, Ph.D. posed some provocative questions to me, “What are you doing to increase your creative skills, traits, and abilities?  What are the tools you use (mental, physical, emotional, social) to increase your creative thinking?  How do you increase your creative skills?”

After some reflection I developed these responses and realized that this is how I develop my creative competency.  It is my hope that this will spark some ideas for you to develop your own creative competency.  After all, creativity is a skill that can be learned, just like riding a bicycle.

Traits – I am daring and I am unafraid to reach out to people who are so out of my league it is laughable to think they would have anything to do with me.  However, sometimes they respond back to me and it is great fun.  I am passionate about learning as much as I can about creativity and how it can be applied to business, science, and technology.  Traits I possess are, I am daring, unafraid of failure, passionate, and I have the philosophy that if I am not having fun then I need to go do something different.

Abilities – I am always thinking about ways to promote creativity through the use of technology.  I have a Master in Business Administration; therefore, I am always on the lookout for how to justify creativity with (ROI) return on investment because that is the language business people understand.  I am always looking for examples of language to use that will make creativity theory understandable to “rational” people such as those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).  I am often told that I am not rational (by my husband); I take this as a high compliment.

Tools – I read books about creativity and then I contact the authors and invite them to engage with me.  Oftentimes they ignore me but I have had some phenomenal successes.  Sometimes the authors find me and initiate the contact.  Michael Michalko did this and he invited me to write an endorsement for his new book, “Creative Thinkering” so I did. 

I use the public relations tools provided by (WITI) Women in Technology International to announce my latest creativity adventures.  They have a market reach of two million.  I am on their leadership team.  I also do webinars on creativity for WITI.  I am the Chief Creative Advisor to the President of Sedaa’s Global Brain Trust, which is a community of over three hundred in the field of (OD) organizational development.  I write blog posts about creativity on their site and how it relates to OD.  I also do webinars for them on social media and creativity.

I am an avid fan of Tony Buzan’s iMindMapping computer software and I use it for all my presentations.  I met him at the American Creativity Association conference in Singapore that I helped to organize.

I learn as much as I can about social media and then I implement what I have learned to promote creativity and connect with others who are interested in creativity.  I go where I have never gone before, for example, I am now a radio talk host on live radio for a program called Women\Men.  It is a new adventure and I am learning as I go along.  I plan to use this as a platform to apply creativity to everyday living and to make others aware of the field of creativity.

I am also constantly promoting RobotLab’s process developed by Lars Ringe that provides training in creativity to build high performance teams.  Our most recent success was his presentation in Copenhagen, Denmark of our white paper, “Mastering Creative Problem Solving within Teams” at the International Association of Science Parks conference.  We will soon begin our new book incorporating the ideas of tomorrow and the management solutions that create and maximize high performance teams by using creative problem solving.

I write blog posts about creativity.  I became a guest blogger for the Front End of Innovation, IIR USA and travelled to Amsterdam and wrote 19 blog posts about design thinking.  I continue to read and study design thinking to gain a better understanding of what it really means.  I recently connected with Roger Martin on facebook, the author of “The Design of Business, Why Design Thinking is the next competitive advantage.” 

Mental – I exercise five times a week.  I sleep eight hours every night.  When I am on the treadmill I zone out and often think about creativity.  I watch the news and think about how creativity might impact some of our world issues.  I am an insatiable reader of books, e-books and periodicals.  My reading ranges from the latest on Harvard Business Review to the latest historical romance novel.  I connect and hang out with international people; they are fascinating because they see the world differently than many of us.

I travel internationally at every opportunity.  Last year I went to Amsterdam; this year I am going to Ireland.  I will be going to China; therefore, I am educating myself about China.  I attend lectures and read about China.

Physical – I play with my two year old grandson on the floor and pay close attention to the way he perceives the world.  He reminds me of how fresh things once were to me and how innocent he is now.  I love to play with him and it leaves me filled with joy and new energy.  He loves to look at plants and animals and wonders about them.  My six year old grandson is just so brilliant; I love to have conversations with him about how he sees the world.  His perspective is so fresh and insightful.   They both make me start to think again about life with a fresh perspective.  When I am with them I take the time to look carefully at a plant, a flower, or to watch and think about the ducks. 

Emotional – I have been married for over 40 years and I am fortunate to be surrounded by a stable and loving family.  I do not take this for granted because some of our friends and extended family have the opposite situation.  I think about the creative skills required to stay married and to raise well adjusted children in such a turbulent society.  I am writing a book about my life’s journey entitled, “Mind Shift, Migrant to Main” and a second book entitled “Unconventional Corporate Mom.”

Social – I seek out creative people on social media networks and engage with them.  I became the President of the American Creativity Association – Austin Global.  It is a virtual community.  I seek out other leaders in creativity.  It is my intent to build a collaborative community using the latest technologies to promote creativity.  I envision scientists, software developers, engineers and other “rational” professionals meeting with creatives in one easy to use friendly collaborative virtual space.  I invite everyone to connect with me on LinkedIn, facebook, and Twitter and I engage with them.

What ideas do you plan on implementing to develop your own creative competency?

Fun with friends and the mic!

I love listening to music and sitting with friends over a great meal and drinks. 

However, the economic meltdown has made me much more conscious of finding a place with great value that also serves excellent home cooked food, and is loaded with a relaxed, friendly and warm ambience.

Much to my delight I found such a place at Mojitos Cuban Cafe.  You will not be surprised to learn they serve authentic Cuban food.  However, you will be surprised to learn that the original drummer for the Drifters provides entertainment as a DJ and as a singer every Saturday evening beginning at 8:00 p.m.

Solve the puzzle on how to move your innovation forward!

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people are persuasive and are able to move their innovation projects forward?  Why is it that some of us are able to persuade others to understand and accept new concepts?  Some innovators are able to inspire and influence a team to accomplish a common goal. 

Some of us have had the benefit of a significant investment in training to learn how to be persuasive.  However, even though we were taught the techniques, we never understood why some of these techniques worked.

I recently read the book, Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini.  As I read, I finally understood why these persuasive techniques are so influential on others.   Why does our brain instinctually react to certain situations?  Why are we then persuaded to do things we ordinarily would not do?

You will find some practical tips here on how you can immediately create influence and become more persuasive in your efforts to move your innovation projects forward. 

1.)    Ask for a ten minute appointment instead of a longer appointment with executives.  It is far more likely they will grant you a small request for time.  Ten minutes is sufficient time to convey your concept at a strategic level.

 2.)    Quantify and present your idea or initiative in terms of how much money the company “will lose” if it is not adopted instead of how much it will save.

 3.)    To successfully implement your innovation be aware that others need social proof from their respected peers before so they will know how to react to your innovation.  The best way to accomplish acceptance is to identify the most respected individuals within your peer group and persuade them first.  Acceptance of innovation comes from the side not from the top.

 4.)    Explain the benefits of your innovation to team members.  Ask them if they support your initiative.  When they respond in the affirmative, ask them to describe to you why they support your innovation.  You must gain a voluntary commitment, they must be actively engaged, and they must declare their support.  Now you have significantly increased the likelihood they will support your innovation within the organization. 

 5.)    Customize your presentation to each unique receiver.  Use the first letter of that executive’s name or a phrase that sounds similar in the title.  For example:  If their last name is Smith, then begin with an “S.”  To increase the likelihood you will gain their mind share, you might name your presentation, “Sailing into the Future or “Smile on your way to the Bank.”

 6.)    Name your innovation or initiative with a word that is simple and easy to pronounce.  Think of Apple or Google.  If it is hard to pronounce, you have immediately lost your audience before you even began your presentation.  Keep your language simple and straightforward during the rest of your presentation.  Many of us use polysyllabic words in an effort to impress.  The end result is confusion and a loss of persuasiveness.  Remember to keep it simple.

I know these persuasive techniques are effective in moving projects forward.  I have used them many times with superb results.  Try them and let me know if they work for you. 

What other ideas have you used to be persuasive and influential?

Connie Harryman is President of the American Creativity Association-Austin Global.  She is the CEO of Applied Concepts Creativity and identifies herself as a Creativity Developer.  You are invited to connect with Creative Connie on LinkedIn, facebook, and Twitter.

This coming week I will have the honor of being interviewed on blogtalkradio by an incredible woman who won the President’s Call to Service Award.  The host of the Kalon Women in Business Blog Talk Radio Show is Sandra Levitin. 

Sandra is the Founder, CEO, and Publisher of Kalön Women an online magazine for women who simply get better with the passing years just like fine wine.  She and I have several things in common.  We both left the corporate world.  We both enjoyed stellar success in the area of sales and marketing.  We are both from Texas.  We both recognize the power of technology and social media to promote and empower women.  We have found and are pursuing our own passion!

She asked me to share my story about how I found my passion in the field of creativity and innovation.  I am filled with gratitude not only for the journey I have taken, but also because of the choices I have made that allow me to live my passion.

Sandra has provided a vehicle where all of our voices can be heard within the community of Kalon Women.  Sandra created her unique blogtalkradio program featuring Kalon Women in Business.

Life is a journey filled with ups and downs.  When we connect with other women and share our stories, we are able to empower each other and smoothen out the road.

I am grateful to Sandra Levitin for creating this community for Kalon women and making it possible for all of us to connect to the most creative and innovative women in the world.  This is an online community where we can share the challenges we face and the victories we experience.    You are invited to join us.  Please come.

You are now invited to grab a cup of coffee, sit down and listen.  You will be pleased you invested the time to hear my story about how gratitude and passion leads to creative thinking.  Since I was able to overcome some rather incredible challenges, then I know you can do the same.  This is a story meant to inspire you.

Take a few minutes and listen to my interview hosted by Sandra Levitin on the Kalon Women in Business Blog Talk Radio Show.  It will take place this coming Wednesday, November 10^th.     Click here to listen.  The topic is Gratitude and Passion Leads to Creative Thinking.

If this time does not suit you, then please be assured that it will be recorded and you can listen to my interview at a time when it is convenient for you. 

Now it is your time to share.  What are you doing to express gratitude?  Do you keep a gratitude journal?  What steps are you taking to find your passion?

Women in senior executive positions enhance ROI.

How do you retain your most valuable employees?  How do you recruit top talent?  How do you increase (ROI) return on investment when there is a talent shortage?   What impact is gender diversity having on the bottom line?

I just finished reading, Womenomics, Write You Own Rules for Success by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay.  They had some fascinating insights into the value of female leaders and their contributions to ROI.

If you want your organization to increase its ROI, then you might want to know about recent research done in France. The findings show that companies with more women in management positions did better during 2008 than those with fewer women.  For example, the share price of Hermes rose by 16.8%.  Keep in mind that 55% of the firm’s executives are women.

At Pepperdine University, a nineteen year survey of 215 Fortune 500 companies and took three different measures of profitability:  equity, revenue, and assets.   The companies that had the best records for promoting women outperformed the competition.  These companies beat the industry average by 116% in terms of equity, 46% in terms of revenue, and 41% in terms of assets.  It concludes women are good for profits.

What is the link between gender diversity in the top leadership and U.S. corporate financial performance?  In the late 1990s, Catalyst, an independent research organization, completed a study of 353 of the Fortune 500.  A higher number of women in senior management results in a higher return on equity and a higher total return to shareholders by more than one third. 

In an effort to make their firms more competitive in the global economy, the minister of trade in Norway demanded that 40% of women be on the board of each company.  

If your company wants to make more money, then one solution is to employ more women in senior leadership positions.  It seems women are now the hot commodity in today’s workplace.

What can you do to attract and retain top female talent?   Women place a high value on flexibility because it allows them to more effectively live their dual lives as professional women and as mothers.  To retain these employees, companies are offering alternative work schedules, furloughs, unpaid vacation time, and reduced schedules. 

Flexibility is viewed as a way to keep up morale and avoid mass layoffs.  During harsh economic times, this is a way to cut labor costs.  Yet at the same time, companies are able to accommodate the wishes for flexibility desired by many women.

What will the future bring?  Women earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees in the United States and 58% of all graduate degrees.  In business, women comprise over one third of all graduates.  From 1996 to 2002, the senior ranks of women in Fortune 500 companies grew from 10% to 16%.  This is more than a 50% increase in just six years.  The feminization of leadership is a trend worth watching.

Do you think seeking out women for senior executive positions is a good business strategy?

An electric jolt of creative ideas can lead to change!

1. Do not provide a budget for any creative projects. Everyone knows that when you are measured on a quarter by quarter basis, the ROI is simply not there to make your performance look good on a timely basis. The long term consequences of stifling creativity will become someone else’s problem after you are promoted for achieving short term ROI.

2. Make everybody dress the same in bland colors. A good recommendation, if you truly want to kill creativity, is to have everyone dress in blue or grey with white shirts or blouses. Color inspires creativity and this is dangerous to entrenched ideas.

3. Do not allow laughter. If you hear laughter in the hallways this means employees might be having fun and everyone knows creativity flourishes when individuals are having fun.

4. Schedule meetings where only the presenter is allowed to speak. Too much interaction might spark a creative idea from your employees.

5. Promote employees who say, “Yes” to all your ideas. Strangely enough one technique for becoming more creative is to say, “Yes, and …..” However, in this case the employees simply said, “Yes.” They forgot the part where you add to an idea with “and.” Watch out and do not promote any employees who say “yes and ………”

6. Do not allow animated facial expressions. Be sure to reward and cultivate a poker face where there is no visible reaction to anything that happens or is expressed. If someone is animated then there is great danger that they will inspire other employees with unusual ideas. Employees must keep their facial expressions under control at all times. Showing emotion is a clear danger sign of creative thinking being formulated.

7. Make every effort to have a homogeneous team that looks like you. Diversity in physical appearance and in thinking styles should be avoided. When you have people who think differently it just takes too much time to reach consensus.  Diversity just leads to disruptive thinking.  If you want similar thinking, then homogeneity is the way to accomplish this.

8.   Do not become proficient in the latest social media or social networking. If you allow your employees to blog, tweet, and connect on LinkedIn, then they might be exposed to radical ideas from other industries.  Do you really want to expose your organization to the possiblity that these radical ideas will be brought to team meetings?

9.   Do not allow time for employees to pursue creative thinking pursuits. This is such a time waster. If you insist on everyone doing things the way they have always been done, then they do not need to learn new things.

10.  Do not schedule any specialized training for creativity. If your leaders and employees learn how to be creative on demand by using the tools and techniques available to stimulate their brains then they might start generating hundreds of great ideas. This leads to more work for you and the management team.

Can you think of any other innovative ways to stifle creative thinking?

Since 1990, U.S. creativity has been in a downward spiral!Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you ever thought about whether creativity could be measured?  It seems that in 1958 E. Paul Torrance designed a series of creativity tasks to measure creativity.  He administered his test to 400 children in Minneapolis. 

I would question how accurate this creativity index would be in predicting creativity for adults.  I read a recent Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.   Apparently, Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University, validated a more than three times correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment with Torrance’s creativity index as contrasted to childhood IQ.

This year, Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary did a follow up study where he analyzed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults.  It appears that creativity scores steadily rose, just like IQ scores until 1990 and then creativity scores nosedived.  The decline is most significant from kindergarten through sixth grade.

In my prior blog post, I wrote about the CEO Survey of 1,500 CEOs who unequivocally identified creativity as the most important leadership competency for success in the future.  

What does this mean for the United States in terms of maintaining our leadership position in the world?  Our leaders understand that creativity is essential; yet at the same time our creativity scores are plummeting!

Stop and think about where we currently need creative solutions.  We are crying out for new ideas to solve our ongoing economic crisis.  We need new ideas to solve the issues of sustainability.  We need new ideas to support our changing demographics.

Creativity includes not only generating great ideas, but it also means being open to the ideas of others.  Through creative thinking we can generate solutions for a health care system as well as new thinking for moving towards a more peaceful world. We need new ideas to make our country more competitive and to identify new ways to measure success. 

Do you think creativity is important?

I am reading Tim Brown’s book, Change by Design, How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.  IDEO is ranked among the ten most innovative companies in the world.  Tim is the CEO of IDEO. 

I was intrigued by the concepts of divergent and convergent thinking.  To experience design thinking, you must understand the difference between divergent and convergent thinking and how they can work together. 

With convergent thinking you are looking at a set of available choices in an existing world.  Divergent thinking is about creating new choices and seeing possibilities that no one else has seen.

When you begin with divergent thinking, you can maximize your choices.  As you increase the number of choices, your life will have become more complex.  However, as Tim Brown comments, “Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.”

With divergent thinking you multiply your options as you create choices.  You have more choices in regard to how you understand and apply consumer behavior in creating new products or new experiences. 

With convergent thinking, you head towards a solution.  In the convergent piece you eliminate options and focus on making the choices you wish to implement.

Why does understanding the difference between divergence and convergent thinking matter?  Westerners are taught to take inputs, analyze them against predefined criteria, and then converge upon a single answer.  Convergent thinking is not a good way to probe into the future and create new possibilities.  It is about finding the most expedient answer versus the right answer. 

Divergent thinking opens your mind to many possibilities.  These are two different phases that go together.  If you apply divergent thinking, you can create choices that have not existed before.  When you go into the convergent phase, you are well prepared to find the right answer.

I often use iMindMapping software and techniques to achieve divergent thinking.  What process or tools do you use to stimulate your mind to create new choices for your future?