Guidelines for stimulating creativity abound in both popular literature and emerging scientific research. here are 7 rules of thumb that seem to be applicable to a wide variety of business settings and across many cultures:
1. Have curiosity and interest in your surroundings: take time to notice what’s going on around you. Schedule time if you are super busy, to make sure you get up and walk around and take a look.
2. Cultivate multiple points of view: The 6 Thinking Hats exercise (easily found on the web) is an effective, simple, systematic way of ensuring that you are considering things from enough points of view.
3. Look for complexity and distinctions: take the time to dig deeper. Ask “Why?” at least 5 times in order to move closer to the root problem or opportunity.
4. Develop mindfulness of situational uniqueness: don’t be so hasty to look for why this time is the same as all the times in the past. Instead, look for what makes this situation unique, and don’t stop until you find at least 1 interesting unique distinction.
5. Use all five senses: we all have a primary mode of sensing and understanding the world. Deliberately force yourself to consider the issue or situation with all 5 senses. Ask yourself how you can use the lesser senses to help you understand what’s going on.
6. Learn to cultivate flow in your everyday interaction with others: find the joy in your everyday partners and surroundings. It’s there, a subtle perfect simplicity just waiting for you to experience. Learn to find and use the flow.
7. Practice divergent thinking: Take the time to deliberately consider foolish or ridiculous notions and look for the connections in a round-about way that lead back to your situation. Sometimes the answers are out there and are just looking for a different way home.
Notice that these are all simple action steps that need one main ingredient: you and your attention!
Now go get ’em!