Written by Rosie on October 8, 2009 – 6:02 pm
If you have done the ‘graveyard’ slot, you will know it is rarely a good time for creativity. Last Wednesday in Oxford, I was on after lunch at a seminar for fifteen women. The topic was creative thinking!
They needed to be energised and find their child like state. ‘Genius is the ability to retrieve childhood at will’ according to Jean Piaget. I decided to use bottles of bubbles. It was incredible the response this created. From quiet, academically minded ladies, they turned into giggling, high energy ‘children’ fighting over whose turn it was. It certainly created the desired effect and highlighted key issues with creativity.
- How many times are creative ideas generated and like bubbles disappear into the ether? You need to capture all ideas in writing. If you cannot use them now, you may be able to use them later
- You need to create the right environment to be creative. A boring meeting room may not be the best place.
- The timing needs to be right. When are you at your most creative?
- Do something different to spark new ideas. What can you do differently to generate creative ideas?
- More fun and more bubbles were generated by sharing the bubble blowing. Two minds are better than one
- Do you go for lots of little bubbles or a couple of big ones? You need to decide the success criteria of your idea generating session
- Restrictions and rules can destroy creativity. How can you free your mind from the straight jacket of adult inhibitions?
- See the world through your creative child’s eye
- Pricking the bubble before it has time to form is counter-productive. Avoid judging ideas before they have had time to be floated.
- So you’ve dribbled it down your front! Don’t be afraid to make mistakes – tomorrow it won’t show.
One of the many ideas generated to resolve real workplace issues was to string a washing line across the office and encourage people to peg new ideas on it. I loved the concept, but I am not sure the health and safety person would! How to get round that is another problem to solve.
What could you do to find the creative child in you?
I met Rosie 5 years ago when she ran a course for the organisation I was working for. My boss decided to send me on the course without actually knowing what it was all about. Those of us who are trainers dread this situation and know that it takes all our skills to win the participant round.
I don’t now remember much detail about the course, but I do know that Rosie must have had what it takes because she enabled me to turn my thinking around completely during those few days, and as a result my professional life has taken huge strides forwards.
I am now one of seven trainers who deliver the Springboard Personal and Professional Development Programme within Oxford University, and two of us decided that we would like to include a session on creativity on one of our workshops. Rosie came along to do this for us.
In the normal course of a working day you wouldn’t think it possible, but among other things she engaged us in a bubble-blowing contest and a brainstorm on how many associations we could make with the word ‘dog’. Silly? Time-wasting? Not at all. These were just preliminaries to the introduction of a very practical technique for generating new ideas, and several of the participants went away that day with ideas for how to approach old problems. The message in the evaluations was a unanimous ‘ Wonderful! Really enjoyable and refreshing and I will definitely make use of these techniques in my daily work.’
Thank you, Rosie!
Alison Trinder, Oxford University
October 2009
I adore your blog a lot. Will read more. Keep up to excellent posting on it. Thank you