The Creative Thinking System

Walt Disney used what he called The Creative Thinking System.  Here are the four components:

1. The Unique factor.  The major objective in the creative thinking system is the development and discovery of the “unique factor.”  It’s important not to copy what other people do but through creative thought to develop a unique approach. 

2.  The show factor.  Do what you do so well that people will want to show others how well you do it.  This objective is accomplished by devotion to  excellence.

3. The romance factor. Romance the idea or concept and raise it to a new standard.  Add that special touch to it! Walt Disney romanced the amusement park and created a new thing — a theme park.

4. The plussing factor. Never let something alone.  Keep fooling around with it, improving it, and making it better. You know you have a unique factor when someone steals it.  So keep the unique factor unique by constantly plussing it.

 

Why Replace Meetings?

Inc Magazine, in a survey of middle managers, found that on an average week those managers spent more than 17 hours in meetings.  The poll was a horror story!  In 34% of the cases, the meetings had no agenda; 38% never addressed all the agenda items if they had an agenda; 41% ended with no follow-up action assigned; 54% involved non-essential personnel; 64% had no time frames set around them; the vast majority had no “thinking questions” set up to help focus the discussion.

Do some math around that survey.  Based on six people in a company, each making $20 an hour, spending 17 hours a week, 49 weeks a year, a company would invest $99,600 in a base salary in meetings alone.

Unfortunately when companies are feeling the economic pinch they usually add to the number of meetings and further reduce the very things that inspire employees’ innovations. If supervisors can step out of time for a moment and look at new ways to communicate and interact with their employees huge benefits can begin to happen.

The great news is that change can happen one supervisor at at time, it does not have to be company wide or from the top down. By getting the company clutter out of the way and creating meaningful ways for people to come together to solve problems, supervisors and have an incredible impact.

Definition of Creativity

There are many definition of creativity, but I like this one “The creation of the new, or the rearranging of the old in a new way.”

How to Turn Loose People’s Creativity

On of the main reasons people believe they lack creativity is that the creative embers which they do possess have been doused by years of negative conditioning. If a manager wishes to unleash the creativity to benefit the work place they need to know that:

1) Finding or creating a neutral environment helps set the stage.

2) Ideas are interesting and when allowed to be explored without judgement can stimulate curiousity.

3) Curiousity is the core for much creativity but many people don’t know where to start.

4) Graham Wallas in 1927, suggested a simple five-step creativity process to get one’s creative juices flowing: (1) preparation (flirting with anything new); (2) incubation (mixing with other ideas to yield new combinations); (3) illumination (new, sometimes off-the-wall ideas); (4) elaboration (building and refining); (5) verification (confirming that the end product is worthwhile).

5) Just try it. These days getting just one new creative idea can mean the difference between failure and success.