How to Master Creative Thinking

Creative accounting is certainly ill-advised, but in most other areas of your organization, from development to marketing to management, creative thinking often represents your most valuable, viable opportunity to differentiate your organization from the competition.

Creativity is the key to any innovative idea, product or service. No matter how large or small your objectives are, approaching them with creativity will almost always deliver more effective results. With indistinguishable offerings saturating many a marketplace, creativity might even be your most important asset. That's why it's worth examining what the creative process requires.

Courage
The unknown can be frightening — and nothing is more of an unknown than creativity. Committing to creative problem-solving begins with mustering the courage to look at your traditional strategies and goals in entirely new ways. How could you make your next exhibit an interactive and engaging experience visitors will remember and want to share? What kind of creative fuel would it take to launch your next capital campaign into orbit?

If these questions seem a bit unnerving, consider that even at its best, doing the expected will lead only to expected results. Ho hum. You might be satisfied with that reliability, but what about your board of directors, your members and new visitors you want to win over? Creative risk-taking often rewards you in unexpected ways.

Leadership
If your organization wants innovation to be more than just a buzz word, your top management team will need to step up to the plate, big time. And this can only happen if top management is aligned, committed, and shares a common vision of what creative thinking is all about. People in your organization know the difference between a pep talk and passion. It’s top leadership's responsibility to close this gap — and make the kind of sustainable organizational changes that will enable innovation to flourish.

Teamwork
While breakthrough ideas may be the seed of innovation, teamwork is the soil. No teamwork, no innovation, plain and simple. Rarely are a few geniuses enough to turn invention into action. For that a high performing team is needed. Or several teams — inspired collaborators with a shared vision and the commitment to go beyond their individual agendas in order to make the magic happen.

Trust
Trust among the participants and trust in the process: both are essential to any creative effort. Brainstorming can often appear aimless, but it's that very quality that leads to real "a-ha!" moments.

Every idea, no matter how insane or impossible it seems, must be treated with equal respect. Postponing judgment until an appropriate moment will likely be difficult at first, but it will get easier with practice. As will blurting out those ideas you used to consider too crazy to share.

Limits
Tight deadlines. Modest budgets. Specific goals. Limits like these are important to the creative process. The more you know about your project from the beginning, the more likely you are to come up with relevant, realistic ideas. Creative thinking without stated objectives and defined boundaries often leads to ambitious but ambiguous ideas.

Failure
We know, you don’t want to hear this, but creativity requires failure. Creative risk-taking is always worth your time and effort — even if your creation fails. Playwright Samuel Beckett said of failing, "No matter what, try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Beckett's attitude will help you through dry periods and help you face creative disappointments. Whether you're writing text for your website or are in the early stages of re-branding your organization, there's no secret that will ensure creative success. There is, however, a trick to consistent creative thinking; it's to remember what you have learned from your failures so that you do, indeed, fail better next time and get closer to success.

Success
Success of any sort is a reward, but succeeding as a result of your own effective creative thinking is more gratifying. You own that success because you own the idea that produced it.

So, if your organization truly values innovation, it will need more than just new ideas, freshly minted teams, and management pep talks. It will need to establish the kind of culture that is conducive to sustainable innovation — one that enables creative thinking to become part of your company's DNA. Developing this kind of breakthrough-friendly culture could become your primary differentiator. Make your organization the one that leads, and the rest will follow.

Share Your Creative Thinking Strategies With Us
How have you fostered creative thinking in your organization? What new idea, product or service have you created that differentiates your organization from the competition? Join our chat and share your experience with us by posting a comment to this blog. We'd love to hear from you!