Ten Tips for Unleashing Creative Potential

Creative people are known for their mental flexibility. But, even the most creative soul experiences times of drought. When that happens, it helps to have a toolbox of creativity tips to delve into. To get you started, here are ten that the staff at CSI has used with success to ramp up our own creativity quotient.

On your own—

1) Drink water.
Lots of it. Next to walnuts and free-range salmon (omega-e essential fatty acids), water’s the best brain food we know of. Keep bottled water on your desk and sip it between cups of coffee. And, to charge up your brainpower further, make sure you get plenty of sleep during the week. Weekends, you’re on your own.

2) Take a walk.
When waiting for a new thought, new copy, a new image, or a new name, get up and go. Some of the best personal brainstorms happen in the elevator en route to a cup of coffee. Take your laptop and get out of the office for 20 minutes. Better yet, take a pen and use it on a napkin. If you have a specific task at hand, give yourself part of the assignment to complete before you get back to your desk.

3) Read out of the box.
While you are out walking, pick up a periodical that you normally wouldn’t read. Scan publications written for those of a different age or culture than your own. Explore someone else’s space for new ideas or new inspiration. If you watch television, turn it off once a week and read instead. If you don’t normally watch TV, make it a practice to check out a program every week or so. If you read mostly fiction, pick up a biography. If you’re into non-fiction, grab a novel.

4) Explore space.
Become an accomplished web navigator. In between projects or on a scheduled weekly basis, spend time visiting new sites or revisiting bookmarked sites. Challenge your thinking patterns by hitting both sites that naturally appeal to you, and sites that have no obvious appeal at first glance. Subscribe to e-newsletters and spend time scanning them for facts and tidbits of interest. Broaden.

5) Use your words.
Words are one of the strongest tools you can use. When creating a logo or a tagline or a visual identity, take a concept and apply analogies or metaphors to see how far you can go with it. In an analogy, you compare the unfamiliar or problematic with something that is familiar and understandable. Metaphors compare two unlike things. Use both to make new mental connections. When examining a new product or a service, try to describe them using a pre-conceived list of action verbs or manipulative verbs. Manipulative verbs include words such as: loosen, stretch, heat, twist, freeze, squash, paint, toss, submerge, dust.


In a group—

6) Do bulk mail.
I’m sure you spend a lot of time around the conference table in brainstorming sessions or staff meetings with your colleagues. But, how often do you file papers, re-arrange the office, or stuff envelopes together? Performing non-customary tasks together will sometimes pry new ideas loose, or teach you new ways of working together creatively.

7) Bring in a wild card.
Next time you have a formal brainstorming session, invite in someone from the outside. Not only will this person’s way of thinking invite new thought patterns from the group, but the presence of an outsider will encourage everyone to give the effort their best creative shot.

8) Embrace variety.
When brainstorming in a group, keep changing tactics. Spend the first hour playing Stop-and-Go. Generate ideas rapidly for three to five minutes, then spend three to five minutes in silent thinking. Repeat this pattern several times. Next, try going around the table in a consistent sequence, asking for ideas from each participant in turn. If someone has no ideas at that moment, that person asks to pass, until the next time around the table.

9) Get random.
Lateral thinking can help to steer a group in new, wildly creative directions. By taking two completely dissimilar items and forcing a connection between them, you move out of the zone of expectation into a place where new ideas can emerge. Try this: take the object of your brainstorm, write it down on a piece of paper, and pin it to the wall. Then, open the dictionary and—at random—pick nine or eleven words, write them down on separate pieces of paper, and pin them to the wall. Next, one at a time, build a concrete relationship between your project and the word. You may not think that there’s a connection between marketing software and a can of peaches, but you could just come up with the One Big Idea by challenging yourself to compare them.

10) Eat from both sides of the mushroom.
A general creative rule of thumb is “anything goes.” During most brainstorming sessions, participants are encouraged to use the sky as their limit. Any idea, no matter how far-fetched is considered by the group as a whole, until the best idea comes along. But, what happens when you put false constraints on your brainstorming session: a very tight budget, incredibly short deadlines, or just direct mail without collateral, advertising, or online? Sometimes closing up the universe in will cause the group to focus and produce a highly creative solution.These are just a few tools from our creativity arsenal—

If you are facing a project that needs some accelerated thinking, we’d like to brainstorm with you.

Please call or email info@creativestrategy.com and set up a time to talk.

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