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Today we’re changing the scales to make a regular situation seem funny and harnessing new insights for creative ideas on the Funny Business challenge of ‘making training more memorable’.
A classic example of changing the scales comes from the sitcom Red Dwarf in the episode ‘Backwards’. Rimmer is administering a Starbug driving test for Kryten [...]
Overstatement is a form of exaggeration, only more specifically related to an individual’s response.
This is how overstatement works:
Take a situation, ideally one that’s loaded with a bit of tension. Find the logical response. What would you normally expect to happen? Do the opposite. Make the response unexpected and irrational. Exaggerate to make [...]
Today there’s some satirical funny business. With satire, the weapon is irony; pretend to accept reasoning in order to expose the absurdity. And to up the comic ante, you can really exaggerate the defunct aspects.
Here’s the blueprint:
Find an aspect of your challenge that you disagree with or think is obsolete. There may [...]
Continuing with the Funny Business, we’re looking at how comedy can lead to creativity at work. Previously we’ve explored reversal and role reversal and now it’s the turn of exaggeration.
Exaggeration takes the familiar then dashes our expectations by serving up a larger-than-life perspective. A classic and very visual example is the caricature. A [...]
Previously in the Funny Business series, we looked at how reversing a situation can not only be amusing but ignite new creative perceptions and solutions to challenges.
Here we’re going in with a slightly different slant and looking at how role reversal can lead to new and creative ideas.
Role reversal is a long-standing [...]
Turning something on its head to see the reverse viewpoint is the 1st humour technique in the Funny Business series. With reversal, humour comes from a surprise twist, diverting our thoughts away from the expected logic.
Here’s a silly little joke that demonstrates this example: What’s the stupidest animal in the jungle? The polar [...]
Creativity and humour are very close relatives. In fact, if they lived next door to each other they’d probably be having boundary disputes!
Humour is often the key to delivering a jolt that knocks habitual thinking off course and onto a new journey of discovery. If you can learn how to harness humour and [...]
Necessity is the mother of invention. But do you really want to have all your ideas when you’re up against it?! We are equally able to produce great ideas when we are in a relaxed and happy state of mind. We can achieve this through being playful and maybe even recapturing some of our youthful [...]
The more information we have to draw upon, the more we are able to access new possibilities. If we stay stuck in a narrow minded world, when the time comes to solve challenges and explore new opportunities, our frame of reference is prohibitively restricting. It’s tough coming up new solutions using the same old information [...]
Yes it’s a classic. If you find a way of doing something that works, why bother going to the effort to change it? However, ways soon become outdated and there’s a slim chance of discovering new & better ways if you stay in your state of adequate bliss.
Here are a couple of examples of [...]
I’m sure we’re all very familiar with brainstorming. Get a bunch of people in a room and spurt out ideas until you find a new solution right?
But brainstorming seems to have become a throw away term in business and at worst becomes just another lackluster process for the meeting agenda. Unfortunately this means idea generation often gets conducted [...]
The essence of creativity is doing something differently in a way that brings you joy.
Pure creative activities should bring you joy by their very nature… unless like me you try to smash your guitar in a violent rage when you can’t hit all the chords. But what about adding creativity to other less inspirational [...]
Have you ever got so stuck in working away on a solution that you want to make it work whatever it takes? We can quite easily build up an emotional attachment to our ideas and this can be unhealthy. You just need to look at some of the people on Dragon’s Den who think their [...]
We sometimes get stuck in routine ways of thinking and as insignificant as it seems, the language we use can hinder our escape to fresh thinking. The words and phrases we use often give us an easy ride down our default lines of thinking. The labels of language can even conjure up preconceptions prejudices, which [...]
See failure as feedback and you’ll access a continual source of inspiration.
A fear of failure will only hold you back from trying anything new. That’s why you won’t find many risk averse companies in creative industries. Failure also gives some people license to make convenient excuses to give in, or worse, not bother.
Instead, [...]
If you’re looking to get more creativity from your team make sure you put as much, if not more emphasis on rewarding their creative attempts.
Just recognising and rewarding creative results acts to raise the stakes and may put people off trying in the first instance. Rewarding creative efforts will produce a more motivated and [...]
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