Currently viewing the tag: "exercise"
Here’s a fun little exercise to get your brain working in a different way…
Inspired by the website www.animalsontheunderground.com the object is to join up stations and underground routes to create animal shapes. This is a very playful activity but certainly gets the brain whirring away looking for new patterns. And we’re not [...]
So you’ve tried over and over to develop your ideas in your head. You may have even try to mentally visualise what your solution looks like. But if we go through the same processes in our head, we can sometimes become a victim of routined thinking and end up getting stuck!
This is where [...]
Looking at the opposite is a great way for reversing your perspective and provoking new solutions. There are many examples where a reverse viewpoint has led to a new solution:
Internet shopping comes to you instead of you going to the shop. Bashing the bottom of a ketchup bottle will only send the sauce to [...]
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 [...]
You wouldn’t skip a body warm up before a sports match, so why skip a mind warm up before thinking? A creative thinking warm up will loosen up your mind and get those synapses firing. It sounds simple but try it. It really will help improve the flexibility of your thought when working on [...]
Many new ideas come about through the connection of existing concepts.
The wine press and the coin punch were combined to form the printing press. Dyson combined the vacuum cleaner with the concept of centrifugal separation. And most significantly, the spoon and the fork have been combined to form the spork!
Try and look for [...]
When we evaluate ideas we most often begin with our own thoughts and feelings. This is the 1st person perspective. By sticking to this viewpoint it may be difficult to overcome our inbuilt beliefs and prejudices.
Actively exploring other perspectives is a simple tool to help free your mind to appreciate other possibilities. So when [...]
We all know this classic optimist/pessimist analogy. But once you find a way of looking at something it can be incredibly difficult to dislodge from your mindset. Creativity is about holding more than just one answer in your mind and keeping open to other possibilities.
But what would you say if you were given a [...]
Today your challenge is think like someone else. The way you see the world is coloured by your experiences and perceptions. But if you experience this world through someone else’s eyes you may get a whole new set of insights.
Example: My challenge is ‘how to cope with stressful situations’.
I randomly picked a cartoon character, a [...]
Generate new ways of achieving your solution by removing a key function and finding inventive ways of replacing it.
I experienced this recently when playing a board game in a pub but didn’t have any dice. I needed to think of another way to simulate a roll of the dice.
First have a think about [...]
Assumptions are behind everything we do. They are based on what we know or believe to be true from and our past experiences. Most of the time, we don’t consciously realise how they impact our decisions.
The question is how valid are these assumptions and can you be more creative if they are removed? List [...]
Reframe your challenge statement in all the ways you can think of. Change words and drop common labels to move your thinking beyond ingrained associations and promote more open exploration. This may even bring you closer to a solution.
Example: ‘How to stop losing my keys’ might become, ‘how to easily find my keys’, ‘how [...]
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