In News

Why Criticism Is Good for Creativity

September 25, 2019 No Comments

Roberto Verganti and I published an article in the July 2019, Harvard Business Review on the virtues of criticism (Verganti, R., & Norman, D. (2019, July 16, 2019). Why criticism is good for creativity. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/07/why-criticism-is-good-for-creativity. May require registration or payment.)

Here is the basic argument

One of the most popular mantras for innovation is “avoid criticism.” The underlying assumption is that criticism kills the flow of creativity and the enthusiasm of a team. Aversion to criticism has significantly spread in the last 20 years, especially through the advocates of design thinking. (In 1999, in the ABC Nightline video “The Deep Dive,” which ignited the design thinking movement, criticism was stigmatized as negative.) In IDEO’s online teaching platform, the first rule of brainstorming is “defer judgment.” To make this rule even more practical and straightforward, others have reworded it to say: “When a person proposes an idea, don’t say, ‘Yes, but…’ to point out flaws in the idea; instead, say, ‘Yes, and…’” — which is intended to get people to add to the original idea.

We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.

The secret of criticism in innovation lies in the joint behavior of the participants. Those offering criticism must frame their points as positive, helpful suggestions. Those who are being criticized must use critiques to learn and improve their ideas. When conducted with curiosity and respect, criticism becomes the most advanced form of creativity. It can be fascinating, passionate, fun, and always inspiring. Let us combine “Yes, and” with “Yes, but” to create the constructive and positive “Yes, but, and.”

By Don Norman

Sourced from LinkedIn

In News

Want To Stifle Your Team’s Creativity? Do These Things

July 2, 2019 No Comments

By Danielle Kost

The slate of companies going public this year— Pinterest, Slack Technologies, and Uber, to name a few—should silence anyone who doubts the power of a bold idea.

After all, one seemingly crazy brainstorm can up end an entire industry, keeping innovation top of mind for every executive. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a coding genius in a dorm room to birth a breakthrough, says Harvard Business School Professor Teresa M. Amabile, who has studied the interplay between creativity, productivity, and innovation for more than four decades.

Amabile, who is the Baker Foundation Professor and Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, reflected on her research and its impact in an essay in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Educating Leaders Who Make a Difference in the World (pdf). More recently, she discussed how artificial intelligence might enable creative breakthroughs in an Academy of Management Discoveries article, Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises.

Danielle Kost: Every executive is searching for the next big idea or strategy. Are there any techniques or approaches that people can use to stimulate their own creativity at work?

Teresa M. Amabile: Three of the components necessary for creativity reside within the individual, and one component, a conducive work environment, is external. The internal components are:

Expertise. People need expertise to be creative. So, to the extent that you can continue to learn not only in your primary domain, but in other, related domains, you’ll begin to see connections that could lead to a breakthrough.
Creative thinking skills. Some people are naturally able to think outside the box. But we can all learn and improve our creative thinking skills. For example, there are techniques that involve using different kinds of visual stimulation. You could go to an art museum and see what ideas emerge as you look at the art, and then try to make connections to some tricky problem that you’re trying to solve in your work. It’s also very useful to stimulate your thinking by talking to other people—brainstorming or simply getting new input on your ideas.
Intrinsic motivation. This is the drive to do something primarily because you find it interesting, enjoyable, satisfying, or personally challenging. Our research has shown that, unfortunately, a non-conducive work environment can undermine intrinsic motivation. Your immediate manager plays a huge role in establishing your work environment for creativity, the extent to which your creativity will be stimulated or diminished.

Kost: When managers want to inspire more creativity in their teams, what should they not do?

Amabile: Unfortunately, for many managers, behaviors that undermine creativity are more natural than behaviors that stimulate it. Many of the management approaches that people learned through decades of management education—especially in the 1950s and 60s and 70s—can really stifle creativity. These are things that managers should really try to avoid. In fact, to the extent possible, they should try to do the opposite:

Excessive constraint. Among destroyers of creativity, or “creativity killers,” as I call them, excessive constraint is probably number one. When people are supposed to be coming up with new ideas or solving complex problems in new ways, they need to be given a lot of autonomy. But it’s very hard for some managers to change their command-and-control management style, even when it’s creativity and innovation that they’re after.

Meaningless work. People tend to do their most creative work when they find deep meaning in what they’re doing—when they feel that their work really contributes to something that matters. If people lack that meaning, it’s very hard for them to stay intrinsically motivated and creative. Many managers don’t realize how necessary it is to help people understand the importance of their work.

A status quo bias. Some upper managers pay lip service to creativity and innovation, but they’re clearly oriented toward maintaining the status quo. They’re suspicious of new ideas. Sometimes the organization has a culture where new ideas are evaluated harshly, and people see that. It speaks much louder than any corporate mission statement.

Risk aversion. Creative work requires an environment where there’s what my colleague Amy Edmondson would call psychological safety—an environment where people feel free to speak up with new ideas even if those ideas may be far out. They have to feel free to call out mistakes and errors in their own and other people’s work, with the understanding that people are not going to get shot down because they tried something new that failed. When you’re trying to be innovative, you’re going to end up with a lot of failures. And if you don’t, you’re really not trying hard enough.

If you find that you’re in a creativity-stifling environment, you may need to transfer to a team that works under a different manager or has a different set of colleagues. You could look for assignments that you find more intrinsically interesting. You might ultimately think about changing organizations, if you find that the one you’re in is not allowing your creativity to really achieve its potential.

Kost: Artificial intelligence techniques and tools are influencing how companies conduct business and make decisions. How do these technologies affect creativity?

Amabile: It depends on how we use these approaches and technologies. If we view them as a way to support our own limited intelligence, it can be very positive. Each one of us has great brain power, but it’s limited in certain ways. It’s very hard for us to look at massive amounts of data and detect patterns, for example, but machines can, if we tell them what to look for.

So combining a machine’s ability to recognize patterns with our own ability to interpret them should be a tremendous boon to our creativity. However, if we feel threatened by the machines that we’re working with, like they are going to take over the work that we do, that’s likely to stifle that creativity.

Feature Image Credit: Teresa Amabile discusses the roots of creativity, how to achieve more of it, and combining it with artificial intelligence. iStockphoto

By Danielle Kost

Sourced from Forbes

In News

The 5 Levels of Mastering Creativity

March 11, 2019 No Comments

By Jeff DeGraff Ph.D.

Here’s how to build your creative muscle.

When it comes to thinking creatively, people’s abilities always have room for improvement. However, it’s unlikely you’re going to become a creative genius like Einstein or Mozart without some natural talent.

Is everyone creative? Sure they are, but in very different ways and to varying degrees. Our democratic longing to make everyone and everything equal has led us to make creative greatness indistinguishable from an act of personal expression. What is lacking is a meaningful appreciation of the different levels of creativity and how we can use them as steps for increasing our own creative potential.

Below are the five levels and types of creativity, from the easiest to the most difficult to master, along with suggestions for building creative muscle:

Mimetic Creativity

Mimesis is a term passed down to us from the Ancient Greeks meaning to imitate or mimic. This is the most rudimentary form of creativity. To improve mimetic creativity, travel to new places and meet new people. Be sure to look for patterns and benchmarks, as well as indicators of success or failure so that you have good ideas about what really works and what doesn’t and why.

Biosociative Creativity

Biosociative is a term coined by the novelist Arthur Koestler in his celebrated book The Art of Creation to describe how our conscious mind, when relaxed, can connect rational with intuitive thoughts to produce eureka moments. Biosociative creativity occurs when a familiar idea is connected to an unfamiliar one to produce a novel hybrid. Brainstorming is an excellent example of biosociative creativity. You can find a variety of brainstorming methods to boost biosociative creativity on my website.

Analogical Creativity

Analogical creativity uses analogies to transfer information that we believe we understand in one domain, the source, to help resolve a challenge in an unfamiliar area, the target. In essence, analogies are bridges that allow our cognitive processes to quickly transport clusters of information from the unknown to the known, and back again. Analogies can also be used to disrupt habit-bound thinking to make way for new ideas. You can develop your analogical creativity through the “imaginary friend” role storming method whereby you imagine what someone might say or do if faced with a particular challenge.

Narratological Creativity

At its essence, narratological creativity is the art of storytelling. Our personal stories are perhaps the ultimate use of narratological creativity as we invent and reinvent the story of our life. In this way something that is deeply personal becomes allegorical or of mythic significance. You can improve your narratological creativity by practicing the art of storyboarding or by engaging in scenario making to project potential courses of action.

Intuitive Creativity

This final and most challenging level of creativity has often been promoted to the realm of spiritual and wisdom traditions. This is where creativity becomes bigger and possibly beyond us; it transcends our individuality. There are several methods for freeing and emptying the mind – meditation, yoga and chanting to name a few. The basic idea is to distract and relax the mind to create a flow state of consciousness where ideas come easily. The approaches to developing intuitive creativity are too numerous to chronicle here; however, free writing is a straightforward way to connect us with our intuitive self by simply observing what flows out of the pen or the tapping of the keys.

As with any learned ability, you have to practice. Even creative geniuses practice all the time. This article from Fortune magazine is a good place to find out more. This video about the five levels of creativity may also be helpful:

Originally published on Quora.

By Jeff DeGraff Ph.D.

Sourced from Psychology Today

In News

3 Habits to Boost Creativity & Become a More Prolific Marketer

February 26, 2019 No Comments

By Caroline Forsey

Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

Oftentimes, this couldn’t feel further from the truth. Imagine, for instance, the moment you finish your quarterly marketing campaign. You’re ecstatic — the campaign launched without a hitch, and you’ve already seen impressive conversion results.

But you’re also exhausted. You feel you’ve used up so much of your creative energy already — how will you ever come up with a new idea for the next quarter?

In these instances, it can feel like creativity is finite, and maybe even rare. But as marketers, we’re tasked with both the burden and the joy of using creativity to succeed in our roles every day.

Fortunately, there are tactics you can employ to begin building the right habits to become more prolific in your role. Henneke Duistermaat, writer and creator of Enchanting Marketing, created the following hand-drawn infographic to help boost creativity, improve focus, and minimize self-doubt to become a better, more creative marketer. Take a look.

Free Download: How to Use Photos in Marketing

By Caroline Forsey

Sourced from HubSpot

In News

Why it is (almost) impossible to teach creativity

December 18, 2018 No Comments

By Robert Nelson

Industry and educators are agreed: The world needs creativity. There is interest in the field, lots of urging but remarkably little action. Everyone is a bit scared of what to do next. On the question of creativity and imagination, they are mostly uncreative and unimaginative.

Some of the paralysis arises because you can’t easily define creativity. It resists the measurement and strategies that we’re familiar with. Indisposed by the simultaneous vagueness and sublimity of creative processes, educators seek artificial ways to channel imaginative activity into templates that end up compromising the very creativity they celebrate.

For example, creativity is often reduced to problem-solving. To be sure, you need imagination to solve many curly problems and creativity is arguably part of what it takes. But problem-solving is far from the whole of creativity; and if you focus creative thinking uniquely on problems and solutions, you encourage a mechanistic view—all about scoping and then pin-pointing the best fit among options.

It might be satisfying to create models for such analytical processes but they distort the natural, wayward flux of imaginative thinking. Often, it is not about solving a problem but seeing a problem that no one else has identified. Often, the point of departure is a personal wish for something to be true or worth arguing or capable of making a poetic splash, whereupon the mind goes into imaginative overdrive to develop a robust theory that has never been proposed before.

For teaching purposes, problems are an anxious place to cultivate creativity. If you think of anyone coming up with an idea—a new song, a witty way of denouncing a politician, a dance step, a joke—it isn’t necessarily about a problem but rather a blissful opportunity for the mind to exercise its autonomy, that magical power to concatenate images freely and to see within them a bristling expression of something intelligent.

That’s the motive behind what scholars now call “Big C Creativity”: i.e. your Bach or Darwin or Freud who comes up with a major original contribution to culture or science. But the same is true of everyday “small C creativity” that isn’t specifically problem-based.

Relishing the independence of the mind is the basis for naturally imaginative activity, like humour, repartee, a gestural impulse or theatrical intuition, a satire that extrapolates someone’s behaviour or produces a poignant character insight.

A dull taming

Our way of democratising creativity is not to see it in inherently imaginative spontaneity but to identify it with instrumental strategising. We tame creativity by making it dull. Our way of honing the faculty is by making it goal-oriented and compliant to a purpose that can be managed and assessed.

Alas, when we make creativity artificially responsible to a goal, we collapse it with prudent decision-making, whereupon it no longer transcends familiar frameworks toward an unknown fertility.

We pin creativity to logical intelligence as opposed to fantasy, that somewhat messy generation of figments out of whose chaos the mind can see a brilliant rhyme, a metaphor, a hilarious skip or roll of the shoulders, an outrageous pun, a thought about why peacocks have such a long tail, a reason why bread goes stale or an astonishing pattern in numbers arising from a formula.

Because creativity in essence is somewhat irresponsible, it isn’t easy to locate in syllabus and impossible to teach in a culture of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are statements of what the student will gain from the subject or unit that you’re teaching. Internationally and across the tertiary system, they take the form of: “On successful completion of this subject, you will be able to …” Everything that is taught should then support the outcomes and all assessment should allow the students to demonstrate that they have met them.

After a lengthy historical study, I have concluded that our contemporary education systematically trashes creativity and unwittingly punishes students for exercising their imagination. The structural basis for this passive hostility to the imagination is the grid of learning outcomes in alignment with delivery and assessment.

It might always be impossible to teach creativity but the least we can do for our students is make education a safe place for imagination. Our academies are a long way from that haven and I see little encouraging in the apologias for creativity that the literature now spawns.

My contention is that learning outcomes are only good for uncreative study. For education to cultivate creativity and imagination, we need to stop asking students anxiously to follow demonstrable proofs of learning for which imagination is a liability.

Feature Image: We pin creativity to logical intelligence as opposed to fantasy. Credit: Shutterstock

Explore further: The secret to creativity – according to science

By Robert Nelson

Sourced from PHYS.ORG

In News

45 Amazing Sites (and Resources) for Stirring Up Your Creativity

October 10, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from BRINGINGSMART.CO

Creativity is a process that cannot be forced but can be cultivated and allowed. Creativity must be allowed for the creation of innovative products and design of everyday things. You can stir up your creativity by getting serious about pen and paper again or you can also use apps as a guide.

Start keeping a journal too. Postpone judgment when you are in your creative mood and start allowing more silence in your life. Don’t put pressure on yourself, avoid creative deadlines when you can. Begin to ask questions about everyday products, ideas etc.

In the words of Masaru Ibuka–Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.

These are 45 amazing creativity resources that can stir up your creative instinct. If you need inspiration and motivation to take your product or business to the next-level, you will find these resources, ideas, projects, designs, videos, predictions and innovations useful.

1. Co.Design— Fast Company’s Co.Design, where business and design collide.

2. Designbuzz — Design ideas and concepts.

3. House of the Future — Living Tomorrow’s vision of the house of the future.

4. Productivity Future Vision — Microsoft’s vision of the future.

5. Springwise — Your essential fix of entrepreneurial ideas.

6. Big Think — Blogs, articles and videos from the world’s top leaders and thinkers.

7. PSFK — A go-to source for ideas and inspiration.

8. The World in 2030 — Dr. Michio Kaku talks computers, medicine, jobs, lifestyle.

9. Wrist-Worm Techsessories — A video compilation by Trend Hunter.

10. DesignTaxi — Design, Art, Photography, Advertising, Technology, and Social Media.

11. VisualJournalism — 80% of the news in infographics.

12. trendwatching.com — Scans the globe for consumer trends, insights and innovations.

13. IdeaMensch — A community of people with ideas.

14. Concept Bug — Product design in the tech world. Forecasting the future.

15. Design Milk —F eaturing architectural designs, and modern house designs and technology.

16. Inkling — Prediction markets, idea evaluation, crowd forecasting and data insights.

17. Yanko Design — Modern industrial design news.

18. Life in 2050 — A discussion of almost-tangible realities from labs around the world.

19. Icon — Gives you a quick way to tap your crowd for ideas, knowledge and feedback.

20. Brainrack — Out of the box innovation that connects students with organizations.

21. 99U— -Insights on making ideas happen.

22. The 99 Percent — Insights on making ideas happen.

23. Get Addicted To — Daily mix of creative culture.

24. Creative Bloq — Daily inspiration for creative people.

25. TheCoolist — Web magazine about design, gadgets and more.

26. One Billion Minds — An amazing new way to discover and support innovation.

27. Visualizing.org — Data visualizations, challenges, community.

28. Fancy — Part store, blog, magazine and wish-list.

29. Cool Hunting — Highlighting creativity and innovation in design and technology.

30. FlowingData — Data visualization, infographics and statistics.

31. Paul Higgins — Futurist interested in technology.

32. Glen Hiemstra — Founder of Futurist.com, speaker, author, consultant.

33. Core77 — Industrial design magazine.

34. CoolBusinessIdeas — A blog that highlights promising new ideas around the world.

35. Trend Hunter — Technology trend spotting community fueled by a network of curious people.

36. TrendsNow — Future trends magazine.

38. Visua.ly — Infographics and data visualizations.

39. InnoCentive — Organizations can solve key problems through crowd sourcing.

40. Information Aesthetics — Data visualization and information design.

41. Bless this Stuff — Tech to drool about, for men.

42. Visual Complexity — A visual exploration of mapping complex networks.

43. oobject — Visual lists of man-made objects.

44. Brian David Johnson — Intel futurist, author and speaker.

45. Ray Kurzweil — Author, inventor and futurist.

Sourced from BRINGINGSMART.CO

In News

Why You Can’t Solve Problems with Teamwork, Genius, or Creativity

November 28, 2017 No Comments

By Brenda Do

If you want to create brilliant products and solutions, you should hire the best geniuses, give them an environment to flourish, then do what you can to keep them, right? Tim Sanders says it’s what business leaders naturally think—but it’s the wrong approach.

His research shows brilliant solutions aren’t born from lone geniuses. They’re developed by diverse teams. And today’s teams aren’t what you’re probably thinking.

Sanders is a technology pioneer. He was on the ground floor of the quality movement, the launch of the mobile phone industry, and the birth of the world wide web.

In his presentation at Upwork’s Work Without Limits™ Executive Summit, Sanders explains how companies solve tough problems by focusing on collaboration. Here are highlights from his presentation.

Collaboration is the new teamwork

Many people think the hit Pixar movie, Toy Story, was a great idea that came from genius creatives. But Pixar CEO Ed Catmull clarifies Toy Story wasn’t genius, it was 1,000 problems solved.

Toy Story was the first movie ever made on a computer. The team faced so many technical challenges during its first few months that Disney wanted to shut the project down. Pixar prevailed by solving each problem through lean, diverse teams called the brain trust.

Brain trusts are centered around collaboration. Teams are made up of several people from different functions. This diversity gets people out of their siloed perspectives.

Then everyone works together in a sharing environment where anyone can say anything. Ideas can come from anywhere. If they require outside experts, they reach out to their freelancer community.

Pixar believes teams are more important than ideas, says Sanders.

He paraphrases Catmull’s thoughts: “You can give a perfect idea to a group of knuckle heads and they will screw it up every single time. But you can give a highly problematic, over ambitious idea to the right team, and they will improve it and bring it to life.”

Eliminate false constraints

Collaboration creates rapid problem solving. Because when you bring people together, especially in lean and diverse teams, you create an environment where everyone reveals what they know. They’re willing to come together at the information level to do joint work. This enables companies to solve blind spots like false constraints.

Sanders recalls a stunning example of false constraints during his role as chief solutions officer at Yahoo. While in a meeting with Yahoo’s co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, they listened to two entrepreneurs pitch an SMS-based idea. The entrepreneurs wanted to create a short messaging service using 140 characters.

Yang leaned over to Sanders saying the idea will never work. Years before, Yahoo bought a company for $400 million based on the same idea. But the service never took. Yang’s conclusion was that people want longer messaging.

The entrepreneurs they denied ended up founding Twitter. Sanders warns that sometimes, organizations become obsolete when they’re in a leadership silo where no one tells you things have changed.

Collaboration in lean, diverse teams can help you avoid that. What’s more…

Collaboration fattens the bottom line

Sanders says over nine out of 10 top sales and marketing organizations make collaboration part of their culture’s DNA. Individuals from cross functions come together to either win a big account, save a critical account, or launch a breakthrough product.

Sanders cites a Miller Heiman Institute study of what they called World Class Sales and Marketing Organizations: Those who collaborate outperform their rivals in key revenue KPIs by double digits.

The study further notes when you bring a second perspective into a meeting, your chance of moving forward increases by 50%. If you add a third perspective, your chances of moving forward with the next play goes up to 100%.

How’s that possible? Because when you bring in everyone who has a stake in the outcome, they work hard to keep the promise and create mutually beneficial solutions.

Sanders adds a caveat: balance teams with the right number of people. Having too many perspectives can slow progress.

Teamwork 2.0

Among the companies Sanders studied, they all have one thing in common: proximity. This enables them to have face to face, high levels of communication. From these interactions, they build trust, empathy, and stronger relationships. Think of it as teamwork 1.0.

Teamwork 2.0 involves collaborating with remote workers. At Sanders’s company, Deeper Media, 90% of their talent either works remotely or is a freelancer.

Today, technology enables organizations and individuals to work differently. “Proximity, much like premise computing, is moving to the cloud,” says Sanders. “The right talent may not live in your market, or want to live there to join your organization.”

Researcher John Seely Brown said the future of enterprise is extended beyond geographical constraints. The business leader of today must learn how to collaborate with remote teams.

Tips for collaborating across time zones

The two biggest challenges with a remote or distributed team are: communication quality and the ability to build relationships. “If you still use email, it’s like using index cards and glue sticks to run your applicant tracking system. E-mail is not how you build relationships,” says Sanders. For more effective collaboration, Sanders suggests these three tips:

Favor visual communication

When you use linear technology like phone and email, there’s no screen sharing, no human sharing. People feel divided and like they’re being delegated to. When you use video collaboration tools, people feel united and more motivated. And it helps people care about the people they work with.

Phone conference calls aren’t effective because people usually work on other things during these calls. As a result, these meetings usually end with the issues still left unresolved. Sanders cites a study where participants reported teams who met over video got the job done 90% of the time. As opposed to 50% for email or phone users.

Show up prepared

Don’t throw people into a room and toss out ideas. At least two days before a meeting, send everyone a project brief. The brief should state the problem, the opportunity, what’s in place now, and how it’s working. Then give everyone an assignment. Keep conversations very idea based. Make it clear you expect collaboration from all participants.

Get the right tools (and lots of them)

Many online collaboration tools are easy to use and some are free. For most teams, the basics should include:

a project management software like Basecamp or JIRA
video conferencing tools like Google Hangouts or Skype
online document sharing like Dropbox or Google Docs

Promote individual growth

No matter where your collaboration partner is located, you can’t work with people you don’t care about deeply. Sanders concludes, “Love, in the business sense, is when you devote yourself to promote growth in every person you do business with. Not just your top performer who makes you look good. Our ability to use high telepresence tools like video allows us to make those super human connections that give us mentorship opportunities, real connections and bonds, and the ability to show empathy.”

By Brenda Do

Brenda is a freelance, direct-response copywriter. She enjoys writing for Upwork™ because their articles help both businesses and freelancers succeed by showing them how to work more strategically together. Brenda is the president of BL Copywriting LLC, where she splits her time writing for other companies and teaching small business owners… View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

Daydreaming Is a Sign of Intelligence, So Go Ahead and Let Your Mind Wander

November 28, 2017 No Comments

By Megan Parry

Creativity and productivity are important concepts around here — we’re always looking for new ways to unlock our creativity and increase our productivity. And it seems science is pretty obsessed with the concepts too. We’ve already learned that daydreaming helps us come up with innovative solutions to mentally taxing problems, but a new study is here to say that daydreamers may just be smarter than the more down-to-earth of us.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggests that people who daydream could have more efficient brains than the rest of us, showing higher intellectual and creative capabilities. Study coauthors Eric Schumacher and Christine Godwin used an MRI to measure the brain patterns of over 100 study participants while they focused on a stationary object for five minutes. The team used these patterns as the control to understand “which areas of the brain work together during an awake, resting state,” Godwin explains.

The team also gave the participants tests to measure their intellect and creative tendencies, in addition to having them fill out a survey about how often their minds wander in daily life. Godwin and Schumacher compared the brain wave data with the intellect data and found that “those who reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on intellectual and creative ability and had more efficient brain systems measured in the MRI machine.”

Basically, if you’re hella smart, you don’t need as much time or mental capacity to perform a task. If you’re able to tune in and out during a task or conversation without making errors or missing information, you may just have a brain that’s making its own entertainment when it’s not being challenged. Shumacher compares the phenomenon to “the absent-minded professor — someone who’s brilliant, but off in his or her own world… or school children who are too intellectually advanced for their classes. While it may take five minutes for their friends to learn something new, they figure it out in a minute, then check out and start daydreaming.”

The next time you find your thoughts drifting at work, check back in to see if you’ve somehow managed to still stay on task and on time. You may just have an efficient brain.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Megan Parry

Megan is a RVA-based writer and stylist with a profound love of the semi-colon, Taylor Swift, vintage sequins, modern art, vanilla-scented perfume, library books and her cat, Stormy.

Sourced from BRIT + CO

In News

I Tried These 7 Ways to Unlock My Creativity + Here’s What Happened

December 13, 2016 No Comments

By Sunny Chanel.

No matter what kind of job you have, from CEO to candle maker, creativity plays a huge role in your success and happiness.

The business site Inc. explored this trait, citing that “60 percent of CEOs polled by IBM agreed that creativity was the most important skill to possess in a leadership role.” Hells yeah it is!

If you’re in a creative field, it should be double that. Yeah, that would make it 120 percent, but that just illustrates how significant a role creativity has on our lives. In their piece, they highlighted seven daily habits, backed up by science, that we should all be doing to ignite our imaginations and to engage in more outside-the-box thinking. I tried them all to see if they really worked to get those creative juices a-flowin’.

1. “Keep a Schedule”: It’s hard to schedule in creative pursuits that don’t include the semi-instant gratification of money. But to truly enjoy being creative, you need to spread your wings and do non-work creative pursuits too. This is especially true for those of us in a creative field. Me, I play with words all day. It’s a way cool job, and I love, and I mean L.O.V.E. being a writer, but I notice that if I take the time to do non-wordy creativity, I’m more creative all around. I decided that every day I would take two breaks, one in the morning and one in the evening. To make sure I didn’t put it off (or forget about it), I set my alarm. At 11:15am, for 20 minutes, I’m taking an innovation break. I set time aside to doodle, plan, plot and to think about ways to improve my side hustle. The second break, at 4:15pm, is a time where I would work one of my many hobbies. For this week, I decided to whip out my embroidery kit. While there were things that went untouched on my to-do list, taking this time was oh-so-needed mentally.

2. “Surround Yourself With Creative People”: How much do I love creative people? SO MUCH. When I’m around makers and creators, I can’t help but be energized and inspired. Inc. notes Albert Einstein saying: “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” Luckily for me, I have a kid in my home and children are inherently creative. They have a freedom that’s so meaningful. So while my career is one I do from the comfort of my own home, I do have this creative energy that invades every day after school ends. Facebook and Instagram are also good ways to keep surrounded by my creative pals, albeit virtually.

3. “Have Fun”: “All work and no play makes you a dull boy (or girl).” Soooo true. When you return from having any sort of fun, your creative tank is refilled, and it’s best to have work and fun co-mingle if you can. Take a place like Pixar Studios in Emeryville: Along with all sorts of sporty fun (beach volleyball courts, basketball courts and a swanky pool), they inject fun into their whole day, from inspiring art on the walls to unique, customized work areas shaped like cottages. There is nothing as invigorating as good old fashioned fun. I don’t have my own cottage/office yet, so to inject some fun into my day, I played some super happy music (went retro with the B-52s), put on bright colors (hello, prints!) and tried to stop myself every now and then to smile (since smiling is so much a part of feeling the fun).

Barbara Pavone 11 days ago

4. “Get Out”: Instead of heading to the gym (okay, who am I kidding, I don’t have a gym membership), it’s suggested that getting exercise outside and in nature has beneficial effects on creativity. I can totes get down with a workout in the great outdoors. Each day, I opted to take a jaunt to a nearby wooded park. It’s peaceful, beautiful and a perfect place to get the blood (and hence, the creativity) flowing. I’m not one for jogging, so I got in touch with my inner power walker and hit the trails. I was pretty stoked to come up with not one but two “genius” ideas while walking. I had my phone with me, so I was able to leave audio notes so I wouldn’t forget.

5. “Act Like a Little Kid”: I’m lucky — I have a kid, so it’s easy for me to have the source material to get in touch with my inner child. But even if you don’t have a wee one under your roof, you can pretend (you know, like, as if you were a kid). One of the things I did was skip around the block. Skipping not only gives you that lighthearted little kid feeling, but it’s also good exercise, giving you the same cardiovascular effect as running. I also tried out a couple of other fave kid pastimes. I did a little finger painting and sculpted with PlayDoh. For each of those, I did not think about the product or the item I was making; rather, it was the process. Both the feeling of the paint on my fingertips and the softness of the PlayDoh in my hands were incredibly satisfying, and it was a stress-free experience since I wasn’t trying to create something — I was merely playing.

6. “Daydream As Much As Possible”: When I was a kid, I remember spending countless hours daydreaming. Now, my only daydreaming happens when I’m staring down at my to-do list and fantasizing that picking up the dry cleaning, putting the stew in the slow cooker and completing all my work tasks will magically get done without me. To kick-start non-task oriented daydreaming, I got into a cozy position on the couch, closed my eyes and let myself free. But I have to admit, it was difficult to switch back to work mode.

7. “Let Go of the Idea of Perfection”: Creativity is not perfect. It can be messy, disordered and chaotic. If you strive too hard for perfection, you’ll lose sight of the creative spirit. Plus, failing is how we learn. By making mistakes, you can adjust, correct and create in a more meaningful way. Striving for perfection will also hinder you to take chances and to try new things. I took this opportunity to draw. I’m one who paints pictures with my words rather than my hands. Grabbing my pastels, I went to my backyard and did a little landscape of what I saw. It was FAR from perfect, but the feeling it gave me, to just try, that was pretty perfect right there.

In a perfect world (yes, I’m throwing shade yet again at perfection), I’d be able to do all of these each day. But playing, having fun, hanging out with creative people — that all takes more time than I have. Taking these in smaller doses, spreading out these tips to every week rather than every day, will work for me. And really, how can I say no to the goal of having fun and acting like a kid?

(Photos via Getty)

By Sunny Chanel

Sunny Chanel is a freelance writer as well as the founder of the whimsical site Wonder and Company. When this proud San Franciscan isn’t writing, working on her fixer-upper or doing crafts, she is playing dress up with daughter and planning her next trip to Disneyland.

Sourced from BRIT + CO