An open mind is a valuable resource. When you're interested in new possibilities and able to think creatively, you're more likely to stay energized in your role – and keep your team or business one step ahead of the competition.

The Power of New Ideas. You don't have to be artistic to be creative. Everyone can learn to generate bold, groundbreaking ideas by adopting a creative approach and applying the best thinking tools.There are three key approaches to generating new ideas:1. Breaking old thinking patterns.2. Making new connections.3. Getting fresh perspectives.

Inspiring Innovation Through Creative Thinking

We can all get stuck in certain "tracks" of thought and fall victim to groupthink . These ideas may be so comfortable that we don't even realize that they're holding us back! So, to have fresh ideas, we need to break away from established patterns of thought and start to see new paths ahead.Here are some of the best ways to do it:Challenge Your Assumptions. Rephrase the Problems. Think in Reverse. Mix Your Media.

1. Breaking Old Thinking Patterns

1. Challenging your assumptions. You likely bring a set of assumptions to each and every situation. Many of them may turn out to be true, but challenging your preconceptions can also open up some exciting possibilities.2. Rephrase the ProblemThe way you define or frame your problem can limit your creativity. If you describe the issue you're trying to solve in a different way, or look at it from a different angle, new solutions can emerge.

A. Ways To Break Old Thinking Patterns. 

3. Think in ReverseIf you're finding it difficult to think of a new approach, try turning the problem upside-down!Flip the question and explore the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. This can present you with innovative ways to tackle the real issue.To come up with a new design for your website, for example, think about how you'd create the worst look possible. Trying to make it boring, frustrating and forgettable may give you some bold ideas for how to do the opposite.

B. Ways To Break Old Thinking Patterns. 

4. Mix Your MediaRadical ideas can arise from tackling problems in unusual ways. A great way to do this is to apply different types of creativity – don't just talk or write about your plans, explore them through music, painting, photography, sculpture… whatever enables you to express yourself. Fresh thinking can emerge when you let your creative juices flow!.

C. Ways To Break Old Thinking Patterns. 

Another way to generate new ideas is to make new and unexpected connections. Some of the best ideas seem to occur almost by chance – you see or hear something unconnected with the situation you're trying to resolve, and a lightbulb goes on in your head!Try some of the following strategies for forging creative connections:1. Random words. Pick a word at random from any document, then look for novel associations between that word and your problem.

2. Making New Connections. 

2. Picture prompts. Images can be a great way to inspire creative thinking. Pick any image, find a connection with your problem – however tenuous – and notice any new possibilities that open up.3. Objects of interest. How about asking your team members to bring a small object of their choice to your next ideas meeting? You could generate new ideas by asking questions such as, "How is this object like the problem we're trying to solve?" or "How could we use this object to meet our challenge?"

A. .Strategies For Making New Connections. 

Finally, you can add extra dynamism to your thinking by taking a step back from your usual standpoint and viewing a problem through "fresh eyes."You'll often get a surprising new take on an issue by talking to someone with a different perspective, maybe because of their age, life experience, or cultural background.

3. Finding Fresh Perspectives

Setting aside the traditional human way of thinking and learn to think anew with the help of new thought process.

philosophy

Philosophy

creativity

Creativity

Da 🕵Creative thinking 💭

Here's the 5 ways to develop the creativity in students:1. Create your own IfsNumerous great creators/innovators take an existing object and pose the clever questions to twist its actual idea and make it new. Steve jobs didn't start of an idea of Smartphone. He just took the existed Smartphone and ask the question to himself that how can he modify it to make it better or the best. Let's clear about this, there are nothing universally verified, it's just their approach to develop their own ideas through their interest, speciality and type of thinking or even what type of team working with you.

Creative Thinking Skills

What would happen if I change it?How can I improve in this object if I have to use it for more 10 to 12 years?What would I do if I have One Million Rupees to invest?How much time it will take if I start now?This questions can become Powerful tool to you that can help you to think in a different way. But it is important to practice this to get more useful effect of this. You have to exercise your mind to improve your creative thinking by asking Ifs. To develop creativity in your mind, start thinking more and more. Initially you will not get much better results, but later on you will be pleased.

I usually suggest you to ask simply Ifs to yourself?

The greatest thing is that the creative thinking is not the product of IQ.It is just based upon your imagination, Practicing your power of observation and dreaming.Your imagination can be big or small to change the world. It sounds so simple,but it become very confusing to you when you can't imagine the things. All too often in our daily life,we are just spending our day in front of television.It just kill your creative mind and ability of thinking.So,at the end of the day, we just come up with an idea that we will not watch the television from tomorrow for longer time.Sound so familiar.Right?

2. Imagination

3. Set up learning activities in your classroom or home that allow you to explore creativity in relevant, interesting, and worthwhile waysSuppose your teacher has given some rock sample and he told you to determine the differences between these samples which you have understand by the definition. Every students have different opinions regarding this such as someone has created difference by colour, some by appearance and others by hardness.

The one who learn everyday, for them it becomes very easy to learn from their activities. When your teacher have told you to look after the matter, everyone has their different ideas and concepts to see the matter. When you think and imagine more and more, your creativity enhances to give the best results which you deserve.*Activities to develop Creative Thinking:<ul><li>Lateral-thinking </li><li>Visual reading (Concept-mapping)</li><li>Think out of your mentality</li><li> Artistic creativity</li><li> Problem-solving Abilities</li><li>Analytical thinking</li></ul>

"Creativity takes courage" is a notable statement from the artist. Emphasizing the value in mistakes will allow you to create a safe space for making the steps to success.The following are a couple of ways of advancing this idea with your group. <ul><li>Give your friends the positive feedback when they commit an error and permit them to tackle an issue to find an answer. </li><li>Read books,It will assist with supporting transforming mistakes into arts in spite of an initial failure.</li><li>Take a paper with a dot,rip, orpaint splatter and transform it into something lovely.This assists how mistake can be transferred.</li></ul>

4. Embrace mistakes of others

Here we have given the ways to develop the creative thinking an to improve yourself.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to develop Creative thinking skills in students

veg protein recipe #food

Protein recipe

In India, we don't have many options for a protein diet when it comes to bodybuilding, so here I'm sharing a quick option to the food menu for the fitness freaks.

food

Food

Cooking

<ul><li>Loving yourself is the first rule of love.</li><li>The biggest milestone on the internet is to earn the first $1.</li><li>Many stories bore people. All people want is a piece of information that will tell them how to survive in chaos.</li><li>Don't beat up yourself when things go wrong. The solution will not come when you lose your cool. The solution will come when you’re at peace with yourself.</li><li>It takes a little effort to turn a page of your memory to recollect something you did in the past that could unlock the door for you in the present or future.</li></ul>

What was the most interesting piece of advice?

<ul><li>People who suffered the worst broken relationships write the most romantic novels. People who went through a hard life write the most interesting stories.</li><li>Start doing something that has never been done before, and people will think you’re crazy. Stop doing it, and people will want to stone you.</li><li>Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about being found by others.</li><li>You could actually go through life without realizing you were there.</li><li>Stop indulging in other people’s affairs. If you’re unable to cope with your own problems, why indulge in other people’s affairs?</li></ul>

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

What was the most interesting piece of advice on life someone has given to you?

Living artfully / artistically is living in the present moment. Artful / Artistic living as a lifestyle. Being present as a lifestyle. Normalising being present. 💜Normalising art. 💜

Living Artfully As A Lifestyle 

Resonance, when inner and outer world are in sync. 

mindfulness

Mindfulness

Living Artfully 

When you’re in touch with your honest aesthetic/spiritual/material/intellectual priorities, writing is pretty easy...once you begin, it shouldn’t feel like trying to squeeze champagne out of wrought iron. It should feel like opening a floodgate—whether that results in a furious swell or an amiable trickle.

The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process. As you continue producing creative work, you will, for better or worse, be changing in the background. You may find that doing the things you once did is no longer congruent with your inner climate. This gives you, roughly, two choices—either you flow with who you’ve actually become, or you slowly descend into a hollow parody of what you once were.

It's not a technique problem, it's a sincerity problem

writing

Reading & Writing

communication

Communication

If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying

Trying to resolve things too quickly, especially for complex problems, is detrimental to innovation because you fall prey to premature closure. And resistance to premature closure — a key aspect of creativity — is our ability to keep an open mind when we already have a potential solution.
While mantras like “move fast and break things” can help push people towards action, they can backfire when the underlying problem is complex. In such situations, urging the team to keep searching for more ideas can lead to more innovative and far-reaching solutions.

The Productivity Illusion

Creative thinking is more cognitively demanding than logical thinking. In that sense, creative thinking is a higher-order skill. In practical terms, this means that analyzing an idea is easier than synthesizing a new one from multiple sources.
In an ideal scenario, organizations would pay people in proportion to their cognitive work. In practice, however, we tend to reward “critics” more than “synthesizers” because critics sound more intelligent.

The Intelligence Illusion

Most teams associate successful ideation with group work. Surprisingly, that’s not true. Group brainstorming feels more productive because the social connection we experience with each other during brainstorming makes us happier and we confuse that with productivity.
In practice, nominal brainstorming (where individual team members think independently before sharing their ideas) consistently outperforms traditional group brainstorming, especially for diverse teams.

The Brainstorming Illusion

career

Career

teamwork

Teamwork

3 Common Fallacies About Creativity

Your mindset naturally constrains your ability to consider alternatives and possibilities that go beyond the boundaries of your thinking. Your limiting assumptions can be about personal skills, team knowledge, and abilities, organizational capabilities, market needs, technology, financial limitations, partnership possibilities, competition, or just about anything else. When it comes to strategy and innovation, success depends on how fast you become aware of your assumptions and then modify them. But it's a paradox: You can't see your most fundamental assumptions until you overcome them.

Your Hidden Assumptions

When it comes to developing your strategy or innovating, get clear on what you need to know and learn. <ul><li>List up to 4-5 topics. For example, the most successful social media influencers.</li><li>For each topic, create a list of guiding questions that, if answered, would really give you a solid understanding of the area. </li></ul>This exercise will help you better understand what's most important to further explore so you can broaden your perspective.

Identify Areas of Intrigue

Find a company completely outside of your industry or market and look at what makes them different and what they do really well. Then adapt their model to your cause. 
<ul>
<li>Use the format "I want to be the \___________ of ____________" by putting a company name into the first blank and the area of your target market or innovation area into the second blank. For example, if you want to transform the fashion industry, you might try "I want to be the Netflix of fashion"_. </li>
<li>Consider companies like Starbucks, Twitter, Domino's, NIKE, Home Depot, or any other innovative company.</li>
</ul>

Adapt a Business Model

Successful strategy and innovation are about how fast you can become aware of your assumptions.

productivity

Productivity

problemsolving

Problem Solving

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

How to See Your Hidden Assumptions

“If your goal is innovation, then your role must instead be to create an environment—a setting, a context, an organization—where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation themselves: to collaborate, learn through trial and error, and make integrated decisions.”

Innovation is often a group effort, not an isolated individual who works alone. Better ideas arise when people with different views can express their ideas and receive feedback. Innovations are discovered after countless experimentation and trial and error. This can take time.

The collective genius

Good leaders encourage discovery and innovation.<ul><li>Leaders ensure their organisations are collaborative and make integrative decisions.</li><li>They help with conflict resolution without providing a solution to a group.</li><li>They encourage multiple opinions.</li></ul>

Leading innovation

Innovation needs paradoxical qualities: Freedom and restraint. Unleashing and harnessing resources like talent and ideas. Harmony in the team and conflict. <ul><li>A good leader encourages people to express their viewpoints. They create an open environment where people feel comfortable contributing their ideas, knowing others will listen to them but also challenge their ideas.</li><li>Good leaders encourage experimentation, iteration, learning and starting over.</li><li>However, learning should be balanced with performance; creative freedom with boundaries (schedules, budgets, rules and procedures).</li></ul>

Collective genius needs leadership

The traditional leadership model tends to squash creativity. The boss creates the ideas, then tells everyone what they should do. This model doesn't work when the goal is to create something new because even the leaders don't know the outcome.To cultivate innovative conditions, leaders should create an environment where people are encouraged to be creative:<ul><li>Increase transparency to build employee trust.</li><li>Make management more accessible and accountable so that employees can flag problems.</li><li>Empower employees so that they will take initiative.</li></ul>

The traditional model of leadership

People want to feel like they're part of a community and work on something bigger than themselves. A brand can be used to unite and motivate employees around a common purpose. Leaders create the space for innovation. They create an environment in which people want to work and can get the work done. For example, De Meo, head of sales and marketing at Volkswagen, established a lab where employees from different departments could work together. He provided little direction and almost complete autonomy. It improved collaboration skills and caused employees to create innovative solutions.

Building a creative community

Values define what is important to a group. They determine the group's priorities. Innovative groups share four core values: <ul><li>Bold ambition: A group with a bold purpose will take on big challenges. Bold groups want to improve the world, and they feel they can improve it.</li><li>Collaboration: Innovative companies intentionally build collaboration into their strategies. Innovation is the result of diverse people working together on a problem.</li><li>Learning: When you try something new, mistakes are inevitable. </li><li> The group shares a sense of responsibility and ownership for the outcomes.</li></ul>

The values of innovative groups

Good ideas are shaped by discussion, debate and conflict. For people to be creative and innovative, they need to be good at disagreeing while staying respectful and treating each other as equals.Creative abrasion is a skill that can be learned:<ul><li>A diverse group of people need to create a lot of ideas and must be willing for their ideas to be criticised.</li><li>Productive conflict requires trust between team members. Conflict that becomes personal shouldn't be tolerated.</li><li>Leaders should not impose solutions on the team but ask questions that help the team create their own solutions. </li></ul>

Creative friction

Creative agility is the groups' ability to continually find out what works. Learning and development are balanced with tangible results. ﻿Constant experimentation stimulates innovation. When the path forward is unclear, the agile team uses a cycle of trial and error, and reflection and analysis until a solution emerges. Each cycle uses the lessons learned from the previous cycle. A certain amount of failure is inevitable, so leaders should learn to accept that mistakes are an important part of learning and should be tolerated.

Creative agility

Ideas are created through discussion and conflict, and solutions are tested via trial and error. The next part is creative resolution. Here it is important to balance perseverance with endurance. At this point, the leader establishes the boundaries and conditions for the work. The leader is the social architect who makes innovation possible, but for the most part, innovation comes from team members.

Creative resolution

Some challenges are so big and complex that they require multiple disciplines to deal with them, often beyond a single organisation. Unlike innovative teams within a single company, teams across organisations often feel competitive or hostile to one another. Leaders may focus too much on the rules and boundaries, but fostering participants' willingness to engage is more important to building community. To build a community essential for innovation, first get everyone to agree on the goal of the effort, then set the conditions for working together.

Creating an innovation ecosystem

A guide to managing people and getting the most out of them

books

Books

timemanagement

Time Management

The Art of Leadership 

The author argues that the traditional autocratic leadership model does not work for innovative businesses. Instead, innovation requires a different type of leader that can foster a stimulating and supportive working environment.

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Linda A. Hill

Greg Brandeau

Emily Truelove

Kent Lineback

Collective Genius

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

Imposter Syndrome is that inner voice telling you that your work is not good enough or, even worse, that you’re useless as a person.
<ul>
<li>Self-criticism can really put (and keep) us down.</li>
<li>Suffering from ‘imposter syndrome’ is common among most of us.</li>
<li>Even with those people where you least expect it, they often suffer from some form of self-criticism. </li>
<li>Creativity comes from relaxing self-evaluation and self-judgment – and the self-criticism and self-doubt that result from them.</li>
<li>Feeling like an imposter can impact one’s ability to be creative or try things.</li>
</ul>

Imposter Syndrome And Creative People

Instead of applying self-criticism, we need to actively practice the opposite: self-compassion. Self-compassion is realising that self-criticism is the enemy and then acting to reverse its negative effects. Self-compassion also helps to unlock creativity. The two components of self-compassion:<ol><li>Making a conscious effort to stop self-judgment.</li><li>Actively comforting ourselves, the same as we would do with a friend in need.</li></ol>

Replace Self-Criticism With Self-Compassion

Awareness of your inner critical voice is crucial. This then enables you to see your critical thoughts for what they are: thoughts.
Being more aware of what your brain and mind do when sensing a potential threat in the form of being judged and receiving criticism will encourage the development of a calmer part of the mind.

Recognizing The Inner Critical Voice

There are a number of so-called cognitive distortions that are relevant to the Inner Critic: <ul><li>Mental filters, or selective abstraction.</li><li>Tunnel vision.</li><li>Magnification and Minimisation or binocular trick.</li><li>Overgeneralizations</li><li>Jumping to conclusions</li><li>Mind reading or hunches.</li><li>Pessimism and catastrophizing a given situation by imagining the worst.</li><li>Emotional reasoning.</li><li>Thinking in All or Nothing terms(Black or White)</li><li>Ignoring positive aspects of a situation</li><li>Thinking everything is our own fault</li><li>Mislabeling of characterizations</li></ul>

Cognitive Distortions

The good thing about negative confirmation bias is that it can be flipped to create a positive full-filling prophecy too. 
Rather than walking around in a perpetual state of feeling that no one believes in you, you can be on the hunt for support. Take confirmation and use it as a force for good to seek out positivity rather than negativity.

Seeking Positive Confirmation

Something happens and we imagine the absolute worst. Our mind plays tricks and we start ‘awfulizing’.
To stop this:
<ul>
<li>First, on a piece of paper or in a journal, write down and answer the question: What I am afraid will happen? </li>
<li>Next, write down a response to this question: What could happen?</li>
</ul>
If we actively apply realistic optimism, looking at the facts of the situation at hand without embellishing or minimising them, we can avoid a ‘spiralling’ effect.

Awfulizing

There are a number of valuable tips to help you learn to take criticism well and use it to get better at whatever you are doing:
<ul>
<li>Breathe.</li>
<li>Detach from the situation or event mentally.</li>
<li>Listen actively.</li>
<li>Get specific demands and relevant, constructive criticism.</li>
<li>Discover new perspectives.</li>
<li>Be curious.</li>
<li>Grow.</li>
<li>Learn in real time.</li>
</ul>

Living With Criticism

Letting go of our preoccupation with the trajectory of other people’s lives, we can transform our envy from a stagnant, blocking force into a powerful motivator for growth. The tools and ideas above help us reframe our self-criticism; seeing critical thoughts for what they are and combating them with compassionate thoughts.

From Stagnation To Action

Be so busy improving yourself that you have no time to criticise others.

Steps to overcome the feeling that you don't belong where you are, and you only got there through dumb luck.

The Imposter Cure

Moving from self-criticism to self-compassion

Silence the Voice of Self Doubt “Banish Your Inner Critic provides knowledge, insight, tools and practice for getting unstuck and expressing full creative potential." ?Rebecca Stockley, Co-Founder of BATS Improv in San Francisco CA Are you ready to boost your personal productivity—minus the fear and loathing? Are you ready to Banish Your Inner Critic and unleash the creative ideas and personal productivity within you? Help is on the way! Blocked creative ideas. Everybody has one, an inner critic that tells you that others have more talent, you’re just faking it, and that you’ll never have those great creative ideas that seem just out of reach. This inner critic is a subconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great creative ideas and the fruits of achievement. It afflicts us with a mental block as deadlines approach, makes us so afraid of being judged that we hold ourselves back and don’t share our expertise, forces us to question our ability to learn ideas and technologies quickly; and makes us doubt, discount, and kill our ideas before they see the light of day. Find a world of creative ideas. Denise Jacobs is a speaker, author and creativity evangelist who speaks at web conferences and consults with tech companies worldwide. As the Founder and Chief Creativity Evangelist of "The Creative Dose", she teaches techniques to make the creative process more fluid, how to make work environments more conducive to personal productivity, and practices for sparking innovation. Now, in Banish Your Inner Critic, Denise Jacobs shows you how to defeat barriers that are holding you back and achieve success through a positive mental attitude. Banish Your Inner Critic and: Identify and quiet the voice of self-doubt Master three powerful practices to transform how you relate to yourself and your creativity Generate more creative ideas than ever before If you’re a fan of books such as The Artist’s Way or The War of Art, you should read Banish Your Inner Critic.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

“Gives you the practical tools you need to own the room by owning yourself. Banish that inner devil’s advocate and become as powerful as you can be.” —Alan Cooper, software alchemist, cofounder of Cooper   As the Founder and Chief Creativity Evangelist of “The Creative Dose,” Denise Jacobs teaches techniques to make the creative process more fluid, methods for making work environments more conducive to personal productivity, and practices for sparking innovation. Now, in her book, Banish Your Inner Critic, Denise shows you how to defeat those barriers that are holding you back and achieve success through a positive mental attitude.   Banish Your Inner Critic shows you how to move beyond that mental block to your creative ideas, realize instant relief and lasting insight, and:   · Identify and quiet the voice of self-doubt in your head · Master 3 powerful practices that will transform how you relate to yourself and your creativity forever · Overcome the fear of not knowing enough or not being original enough · Free yourself from comparisons, overwhelm, high self-criticism and self-sabotage · Transform your self-talk into a tool for success · Generate more creative ideas than ever before · Embrace your expertise and share your brilliance with the world   Banish your Inner Critic to start doing your best work, achieving excellence, and contributing meaningfully to the world!   “If you’re interested in diving deep into your own creative genius, this book will give you an abundance of ways to do that.” —Michelle Villalobos, “The Superstar Activator” & founder of The Women’s Success Summit   “A book I believe will inspire a new generation to step out of the shadows and shine.” —Paul Boag, author of User Experience Revolution

Denise Jacobs

Banish Your Inner Critic

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