How To Stimulate Creativity In Your Company -part 3-
4. Train on different tools for thinking “outside the box”
One complaint I hear frequently is that their managers give employees incremental ideas, or more of the same, while what they want are ideas are radical and different, that have the potential to transform the business. Find below some concrete tools managers can use to stimulate more radical and revolutionary ideas in his collaborators.
Mind Mapping: One of the most powerful tools for creative thinking are the mental maps. A mind map is a graphical technique to organize and connect ideas visually created by Tony Buzan, where part of a central node and ideas unfold as the branches of a tree in a radial fashion. This way of organizing ideas break with linear thinking and helps us create new connections between our ideas. Mind maps, being a graphical tool, promoting the use of the right hemisphere of our brain, which is associated with visual thinking and creative thinking.
Lateral Thinking: Lateral Thinking is a term coined by psychologist and author Edward de Bono Maltese as a set of techniques to induce creative thinking. Instead of waiting for the ideas come as if by magic, De Bono proposed the use of lateral thinking consciously and deliberately to change patterns of thinking, breaking the logical and predictable, to produce new and unexpected ideas.
TRIZ: The TRIZ and systematic inventive thinking is a method that is based on research by the Russian engineer Genrich Altshuller, who obtained his first patent at age 15 and worked all his life to systematize the creative process. As part of his research, Altshuller investigated more than 200,000 patents and found that they all followed a similar series of patterns which organized around a set of principles and created a technique that named TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Resolution in Russian .) TRIZ is a method that helps you to find creative solutions in a structured and systematic. What makes it different from other methods is that creativity is based on certain patterns of thought that historically have led others to think creatively. It is for this reason that this technique produces a short list of ideas and more applicable than other methods.
There are many other tools available to generate creative ideas. The aim of all is to get people out of their normal thought patterns, showing them new ways of seeing things and helping them make new links.
Conclusion: As we have seen, creativity is a skill that can develop in all employees of a company. What you should do is focus on creativity, create the conditions for support, provide stimuli that arouse and provide staff with practical tools to help them think differently.
credit to: Mario Morales
Source: www.gestiopolis.com/innovacion-emprendimiento/como-estimular-la-creatividad-en-su-empresa.htm
image source: http://topjobinterviewquestionsanswers.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/company-success.jpg