Creative Thinking

Here are some ideas to unleash the creative process within yourself, your team and your business.

There is a big difference in thinking and doing. But there is also a big difference in 'creative thinking' vs 'commuter thinking', or that all-in 'proactive doing' vs 'drift-ly doing'.

We all think, feel, and do differently which makes everyone unique. Just look at the different personality types around us and how people respond to different situations or challenges.

When it comes to creative thinking there are those that thrive in the unknown ambiguous canvas and those that need a little structure to help unleash their full creative power.

According to ACER (The Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd, Victoria), they define creative thinking as:

"the capacity to generate many different kinds of ideas, manipulate ideas in unusual ways and make unconventional connections in order to outline novel possibilities that have the potential to elegantly meet a given purpose."

"Creative thinking is, at its core, a generative process. This strand acknowledges the importance of the production of many different ideas, sometimes called ideational fluency (Guilford, 1950) to the process of creative thinking."

Idea generation is one thing, but idea generation in the right direction that absorbs the bigger picture strategy and purpose, the key messages, the core problems you are trying to solve - all these things require a thinking process that can cut across many different disciplines.

And thats a really important approach these days...being able to cut across the words, the numbers, the expectations, the timeframe, the customer needs, the business needs...all these areas have to be reviewed as part of your creative thinking process.

Then testing all the ideas to screen out the best ones - experiments, trials, customer research - to prove your hypothesis and fine tune to them make it better. These days there is data everywhere, live and at your finger tips, but not as much useful and insightful information. Whether it's in your IT / finance system, your CRM, your database, you still need a good way to extract the meaningful bits and then interpret them. We love simple but super effective digital tools like BlueOcean AI brand tracking, or Phocus data analytics software that give you real live insights as you need.

But then it all comes back to 'creative thinking' to absorb and marinate to define the next step actions.

Creative execution in communications is particularly important today. Your message is multi-medium/multi-channel and across multiple devices (phone, computer, virtual face to face). How to cut through the noise in a simple and effective way, but still stick to your core values and messages.

Lots of distractions, lots of likes/followers, but how much real targeted engagement?!

Some of the graphic design tools are incredible to make creative communications easier (Canva, Adobe etc), but they still need someone to help select or de-select the best creative executions and then turn into into all the various content formats to excite, inspire and engage.

We love helping our client uncover their own unique thumbprint of creative thinking methods to help their leaders, their teams, their brands and their company all 'Be Better'.