Think Different: About Creativity

 The Creative Mindset: Mastering the Six Skill That Empower Innovation – Jeff DeGraff and Staney DeGraff (Berrett-Kohler Publishers)

Creative. The word alone can get people nervous and shaky. Creativity, that’s for artists, writers or musicians…right? At some point, if not all the time, any business can need a shot of creativity, a new idea, a new way of thinking, a new way to solve a problem.

So, can you teach people to be creative? Probably not, but you can help to build a formula for understanding how being creative works. Jeff and Staney DeGraff have built that roadmap in the form of The Creative Mindset: Mastering the Six Skill That Empower Innovation.

The DeGraff’s boil down their six steps to the acronym CREATE: Clarify, Replicate, Elaborate, Associate, Translate, and Evaluate. You will have an   A-ha! moment as you realize how much sense these steps make. Here are the steps spelled out with my input:

Clarify – Understanding, and most importantly, you have to communicate clearly the challenge at hand.

Replicate - Mimic and build on your new ideas. This can set the creative tone for your team/business.

Elaborate – You may have the kernel of a great idea, but don’t be afraid to take that idea and add new alternative tweaks or ways of thinking to help build on the idea.

Associate - Connect ideas with analogies to help others clearly understand a concept and in what direction we are headed.

Translate - Stories are priceless tools and help drive ideas home within your team and to your customers. Create stories based on your ideas.

Evaluate – Consistency is import here; select the best ideas to fit team expectations and it will help aid buy in and keep everyone is on the same page.

There isn’t a lot of over-technical science involved in this. We are talking actionable steps that you can put into practice with your team and in your business pretty quickly. I recently facilitated a leadership, team building session where I rolled out some of these steps to the group and you could almost see the lightbulbs turning on above their heads as the grasped concepts and then carried them forward into the next exercise. It was really that easy to connect to purpose.