Milking the Right Brains of your Team, with ease!
As Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future” puts it, the time of left brain thinkers is over.This era is about Right Brain Thinking.
Agreed, that all of us have to solve problems all the time, sometimes small, and other times really big ones. As leaders, we constantly demand our team members to come up with creative ways to solve these problems.
Researches say that right brain thinkers can come up with crazy ideas, sparking light bulbs around their head. By sheer desire innovate, most organizations want all their employees to be right brain thinkers. They put a bulk of them through some kind of creativity and innovation workshops. But have you ever wondered how many of these employees come up with new and newer ideas every day? How many new products, features and processes is your organization churning out in a year?
Coming up with creative ideas used to be real fun when we were kids. We all enjoyed it. Being adults, it’s quite a different story.
Firstly, we are tight zipped in brainstorming sessions in our office. Why?
- Because we don’t want to expose our ignorance of business or processes by coming up with crazy ideas that might not work.
- Also we don’t want to be on the wrong side of our boss.
And lastly, the moment of truth is when we can’t come up with anything different, particularly when we really have to do so. We get wonderful ideas at odd times, and on odd matters :-). This reminds me of a legendary curse in Indian mythology that goes something like this – “You shall forget when you need to remember”
Over time, we surrender to a view that creativity is a gift and that, its not my cup of tea.
Edward De Bono, the father of modern creativity and lateral thinking said that anyone can choose to be creative. All we need to do is to follow a set of tools & techniques like the super cool magicians, dare devils and other expert showmen do. They perform extraordinary acts with ease, some thing that you and I can’t imagine to accomplish; Not because they are gifted but because they meticulously follows procedures, tools and techniques, every time.
Creativity is no exception to this. There are many tools that can make you creative in seconds (I’m not joking). If you can stimulate your right brain, at the right time, it can do wonders.
So, how do we stimulate our right brain?
There are many ways and SCAMPER is one such tool that can make you (and your team members) rattle ideas, creative ideas, any where, any time. It is a simple technique to channelize right brain thinking and put it to use in day-to-day problem solving.
TRIZ (theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is another such tool.
Random stimulus, anti-solution, brain-writing, channeling, analogy, etc., are some common techniques to boost creativity in your team instantly.
So, don’t let the creative giant in you doze off.
Kick it up a notch!
If you wish to implement Design Thinking or drive creativity in your organization, pls feel free to contact us.