All good innovative projects are based on human needs. At the beginning of a creative project, it may therefore be helpful to interview as many people as possible to try and make them express not only their obvious needs but also their latent, indirect and unconscious needs. Already Henry Ford realized in the early days of the automotive industry that if he asked people what they wanted, they would have answered “A faster horse”.
If you sit still doing nothing for just a few moments, your mind will start to wander in all different directions, and this happens also after a while when you otherwise try to concentrate on a task. A beloved child has many names, and this also goes for this well-known phenomenon. The Buddha called it the “monkey mind”, likening it to the monkey constantly jumping from one tree branch to another. A western everyday name is of course “day-dreaming”, and the neuroscientists are talking about “mind-wandering”.
Continue reading “Day-dreaming, creative thinking and meditation”
The American best-selling creativity writer Julia Cameron has many excellent tips on how to increase your creativity. One of the most effective is to start writing a “Creativity Diary”, or as Cameron calls it, “Morning Pages”.
One of the genetically strongest fears we have is to be abandoned by the group. Humans are flock animals, and the safety of the group has been vital for our survival throughout evolution. If you challenged the prevailing norms in the early hunting tribe, you’d risk being expelled from the group, and this was often the same as a death sentence.
Continue reading “To silence your inner self-critical voice”
There is a saying that seeing is believing, but what happens when what you see with your eyes contradicts a seemingly obvious truth?
Continue reading “Test your outside-the-box thinking ability with the triangle challenge”
Every single experience of what has happened to you took place within your own mind as reflections and interpretations of sensory information that have reached you from the external world around you. While this flow of sensory information is partly beyond your control, you still have a choice of what you expose yourself to. Reading books, meeting new people, experiencing nature are all within the range of your possibilities, and are all bringing you new sensory information, and thus novel experiences.
But your opportunities don’t stop there….
Continue reading “There are no boundaries to your imagination”
We would like to think that our different memories are quite accurate, but in fact, the memory is extremely unreliable. When we pick up a memory, we can not just “put it back” from where we retrieved it as it once was, but instead it has to be re-stored. In that process, it is not saved in the same state as it used to be, but is being distorted by our current mood, but also according to our wishes and expectations.
One of the many fears we have as humans is not to be perceived as knowledgeable and competent. Not least, many new and inexperienced managers carry such fears, believing that they need to manifest their leadership by being the one who knows the best in every situation. But this is often destined to fail for two reasons.
Linear thinking. In our conscious thinking, we can only handle one thought at a time, but this thought is not isolated. It instead builds on the previous thought and leads to the next thought, in linear thinking chains based on a broader overall plan, where A leads to B leading to C …
Our linear thinking works both in the small everyday situations and in our big life choices. If our interest is captured by a certain phenomenon early in life, it may be history, politics, motocross, fly fishing, veganism or something else, then the first, often random contact, may sometimes lead on to a life-time interest.
Continue reading “Linear thinking: What is actually controlling our life choices?”
Five monkeys are placed in a cage. From the ceiling of the cage hang bananas that can be reached by using a ladder. As soon as one of the monkeys climbs the ladder to pick a banana, cool water is sprayed all over the other four apes. When the monkeys soon realise the consequence of one of them climbing the ladder, the remaining will immediately and with great force drag down anyone in the group trying to climb the ladder before the cold water is turned on. It will not be long before no one of the monkeys climbs the ladder anymore out of fear of the others.
Creativity boost 