• Educational toys? Try DIY science experiments instead, USA Today article by Liz Szabo, 13 December 2011. Szabo gives some simple, inexpensive experiments you can do with your kids aged 3 to 10.
• Simple gifts of learning spark creativity, curiosity in kids, USA Today article by Liz Szabo, 13 December 2011. Szabo gives suggestions for some inexpensive gifts that will spark creativity and curiosity in young children.
• This Year, Give Them Brains, Scientific American article by Anna Kuchment, December 2011. Scientists’ and educators’ picks for fostering inquiry for younger and older kids.

April Joyner in the Tapping Customers for Product Ideas article in the November 2010 issue of Inc Magazine describes how Volusion has set up a formal process of soliciting and vetting customer suggestions and the product development based on them. Volusion:

• Sends out a monthly survey to its customers which includes questions on customer loyalty and which improvements the customer would like to see.
• Built its own online forum that lets customers submit ideas and vote for the suggestions they like, modeled on Digg.
• A group of employees from different departments meets each week and evaluates the ideas.
• Once the group has approved of a new feature, sales and customer service employees follow up with those who made the suggestions and gather additional information for the software developers.
• Then the software developers start development.

• People whose work involves complex relationships , setting up elaborate systems, or dealing with people or difficult problems tend to perform better on cognitive tests.
• New tasks stimulate the brain most.
• Training that involves switching mental tasks quickly aid in cognitive tests. I’m absolutely not a fan of multitasking, but I guess it does have some kind of benefit, at least to the individual, if not the tasks.
• Music lessons are linked to higher IQ throughout life.

The December 3-4, 2011, Wall Street Journal article To Sleep, Perchance to Dream–But Why?, by Matt Ridley, answers why.

Ridley writes that recent research on dreams has shown that dreaming is a symptom that our brains are transforming new memories into more permanent memories, giving the memories mental context and extracting their meanings. He writes that people dream throughout sleep, not just in REM sleep, and that non-REM dreams are more literal than REM dreams.

The bottom line is that sleeping improves memory performance.

Lehrer writes that people experience two distinct reactions to failure. The first one is a mostly involuntary reaction, called Error-Related Negativity, that appears about 50 milliseconds after the failure. The second one is called Error Positivity, and happens when we dwell upon the disappointing result.

We learn most from failure when our Negativity response is large, meaning the reaction to the failure was strong, and when our Positivity response is consistent, meaning we focus on the failure and are trying to learn from it.

Our Negativity response may be more automated, but how we think of things greatly controls our Positivity response. If our mindset is one in which we think we can learn from failure (a growth mindset), obviously that helps us in this type of situation. If our mindset is one in which we think mistakes happen as a result of stupidity and nothing can be done about them (a fixed mindset), that does not help us learn from failure.

Lehrer writes about an interesting experiment that showed that if people were praised for being smart, they tended towards a fixed mindset, and if they were praised for their effort they tended towards a growth mindset. That reminded me of a company I worked at years ago where a senior manager told everyone at the company that the company would not reward people for their efforts, only for their results. That company no longer exists today.

The information in this article is geared towards someone taking an exam, like in high school or college, and it’s easy to see how this information can apply to someone going on a job interview. A good deal of this information also applies to our creative endeavors, and will be familiar with those familiar with this blog.

Shellenbarger writes that a growing body of research on study techniques shows that to do optimally on a test, you should:

• Repeatedly test yourself before the exam, like with practice tests, to teach the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory and to help with test-taking skills. I used this technique years ago, first when studying for the GED to graduate high school a year early, then for the SAT, then for the EIT and PE exams. Back in the day, I just went to a general bookstore or technical bookstore and picked up a book on practice exams. Now, I would assume these can all be found on-line.
• Get enough sleep
• The night before the exam, review the toughest material right before going to bed. Presumably this helps in recalling the information the next day. I bet it also gives you a restless sleep.
• Don’t wake up earlier than usual the day of the exam in order to study, as that could interfere with REM sleep that aids in memory retention.
•  Don’t do the “all-nighter.” This practice is linked to lower grades and impairs reasoning and memory for as long as four days. I’ve never done an all-nighter…never had the stamina, actually, and just on the face of it it always seemed like a bad idea. People will do this for work, too, working long hours, but I always wonder if they wind up creating more problems than they solve.
• Sleeping and napping and have been discussed in this blog elsewhere. Search for it.
• Eat right
• High-carb, high fiber, slow-digesting foods are best
• Eat breakfast the morning of an exam. Oatmeal is good. I like mixing it up with crushed wallnuts, wheat germ, a cut-up apple or banana, and if it’s unflavored oatmeal a dollop of maple syrup.
• What you eat a week in advance of the exam matters, too. Eat a balanced diet with fruits and vegetables.
• Avoid distractions, like music, text messages, TV, and email.
• Reduce anxiety on the day of the exam as that can impair performance
• If taking the exam in an unfamiliar place, visit the room or location in advance, if possible.
• Set aside 10 minutes before the exam to write down your fears and anxieties.
• Before the test, envision yourself answering questions calmly and with confidence.

Korn writes of a new report by Booz & Co showing little correlation between the amount a company spends on R&D and the perception of the company as being innovative by other companies. For example, out of 1,000 companies, Apple ranked 70th in terms of R&D spending but was perceived as the most innovative company; Google ranked 34th in R&D spending but was rated 2nd most innovative; and 3M ranked 86th in R&D spending but was rated 3rd most innovative.

Korn also gives examples of how companies encourage creativity:

• Involve employees company wide to help generate ideas.
• Hold interdepartmental brainstorming sessions.
• Provide a Web forum for recommendations. In this regard I’ll provide a shameless plug for Web2Intranet.com.
• Pfizer, which ranked 2nd in R&D spending and was rated 16th for innovation, invites researchers to attend business meetings and encourages employees on the commercial side to attend scientific reviews.
• 3M, mentioned in the podcast episode on Serendipity and in my book review of Built to Last, allows employees spend 15% of their time exploring side projects and offers seed grants to encourage innovation.

The guide opens with certain points about finding creative people, like it can be time-consuming and that a creative person in a non-creative job will be frustrated. All well and good, but then it quotes someone saying:

It’s most important when it’s going to cost you a lot of money if the new hire makes a mistake.

As has been written & spoken about in this blog & podcast and elsewhere, tolerance for failure and mistakes, and even expecting and embracing them, is inherent in the cultures of creative organizations. Let’s just tolerate the above quote as a mistake.

The guide continues with the steps in finding innovators, starting with the basic managerial decision making process of defining what it is you want. (Brought to mind Episode 4: Decision Making and Creativity.) This part mentioned breadth creativity—seeing the big picture—vs. depth creativity—ingenuity within a specific realm. This part discusses how many companies find it difficult to integrate truly outside-the-box thinkers, but also says that if you find your organization has a limited acceptance of creativity, then you may need to “refurbish the company culture,” and offers advice for that in a side panel (see below).

The next step is to attract the talent. Convey the organization’s goals and values in each communication medium, and add some flair to your job postings. The job postings can also be used to filter for specific kinds of creativity, like asking the candidates to submit samples of their work or asking for proposed solutions to a specific challenge they may face on the job. And consider looking outside your organization’s industry to perhaps find someone with a different perspective (which brought to mind Episode 5: Diversity and Creativity…ah, the memories…). This part ended with the statement:

Expertise can be acquired; creativity generally can’t.

I guess I’ll have to tolerate that as another mistake. I certainly hope this website is helping people in their pursuit of acquiring greater creativity. If nothing else, just click on the Creativity Tips and Techniques link in the Categories section on the right hand side of each webpage here; that should help in picking up tools to help make you more creative.

The last step in finding innovators deals with the interview process. Behavioral interviewing is discussed (“Tell me about a time when you…”, “Describe an experience when you…”). You can ask the candidate to describe a time when they faced a new situation and how they dealt with it, or ask them to respond to a situation your team recently faced and how they would have approached it. The key here is to evaluate the candidate’s thought processes; look for alternatives and trade-offs, taking into account different perspectives and stakeholders, coming up with development plans, or whatever you think is appropriate.

Other interviewing techniques written about were having the candidate create sample work (writing, art, design), putting the candidate in a role-playing scenario, and giving them a writing exercise, like coming up with a marketing plan in 30 minutes.

The end of the guide contained two sidebars. One was on Building a Creative Culture, making the point that you’ll need to find ways to inspire and motivate a creative team (really, any kind of team), and for creative people:

• Inspire with work, as work itself is a primary motivator. I find this to be exceptionally true: when I’m tired and not feeling well, when I’m working in the groove I don’t notice feeling bad at all, but when I stop to take a break, that’s when the feelings of being sick & tired set in.
• Compensate with care. You don’t want your people feeling manipulated, and you don’t want them to feel unappreciated.
• Create happiness, as people felt more creative when they were happy. Or at least don’t create unhappiness, if possible.

The second sidebar gave suggestions for specific questions on how to probe a candidate for creativity. I’ll let you read article on Inc.com for that.

Cognitive Psychologist Robert Sternberg in his book, College Admissions for the 21st Century, argues that standardized tests, like the SAT and ACT, overvalue analytic abilities at the expense of leadership, creativity, and wisdom, and as Dean of Tufts instituted Project Kaleidoscope aimed to test high school applicants on such qualities.

Seems like a great idea to me. If that catches on, you’d think high schools would start emphasizing those qualities in their education programs. Pipe dream? I hope not.

The article discusses that if you feel your employees are getting more conservative, perhaps slower, playing it safe in order to not make mistakes, and you want more innovation, then you must realize that higher innovation also involves more failures, so you need to tolerate and even encourage and reward risk taking and the inevitable failures that come with it. I think an analogy can be found in baseball, in which the home run kings are also the strike-out kings (or at least can be—don’t hold me to baseball stats).

The idea here is not to reward just any failure (don’t reward failure as the result of laziness of sloppiness, for example), but to reward “Heroic Failure”, for taking a big, edgy risk. Likewise, this kind of failure is not to be hidden, but to be shared, discussed, and learned from (a tuition of sorts).

The article gave some other ways companies try to foster innovation:

• No meeting times or days
• Creating a team or a division for innovations
• Game or nap rooms
• Art-filled atriums
• Hiking trails
• Meditation rooms
• Limiting teams to a small number, like 5 people
• Encouraging trust and open communication and discussion

The article also had a sidebar on other facets of creativity:

• Being last in the family, as opposed to the first-born, tends to help in being more creative
• Being aggressive, egocentric, or antisocial helps in being creative, while being resistant to change or giving up easily tends to inhibit creativity
• Taking time off and letting ideas gel helps creativity, whereas working doggedly on a goal tends to inhibit creativity
• Having the freedom to take risks, working on a variety of assignments, and multiple projects at once helps creativity, while pressure to play it safe will have the opposite effect

Clive Thompson writes about drawing in his article, Think Visual. Thomson writes that the best way to solve a complicated problem may well be to use drawings and pictures, that such visual techniques allow people to more quickly understand an issue and have the same mental model of a problem, and that images provoke a creative leap (the “aha moment”) more often than verbal or writing techniques.

Thompson’s article points out that drawing, unfortunately, is considered childish, and that people with higher verbal skills are thought more highly of, including in our school systems.

Related to education and drawing is a company named Smart Technologies which sells large interactive screens to schools, as profiled in a Forbes October 9, 2009, article, Getting to The Top of the Class. These screens replace the old whiteboards and even older chalkboards. The screens can be attached to the Internet, providing a “portal to the digital world,” students and teachers can manipulate what’s on the screen with their fingers, and they can be used as a blackboard, too. The founders of Smart Technologies believe these screens increase student participation and enjoyment in their learning and so decrease behavioral problems and help the students to achieve more. I sure hope so.

• Refresh talent often. Genentech has a postdoctoral program where up to 120 Ph.D holders are awarded fellowships for up to four years. These postdoc fellows are not assigned to any particular project, but work on the research of their own choosing, and that research might later be applied to future products. This results in a constant flow of new, diverse people and ideas moving through the company, keeping the “real innovative, entrepreneurial, creative spirit” around the company.
• Encourage risk taking. Most high-risk projects fail, but those that don’t often provide true breakthroughs.
• Share results. This is through papers in scientific journals.

Genentech’s creative processes tie in well with an October 2010 article in Wired Magazine, Where Ideas Come From, where authors Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson are interviewed. Kelly and Johnson discuss how innovation typically comes not from an isolated lone genius, but rather from environments in which diverse, passionate creators interact and influence each other. These environments produce an increasingly diverse number of things, resulting in an increase of “crap” but also of great things.

So here we have the creativity concepts of diversity, risk taking, and collaboration.

Another interesting point Kelly and Johnson make is that an innovation will only be valuable if it’s not too far ahead of its time. If too many intermediate steps need to be taken, then the innovation will languish. For example, the computer had to be invented before the internet could be developed; inventing the internet before the computer would not have been valuable. The most valuable inventions are usually those that take the smallest possible step to generate the most change.

We’re all familiar with user-generated content: anyone who posts a YouTube video or adds to their Facebook wall creates that. User-generated innovation, of course,  is where users of a product or service drive that product’s or service’s (or company’s) innovation. This could be from utilizing Wisdom of the Crowds techniques, like forums in which users suggest features they’d like, or observing closely how users use (or try to use) your product or service, to having users actually design and implement the innovative feature, new product, or service. Netflix did the latter by offering a $1 million dollar prize to anyone or any group that could develop software that improved customer movie recommendations by at least 10%.

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, said that most business problems can’t be solved by outsourced committees, but if you try to do that, “the trick is finding problems in your business that you can package cleanly, where you can provide a sample data set and a very clear evaluation metric.” This is really part of good project management—who does what by when, where the who is whoever steps up, the what is the clearly defined problem definition and expected results, and the when is whenever the problem is solved or the end limit is reached, whichever comes first.

When we encounter something unexpected or unintended, our natural first instinct is to assume we did something wrong. We’ll ignore the unexpected occurrence, and repeat the experiment or test looking for our preconceived intended results. This must be recognized and resisted.The unexpected, unintended event may be perceived as a failure of some sort, but from that failure, a different or more nuanced opportunity may become apparent and success follow from that. Failure, accidents, and unintended variations are an important aspect to innovation and success.

For serendipity, we’re looking for:

• A surprising mental association; an association between ideas we wouldn’t have thought of if it weren’t for the unexpected occurrence.
• Achieving a desired objective in a surprising way, in a way we weren’t intending to.
• Something useful when we were looking for something else.

Part of serendipity is luck. We can be more lucky by:

• Being more observant.
• Improving our Interpersonal Intelligence.
• Asking for things we might not have asked for before.
• Don’t think of a failure as a failure, but rather as an opportunity.

When encountering a failure, accident, or unintended variation, to take advantage of serendipity:

• Reconsider your assumptions. Maybe the experiment didn’t fail, but the assumptions behind the experiment are wrong.
• Use someone as a sounding board. Frequently trying to clearly explain something to someone else actually helps us to better understand what the issue is and to gain insight into it.
• Discuss the issue with others in your field. This may provide additional questions for you to consider or avenues to pursue to gain a better understanding.
• Use diversity to get different perspectives on the issue. Maybe this will lead to the use of different metaphors describing the problem and thereby lead to an innovative solution.
• Try not to filter out any of the information that contradicts your preconceptions.

For an organization to take advantage of serendipity, it should hire creative people and give them new, unexpected assignments;  expose them to diverse experiences and new ideas; encourage them to keep an open mind, to not dismiss their so-called failures, and to keep an eye out for accidents and unintended results of all types. Organizations should encourage risk taking and take steps to lower the cost of experimentation and invention.

References used in this episode:

• How to Make Your Own Luck
• Be Lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn
• Are You Lucky?
• Wall Street Journal Article on Innovation: Oops! Accidents lead to innovations. So, how do you create more accidents?
• Jeff Bezos on the importance of failure on entrepreneurial growth. James Dyson of the Dyson vacuum cleaner also emphasized the importance of failure on innovation in a July 7, 2008, Fortune Magazine article.
• Wired Magazine articles on How To Fail.
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by Jim Collins and Jerry L. Porras.
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell.

San Diego Inventors Forum August 2009 Presentation (Powerpoint)

The company first tried to get emloyees to offer suggestions on the company’s wiki and on forms in their break room, but when that didn’t produce the results they desired, they held a company-wide competition which did produce an idea pipeline. The groundrules they established were:

• Make participation mandatory as ideas can come from even the unlikiest of employees.
• Pick a slow time of the year to minimize lost productivity.
• Assemble small, diverse teams of employees, ideally from different parts of the company. They created teams of three people by randomly picking names out of a bowl.
• Keep the rules of the contest short and simple while providing guidelines to keep the contestants on track.
• Give specific feedback, explaining why each idea works or doesn’t work, while emphasizing their positive attributes.
• Let the contestants vote for their favorite submission and reward the winners with a small prize (e.g., a $100 gift card for the team to share) and lots of recognition.
• Establish a system for vetting the ideas thoroughly after the contest.

Creativity is morally neutral; it is neither inherently moral or immoral. It is how you use it that gives it its moral character. Morality is usually subjective, depending on the person making the judgment and when they make it.

Some possible dark sides, or down sides, of creativity or of being creative:

• Collaborating with the wrong person. Be careful who you collaborate with and how you collaborate with them. The podcast episode offers some suggestions on how to avoid partering with the wrong person:
  • Look for obvious red flags: do they have a history of being active, do they have basic business behavior, do they network, do they have the energy to contribute, are they overly paranoid or defensive.
  • Do a background check and a credit check.
  • Use the services of a good business attorney (not some other kind of attorney) to get a buy-sell agreement in place, corporate by-laws indicating what the expectations of everyone is, etc.
  • When in doubt, just don’t do it. Other opportunities will come.
• Working when tired, creating more problems than you solve.
• Drug use to be creative, whether sleeping pills or other drugs.
• Being open to bad or harmful ideas.
• Being affected by over-negative or over-positive emotions. Be careful of “Compliance Practitioners” who try to manipulate you.
• Lack of critical thinking. It’s good to inhibit critical thinking for creativity purposes, just don’t turn it off permanently.

References used in this episode:

• Leaders, by Richard Nixon, page 330 on leadership and morality.
• Google motto of “Don’t Be Evil”
• The Power of a Positive No: Save The Deal Save The Relationship and Still Say No, by William Ury, pages 12-13.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini.
• Masaru Emoto and his water experiment.
• Quantum Entanglement.
• Particle Wave Function.

SCAMPER is an acronym:

• S – Substitute
• C – Combine
• A – Adapt
• M – Magnify/Minify/Modify
• P – Put to other uses
• E – Eliminate
• R – Reverse/Rearrange

The various techniques aren’t necessarily exclusive of each other — a substitution might also be a modification, for example — and the techniques can be used together, for example, applying a combination idea along with an elimination idea.

To use SCAMPER, first isolate your subject, e.g., by stating the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. Then go through the SCAMPER list and ask questions about your subject.

For what can be substituted, think about things such as: process, procedure, rule, person or people, place, time, color, approach, part, shape, texture, sound, smell, name, people’s feelings or attitudes towards the subject, power, force.

For combination, think about things such as: what ideas, purposes, or parts can be combined or merged, what assortments, materials, people, or appeals can be combined; can a blend be created with something else that will create additional uses; can different talents be combined.

For adaptation, think of such things as: what else is like your subject, but in a different context; what other ideas are suggested; how can circumstances be adapted to; what ideas can be incorporated, what can be copied or imitated, who can be emulated, what different contexts can the subject be put in to.

For magnification, think of such things as: what can be made larger, extended, exaggerated, overstated; can more time be added; can it be made higher, longer, stronger, more frequent, thicker; can additional features or value be added; can something be duplicated.

For minification, think of such things as: what can be made smaller, more restricted, understated, streamlined; can something need less time, go slower, be made lighter, can it be made lower in height, weaker, less frequent; can a feature be removed or less value added and have the thing be used for a new purpose; how can costs, time, effort, or waste be minimized.

For modification, think of such things as: what can be altered for the better; can the meaning, color, motion, shape, package be changed; can the name change; can some plan or process be modified.

For putting to other uses, think of such things as: what else can the product, process, or idea can be used for; what new ways can the thing can be used as it already is, or any other uses if the thing is modified somehow; how can it be used by people other than those it was originally intended for, or by a child, an older person, or a person with disabilities; what other markets or industries could it be used by, perhaps with modifications.

For elimination, think of such things as: what’s not necessary, what can be omitted, divided, split-up, separated into different components; what rules or processes can be eliminated; how can it be simplified; what can be removed without altering its basic function; how can waste be eliminated.

For reversing, think of such things as: what are the opposites of the idea; what are the negatives; can you turn something around or backwards or upside down; can roles be reversed; can something unexpected be done; what if the subject was used for the exact opposite of what it was intended for.

For rearranging, think of such ideas as: what ways can another arrangement be better; what parts can be interchanged; can another pattern or layout or sequence be created; can the pace or schedule of something be changed.

References used in this episode:

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), by Michael Michalko, Chapter 9, SCAMPER.
• Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, by Michael Michalko, pages 95-104.
• SCAMPER technique training for lateral thinking
• Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER
• SCAMPER
• Wikipedia article on Alex Osborn

The June 2008 issue of Inc Magazine had two articles, Making Inspiration Routine, by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan, which is more about creativity as a process, and How the Creative Stay Creative, by Leigh Buchanan, which is more about how to help those flashes of insight more likely to happen.

Lafley, Proctor & Gamble CEO, and Charan wrote The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation which “describes dozens of mechanisms for keeping the idea pipeline full”. In the Inc Magazine article, they describe scaled-down strategies more appropriate for a small business:

• Look for an underserved market. Segmenting your market can be a creative exercise itself. Try to identify a segment that is rarely treated as a segment.
• Use social networks to bring in ideas, as opposed to just using them to push out marketing messages.
• Brainstorm with employees’ network members to generate ideas; the more diverse the members the better. Promising ideas are flushed, written up, and submitted by a pair of employees who team up for collaboration on the idea.
• Ideas are formally evaluated based on their projected revenue and profit goals.
• For ideas that are chosen to go forward with, the ideas are prototyped and tested with the employees’ social networks.
• As the company grows, the innovation process scales upwards, e.g., with additional training on the creative process, hiring of more creative people, team structure, feedback.

In the How The Creative Stay Creative Article, Inc gives some insight on how top innovation consultants stay creative:

• Get multicultural
• Encourage risky behavior
• Provide lots of free time to think
• Hire people with good problem solving skills and who are open to criticism
• Have a way for employees to share their ideas
• Bring in outside experts to get their perspectives
• Be very flexible in how a team organizes itself and how it operates
• Mix teams up with people from other teams

Collaborating with others is a fundamental principle of creativity. In this blog, you’ll find many references to this — just click on the tags “Brainstorming”, “Decision Making”, “Diversity”, and “Innovation”, for a sample.

Threadless is a great example of this, where the “customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting.”

This is also an example of Creativity as a Process, where Threadless’s process is maintaining the on-line community, and having the community members submit and choose the designs to be printed.

1. Engage employees from all departments in brainstorming sessions. I addressed this in the episode on brainstorming.
2. Encourage and enable employees to pursue outside interests. This was touched on in the episode on leadership.
3. Create an inspiring work space. This was mentioned a bit in the brainstorming episode in relation to the environment for the brainstorming session. And of course, having an inspiring work space in general helps spur creativity.
4. Fund extracurricular projects or classes. Related to encouraging and enabling employees to have outside interests.
5. Lower cubicle walls. This is similar to the traditional Japanese model where there are no cubicles, where peoples’ desks are just put together in a large room. The idea here is that it helps foster teamwork. (I would note that it’s also nice to have a quiet, private place to work.)

A mind map helps you visualize the challenge at hand: some problem you’re trying to solve, some plan you’re trying to develop, something you’re trying to understand better or look for new ideas for. It helps you formulate and remember things to do. It may be used as-is for remembering and organizing things, or it can be used as the basis for other things, like to-do lists, or a more formal type of plan, like a project management plan or a marketing. Mind mapping can be used in problem solving, decision making, and writing. You can do mind mapping alone or with other people in a collaborative brainstorming session.

This episode discusses:

• What mind mapping is and its uses
• The mind mapping process
• Mind mapping tools

References used in this episode:

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), by Michael Michalko, Chapter 8, Think Bubbles.
• Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, by Michael Michalko, pages 51-68.
• Wikipedia article on Mind Mapping.
• Wikipedia article on Mind Mapping Tools.
• Adventures of the ITIL Imp blog posting on Mind Mapping.
• Exploding Creativity episode on Diversity.
• Unified Modeling Language Resource Page.
• Wikipedia article on the Unified Modeling Language.

Example Mind Map:

• Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making.
• Taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.
• Particularly important is “slow-wave sleep,” a period of deep sleep that occurs before REM sleep, which can occur even in a power nap.
• Even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory.

Having worked from home the past three years, I’ll often take a power nap around 3 pm, which helps me finish the day stronger than if I didn’t. Sometimes I’ll fall into a deep sleep and maybe wake up a 1/2-hour or so later, but typically I’ll rest for only about 15-minutes, which works great for me. Working from offices before that, though, even ones with couches available, I can’t say I’d feel comfortable stretching out in front of everyone (no one else did).

On a more enlightened note, Google employees are encouraged to take naps. Check this out.

Winston Churchill was big on naps. He’d work late into the evening and needed afternoon naps to keep himself fresh and productive.

Thomas Edison was also famous for his naps. He was known to work and nap around the clock, even sleeping right on his workbench.

Brainstorming is used to expand the number of choices to choose from. The guiding principle is that quantity of ideas breeds quality of ideas. Brainstorming separates the creative act of coming up with ideas from the critical act of deciding. The key to this is to defer judgment, to suspend all assumptions, preconceptions, and criticism.

This episode discusses:

• History of Brainstorming
• Purpose of Brainstorming
• Brainstorming Process
  • Define Your Purpose
  • Selection of Participants
  • Selection of Facilitator
  • Selection of Recorder
  • The Three-Phases of the Brainstorming Process
• Solo Brainstorming
• Brainstorming Tools

References used in this episode:

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), by Michael Michalko, Chapter 34, Brainstorming.
• The Creative Spirit, by Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman, and Michael Ray, page 38, on the importance of humor and playfulness when brainstorming.
• Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, by Michael Michalko, pages 257-28.
• Management: Skills and Application, by Leslie W. Rue and Lloyd L. Byars, pages 81-83.
• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, Chapter 4, Invent Options for Mutual Gain, for a good discussion on brainstorming, and brainstorming with the other side and how to mitigate the associated risks.
• Manager Tools Podcast Episode on Brainstorming, Part 1 of 2
• Manager Tools Podcast Episode on Brainstorming, Part 2 of 2
• Wikipedia Article on Brainstorming
• Exploding Creativity Episode for discussing Creativity as a Process
• Exploding Creativity Episode on Emotions
• Exploding Creativity Episode on Decision Making
• Exploding Creativity Episode on Diversity
• Exploding Creativity Episode on Leadership

P&G is the world’s largest consumer products company that wants to expand its reach to younger consumers who spend more time with online media, and Google wants a bigger portion of P&G’s $8.7 billion annual advertising budget, which is currently dominated towards television. In order to help each other help each other, they’ve swapped about two-dozen employees, who spent weeks attending the other company’s training programs and planning meetings. This is an interesting variation of diversifying your team, as I discussed in Episode 5: Diversity and Creativity.

As described In Episode 5, you can bring in outside stakeholders (clients, suppliers, service providers, investors, etc.) as team members or advisers on an as-needed basis. P&G and Google took this a step further and actually swapped employees temporarily. Giving “outsiders” such intimate access to company confidential information has got its associated risks (and I assume P&G and Google had an anti-poaching clause in their Non-Disclosure Agreement), but I certainly admire their creativity and courage to do this.

Of course, similar activites you can do internal to an organization to help spur innovation are swapping employees between different parts of the organization, where people get experience working in different aspects of an organization’s operations, and bringing in people from different parts of the organization to form a cross-functional team.

Here’s a pic of the small notebook I’m currently using.

Here’s a pic of the cover of one of my large notebooks.

Here’s the cover for a notebook I bought some time ago for patent use. I don’t know if the publisher of this notebook is still around or if they still publish this notebook. If you’re looking for something like this, just Google for something like “invention notebook”.

And here’s an inside look of the above notebook. Note the witness signature block at the bottom of each page:

Follow this link to the book I mentioned in the episode, Nolo Press’s “Patent It Yourself”.