On Creativity Being a Habit
Takeaways:
- Creativity Should Be a Habit, Not a Scheduled Event: Treating creativity like a box you take off a shelf for an hour-long brainstorm limits potential. True innovation requires it to be embedded in everyday behaviour, not reserved for special occasions.
- One Hour Is Not Enough for Effective Brainstorming: Meaningful ideation often requires extended time. A single hour is usually insufficient to generate truly novel or useful ideas.
- Stimulate Your Brain Regularly: Seek out different perspectives and stimuli, such as meeting with new colleagues, observing other industries, or watching a short video. This keeps the mind open and helps spark new connections.
- Creative Confidence Requires Practice: Teams or individuals who aren’t regularly engaged in creative thinking often struggle to produce innovative outcomes. Creativity is like a muscle—it must be trained and exercised regularly.
- Beware of Superficial Innovation: Dressing up old ideas with new language or presentation (“putting lipstick on a pig”) isn’t genuine innovation. Creativity should lead to meaningful and original outcomes, not recycled concepts in disguise.
- Design Thinking Is a Practised Discipline: In high-performing creative teams (like those in gaming companies), design sprints are successful because the teams are well-practised. For others, attempting these processes without proper creative habits often falls flat.
Why should you come to ACRE?
Lee tells us why he enjoys coming to ACRE!