Are you looking to improve your creative thinking skills so as to impact your breakthrough thinking? Don’t believe you are creative? Creativity is often defined as the ability to connect ideas that are seemingly unconnectable.
Connecting ideas are how new ideas originate … it is the basis for creativity. Most of the time we time in terms of finding more ideas to add to our list of consideration … the more new ideas to connect, the more chances of improving your creativity.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Often you can rekindle your creativity by adding constraints to your problem space. Have you ever been successful in trying this technique?
My son once came back from a trip during which he broke a guitar string that he could not replace. He was actually delighted with the experience, having had to invent a different way of playing the instrument, and discovering new harmonies.
With one string missing, he had to work out the others to a whole new level. And voila … he used a part of his creativity he had never exercised.
This is a creative classic.
Other examples include legislation on car emissions that have led to the creative changes to the combustion engine and the rise of hybrid and electric vehicles. Another good example is Apple making the explicit decision to ban the use of a stylus, which led to the famous touch-screen products that we all know.
Examples of creative thinking.
Creative design can be enhanced not always by adding new degrees of freedom, but sometimes by cutting some degrees of freedom.
Sharing a story of creative thinking
We are always on the lookout for good stories. Stories to illustrate points we are emphasizing. So we read a lot. Today’s story is about generating ideas. Ideas from convergent thinking.
The story is about why you should ask why. It comes from Ideas Champions. A consulting company like us (but bigger and more well-known), who specialize in creativity, innovation, team building, and leadership. All favorite topics of ours. So we keep up with this team.
The story is about a big problem with one of our favorite monuments – the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.
Simply put, birds — in huge numbers — were pooping all over it, which made visiting the place a very unpleasant experience.
Attempts to remedy the situation caused even bigger problems since the harsh cleaning detergents being used were damaging the memorial.
Fortunately, some of the National Parks managers assigned to the case began asking WHY — as in “Why was the Jefferson Memorial so much more of a target for birds than any of the other memorials?”
A little bit of investigation revealed the following:
The birds were attracted to the Jefferson Memorial because of the abundance of spiders — a gourmet treat for birds.
The spiders were attracted to the Memorial because of the abundance of midges (insects) that were nesting there.
And the midges were attracted to the Memorial because of the light.
Midges, it turns out, like to procreate in places where the light is just so — and because the lights were turned on, at the Jefferson Memorial, one hour before dark, it created the kind of mood lighting that midges went crazy for.
So there you have it: The midges were attracted to the light. The spiders were attracted to the midges. The birds were attracted to the spiders. And the National Parks workers, though not necessarily attracted to the bird poop, were attracted to getting paid — so they spent a lot of their time (and taxpayer money) cleaning the Memorial.
How did the situation resolve? Very simply.
After reviewing the curious chain of events that led up to the problem, the decision was made to wait until dark before turning the lights on at the Jefferson Memorial. About as simple a solution as you could get. Right?
That one-hour delay was enough to ruin the mood lighting for the midges, who then decided to have midge sex somewhere else.
No midges, no spiders. No spiders, no birds. No birds, no poop. No poop, no need to clean the Jefferson Memorial so often. Case closed.
Now, consider what “solutions” might have been forthcoming if those curious National Parks managers did not stop and ask WHY:
Hire more workers to clean the Memorial
Ask existing workers to work overtime
Experiment with different kinds of cleaning materials
Put bird poison all around the memorial
Hire hunters to shoot the birds
Encase the entire Jefferson Memorial in Plexiglas
Move the Memorial to another part of Washington
Close the site to the general public
Technically speaking, each of the above “solutions” was a possible approach — but at great cost, inconvenience, and with questionable results. Not great solutions.
The bottom line
To be effective in this new era, we as creative thinking business people need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares. We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire perspectives that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement on brand marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. It seems we all are looking to take our success to a new level. This is an excellent time to make a statement with their creative thinking. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.
Do you have any similar stories of creative design to share with this community?
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circlesfor 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Stephen Hawking once said: The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. The illusion of knowledge? Here is a great example of design collaboration using the Marshmallow Challenge from Ted videos. Even Stephen Hawking would be intrigued by this creative design experiment.
Do you watch Ted videos? We are big fans and rarely do we watch one that doesn’t capture our attention. Or learn a great deal from them.
Learning is an interest of ours, as is innovation, design, and team collaboration. So the video topic we will discuss with you today, struck an immediate chord.
The video was done by Tom Wujec and you can watch it here The Marshmallow Challenge. It is only 7 minutes or so.
We recommend you read this post first and then watch the video. For more details we recommend you check out www.marshmallow.com.
The challenge
The idea of the design challenge is pretty simple. Teams of four must build the tallest free-standing structure that will support the marshmallow on top of the structure. The assets the team has to work with include 20 sticks of standard size spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string and, of course, the marshmallow.
Oh, and the time constraint on the challenge is 18 minutes. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Actually, it is difficult. The biggest challenge? The short time constraint forces very rapid collaboration among the team members.
Most of the teams begin by discussing the problem and approach. They discuss conceptual design ideas, and they jockey for power. They plan, organize, sketch ideas and eventually lay out the spaghetti. As you might guess most of the time is spent assembling the spaghetti into a structure.
Finally, at the very end, they place the marshmallow on top. Then they then stand back for the TA-DA moment. Doesn’t last long, as the usual result is for the TA-DA to turn into UH-OH as the weight of the marshmallow causes the structures to collapse.
Related post: Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Why conduct this design challenge?
In this exercise, the marshmallow represents the hidden assumptions. The learning objective? Help team members identify the marshmallow in their projects at their work locations.
Other objectives include learning about a team’s shared experience, common language, facilitation, and design prototyping.
Creative design … the results
Tom Wujec, the Ted presenter, has run this challenge 70+ times with various groups. The results are very surprising, to me for sure. Let’s look at how different teams performed. The average is around 20 inches.
Business school students about half of that, lawyers a little better, CEOs a little better than average, and amazingly, kindergarteners, who did better than most adult teams. The best teams? Architects and engineers, what I would have expected.
And let’s discuss the results. First the business school students. They are trained to find the single best plan and then execute on it. The results reflect their approach.
And the children, what is it about their results? They have the advantage of not being too competitive in the group, ie no jockeying for power. What they did differently was to start with the marshmallow and build successive prototypes.
So they have multiple attempts to fix and learn as they go, on what works and what doesn’t. Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process.
The CEOs? The interesting thing about this group is that when an executive admin is added to the team, they got significantly better. Why may you ask? Because they add special skills of facilitation. They understand and manage the process.
The challenge has proven to be very effective in teaching the teams about:
Improvements in capacity for generating fresh ideas
Creative collaboration
Criticality of prototyping
Identifying hidden assumptions
Importance of diverse skills
Our takeaways and recommendations
We certainly believe in the criticality of prototyping, even before watching this Marshmallow challenge. It certainly reinforced our thinking.
With these thoughts in mind, we offer these additional takeaways (from the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly):
Shoot the bad ideas first
Study the things you know won’t work. They will help you understand why they don’t work and give you more alternative options.
Have a bias for action
Move to implement experimentation with your best ideas as soon as possible. The mere process of actualizing will create more ideas and thoughts on solutions.
Use lots of media
Try as many types of media as possible to explore your prototype options. Examples include drawings, graphics, foam … any means to learn quickly.
Iterate often
Create short feedback loops. Don’t go long without experimenting and testing your ideas.
Expect your design to change
Rarely does your first prototype become your final design?
What do you think? Like to give the exercise a try? If so, you can find the details on how to run the exercise at www.marshmallow.com. Definitely, something we will incorporate in our collaboration and creativity workshops.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
As digital marketing evolves, we continue to see trends favoring video. Here are some quick and easy stats to use to convince your boss to invest in that video project, YouTube ads, or simply qualify your Snapchat habit.
YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.
45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
More than 500 million hours of videosare watched on YouTube each day.
More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
87% of online marketers use video content.
Make the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple … that’s creativity.
Connecting ideas are how new ideas originate … it is the basis for creativity. Most of the time regarding finding more ideas to add to our list of consideration … the more new ideas to connect, the more chances of improving your creativity.
Though it has some competition, YouTube remains the premier video site on the web. With a staggering amount of videos uploaded every day, some people even make a living from the service. Here are ten great alternatives to YouTube, although the “better than” is obviously open to debate.
Let’s look at some URL tricks to get more out of the service.
Creative video … make a GIF from a video
Have you found a YouTube video that has a GIF-worthy moment? You can easily create an animated GIF from any part of a video by adding gif before the YouTube link. So, to edit this video into a GIF:
You’ll be brought to Gifs.com, where you can add a variety of effects and crop the GIF to your liking. Once done, share the GIF to social networks with an easy link or download it for safekeeping. Note that videos must be under an hour to use this service.
Link to any part of a video
Typically, when you copy a link to a YouTube video, it starts from the beginning. If you want to show someone just a bit of a video or skip a lengthy intro, you can append a time stamp to the URL to start it at that time.
You can do this in a couple of ways. By manually adding &t=YmXXs to the end of a video URL, you’ll set it to start that many minutes/seconds into the video. You can omit minutes, or use only seconds, such as the 90s for a minute and a half. So, this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=7RWI3-8N_-Y
Can be shared 90 seconds in using this URL:
youtube.com/watch?v=7RWI3-8N_-Y&t=1m30s
If you don’t want to use the manual method, pause the video at the time you’d like to share it at, then right-click and choose Copy video URL at current time.
Skip a certain amount of the intro
Similar to the trick that lets you pick the start time, you can also choose to skip a certain amount of seconds at the start of the video.
You can’t specify minutes with this one, so use 90 (seconds) for a minute and a half. And, to skip the first 30 seconds of this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=1F_bG-uJMns
Add start=30 to the URL and get this:
youtube.com/watch?v=1F_bG-uJMns&start=90
This is similar to the timing one, but a bit faster to type and doesn’t require you to remember a certain time stamp.
What if you want to search for an image similar to the one you see? Or, what if you want to quickly locate an image based on a word or phrase on a page? READ MORE
You can view a high-quality thumbnail for any YouTube video (if it has one) by visiting the following URL:
YouTube is a great place for listening to music, especially video game music. If you’re into a song and want to listen to it over and over, you can add repeater after youtube in the URL. This will open the video at YouTubeRepeater.com, which will loop the video for you.
You can tweak the playback using the options below the video if you want to start or end at different points.
Download YouTube videos
If you’d like to download a copy of a YouTube video for your records, there are a couple of URL shortcuts that easily let you do that.
Before the youtube.com in the URL, type either pwn or kick to jump to services that will let you download those videos in a variety of formats. So, this URL:
youtube.com/watch?v=kFIsoq63lwo
Can be downloaded by changing the URL to either of these:
We suspect that you, like us, have found one of your favorite videos suddenly, and inexplicably, removed from YouTube. And it’s extremely annoying. So you might as well understand the reasons behind it. READ MORE
You probably won’t want to make this your main YouTube interface, but it’s worth checking out for a cleaner look.
Just visit this URL to have a look:
youtube.com/tv
Mashup YouTube videos
This one isn’t a URL hack per se as you can’t visit it right from YouTube, but it still uses YouTube URLs, so we include it. Visit YouTubeDoubler, and you can add two YouTube URLs to mix. You can choose to start either video at a certain time to help them sync up.
Whether you see how two songs sound when played at the same time or want to add some funny background music to a clip, see what you can create.
These tricks will let you get even more out of YouTube! Some of these are built into YouTube itself, while others rely on outside services. It’s possible that any of these could stop working in the future, so your mileage may vary as time passes.
While YouTube remains a staple for viewing video clips, there are some other things you can do with it.
YouTube’s recommendations can eventually start going wonky, suggesting weird videos that have nothing to do with your interests. When that happens, here’s what you can do to deal with it.
When you’re signed in, try changing your YouTube bookmark from the main site to your subscriber upload page using this URL:
youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
This lets you see the newest videos from channels you subscribe to, so you don’t miss any of their new content. Thus, you’re in control of what you see instead of YouTube deciding for you.
The bottom line
To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.
We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Ultimate Guide to Creative Social Media Marketing
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
