Creativity Inside the Box

“Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play!”

You probably recognize that lyric from the very popular song, Home on the Range. That song is top of mind right now because my wife and I just returned from Yellowstone National Park. While there, we saw plenty of buffalo, deer, antelope, and elk.

I also noticed something very interesting about the buffalo while at Yellowstone. There is something the park rangers can learn from watching these buffalo. As a result, they do something very creative. 

In this episode, I’m diving into what that lesson from the buffalos (or bison) is and dive deep into the creative lessons we can learn from our national parks.

1. What biomimicry is.
2. What bison can teach us that leads to a creative act.
3. How park rangers have followed the buffalo to know where to build safety boardwalks.
4. What omission neglect is.
5. Other ways we can apply this biomimicry lesson.
6. What pareidolia is and how we do it all the time.
7. How all of this related to the task unification technique in the SIT method.

Resources from this episode:

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

We all want to improve the quality of our ideas. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.

So let me give you one quick tip that will help you improve all of your ideas: forecast that idea’s future.

Taking an idea and thinking about how it will play out far into the future is a phenomenon in innovation. Today, I share some research that has been done on it. I’m also going to describe how to practically apply this idea so you can generate better quality ideas.

1. What perspective innovation is.
2. How to forecast the future of your ideas.
3. Research done on this topic by the University of Oklahoma.
4. Why you should stop and think about a new idea before moving on to the next one.
5. An example of how I’ve seen someone use this phenomenon.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Creativity is nothing more than the collision of two previously unrelated things.

To be creative, you simply have to take two things that don’t belong together, mash them up, and figure out what they make. However, the key here is that the end result must be useful. 

Sure, you can take any two objects, smash them together, and come up with something creative. The problem is, it might have no use. If this is the case, you’ve gone too far.

So, in this episode, I want to teach you how to make sure you err on the side of being useful. I explain the product that inspired me to think deeper into this idea and delve into the SIT method once again to show you how to be truly innovative.

In this episode you’ll hear:

1. What “Mayochup” is.
2. Why food flavor combination is nothing new.
3. How cognitive fixedness is a barrier to true creativity.
4. Why creativity doesn’t always equal usefulness.
5. Innovation=creativity+usefulness.
6. How the SIT method empowers you to routinely create high-quality ideas.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Do you remember being told as a kid that elephants are afraid of mice? Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not true. Despite what we saw in the cartoons, scientists have said that elephants are not, in fact, afraid of mice.

However, want to guess what elephants are afraid of? Bees.

Today I talk about how this fact about elephants and bees relates to creativity. I explain the insights that it can give us into innovation. I also discuss what the codes and patterns of nature, in general, can teach us about creativity. 

1. What inspired me to look at this issue.
2. A creative solution some farmers came up with when elephants were destroying their crops.
3. What a closed world solution is.
4. What biomimicry is and how it relates to creativity.
5. Lessons we can learn from nature.
6. How to transfer nature’s patterns into human society.
7. Why innovation requires us to be able to pass on the information.

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Today, I’ve got some bad news and some good news.

Good news first: you’re probably more creative than you think you are! 

So what’s the bad news? We all tend to give up right at that point when we’re starting to become really creative.

Studies have shown that when we’re facing a creative challenge and things start to feel difficult, we lower our expectations about what we’re able to do. We underestimate our ability to generate more creative ideas.

Today, I’m going to talk about what this means for all of us. I’m going to share more research that backs up this tendency and then I’ll help you understand what you should do when you reach that point of wanting to give up.

1. Experiments that have proved that people consistently underestimate the number of ideas they could generate while solving a creative challenge.
2. What to do when you feel a creative task starting to get difficult.
3. Why the best ideas come after you get stuck.
4. The danger of stopping when you feel stuck.
5. An example of a time I witnessed this happen and clever ideas were produced.
6. The power of persistence.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Fear of failure is one of the biggest barriers to creativity.

However, if you struggle with fear, don’t despair. There are strategies for dealing with it. In this episode, I’m sharing some of those strategies with you.

The truth is, even though anyone can learn the skill of creativity, everyone also encounters impediments to this skill. There will always be situations where fear will kick in and prevent you from reaching your greatest creative output.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again in my 30 years of dealing with innovation. Tune in to hear some of the things I’ve learned about overcoming your fear of creativity.

1. Why we fear creativity.
2. How systematic methods do the hard work for you.
3. Why your fear is unfounded.
4. How the fear of being judged inhibits brainstorming sessions.
5. Three practical ways to overcome your fear of creativity.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Today’s topic is toilet paper.

Yes, you read that right. We’re talking about toilet paper on the podcast.

I promise there’s an explanation: I want to teach you how to apply structured creativity methods to this everyday product. I believe that if you can learn to create innovative ideas for something like toilet paper, you can apply innovation to just about anything. 

To apply creativity to toilet paper, we’re going to focus in on one of the five patterns in the SIT method. This is the technique that I would consider to be the most difficult. It’s called attribute dependency. 

Tune in and we’ll dive into attribute dependency and toilet paper.

1. The history of toilet paper.
2. Different ways to innovate toilet paper.
3. How attribute dependency works.
4. What internal and external attributes are.
5. How to apply attribute dependency to toilet paper.
6. How this helps break structural fixedness.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Today, instead of innovating inside the box, I want you to think inside the umbrella.

Believe it or not, the umbrella is a great example of how patterns of innovation have progressed over time to form the basis of the SIT method. Patterns have been used by everyday innovators for thousands of years to create new inventions. Many times they were using those patterns without even realizing it. Now those patterns are embedded into the everyday things you see around you like umbrellas. These items can be leveraged and used to create and innovate new things.

In this episode, we’re going to look into this everyday object of the umbrella. It may seem like a simple and lowly household object. However, you’d be surprised to know that all five patterns of the SIT method can be found inside of it. Tune in to learn how.

1. The history of the umbrella.
2. Examples of innovations of the umbrella that used subtraction.
3. How the task unification technique has been used on umbrellas.
4. What the “unbrella” is and how it exemplifies the division technique.
5. How transition umbrellas use the attribution dependency technique.
6. How the multiplication technique could be used to innovate the umbrella.
7. What a 3rd grader taught me about the multiplication technique.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

You may not realize it, but there is a very important part of our food chain that is under duress.

One-third of the food we consume on a daily basis depends on animal pollination. Eighty percent of all flowering plants rely specifically on the pollination of bees. The problem is, these bees are in trouble. Both the honeybee and native bee populations are declining.

Scientists know that if they were able to figure out where bees are doing well and where they’re not, they would be able to address some strategies for helping them out. With millions of bees all over the country, though, they need to come up with a very creative solution for collecting all of that data.

Well, one very clever and talented researcher has decided to use a creativity technique to do just that. Processor Gretchen Lebuhn used the task unification technique to start The Great Sunflower Project. In this episode, we’re discussing this project in depth. I’m explaining how Professor Lebuhn’s project works and where the SIT method plays into it.

1. How The Great Sunflower project allows scientists to get an accurate picture of what’s going on with bees.
2. The creative part of this project.
3. How the task unification technique works.
4. What crowdsourcing is and how it plays into all of this.

The Great Sunflower Project

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

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Have you ever said the following? “I’ve got this great idea! If only I could explain it to you…”

I’m willing to bet you have. A great idea has popped into your head but you just couldn’t find the right words to express it. You were trying to understand it yourself and then had to go and try explaining it to others.

You’re not alone. In fact, this is a very common phenomenon. 

So today, I’m going to talk through the sequence of events that are put into play when an idea comes into your mind. I’m going to take you from the core of the idea when it starts to the finishing point of the idea and through all the things that have to happen in between. 

Tune in to get your ideas out into the open!

1. What a pre-inventive form is.
2. How to match your ambiguous ideas with objective facts.
3. Why you need to put words around those facts.
4. How to describe your idea in a way that creates value.
5. How Googling your mind can play into all of this.
6. Why you should demonstrate your idea by explaining it in a way that people can see it.
7. An example of how this sequence of events might flow.

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

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EPISODE CREDITS:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com