The Deliberate Creative

In this episode you will learn tools to use for stage three of the Creative Problem Solving process - Develop.

What You'll Learn

• How to evaluate, strengthen and select your best ideas
• How to use the PPCO tool to further develop your top ideas
• How to design and use an Evaluation Matrix to assess the best idea to implement

Resources and Links:

• Download the Develop workbook (includes Clarify & Ideate worksheets too)
• Climer Cards - a simple deck of cards that can spark thousands of ideas
• Book Decisive: How to Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath

Write a Review and Win!

Enter the Podcast Review Contest! Write a review by July 12, 2015 and you'll be entered to win a free deck of Climer Cards or a series of three . Details here.

The Weekly Challenge

Your challenge for the week is to use the PPCO and Evaluation Matrix to narrow down to one idea that you will then implement. Share your selected ideas in the comments!

In this episode you will learn tools to use for stage two of the Creative Problem Solving process - the Ideate Stage.

What You'll Learn

• Idea Generation tools besides the classic brainstorm
• How to defer judgment to generate hundreds of ideas with a team or individually
• How to select the top ideas for further development
• Variations for individual and team ideations Write a Review and Win!

  Enter the Podcast Review Contest! Write a review by July 12, 2015 and be entered to win. Details here.

  The Weekly Challenge

  Your challenge for the week is to generate dozens or hundreds of ideas for your own creative challenge. Share your challenge statement and your best ideas in the show notes at climerconsulting.com/005!

In this episode you will learn tools to use for stage two of the Creative Problem Solving process – the Ideate Stage.

What You’ll Learn

* Idea Generation tools besides the classic brainstorm

* How to defer judgment to generate hundreds of ideas with a team or individually

* How to select the top ideas for further development

* Variations for individual and team ideations

Resources

* Supplies:

* Climer Cards – a simple deck of cards that can spark thousands of ideas

* Climer Cards Free eBook

* Mr Sketch Scented Markers

* Sharpie Flipchart Markers

* Neuland Markers

Write a Review and Win!

Enter the Podcast Review Contest! Write a review by July 12, 2015 and be entered to win. Details here.

The Weekly Challenge

Your challenge for the week is to generate dozens or hundreds of ideas for your own creative challenge. Share your challenge statement and your best ideas in the comments below!

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #005: Creative Problem Solving Stage 2 – Ideate

Amy Climer: In today’s episode, you’re going to learn new techniques for coming up with lots of ideas.

Welcome to episode #5 of the Deliberate Creative Podcast.  On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the second stage of the Creative Problem Solving Process, which is the Ideate Stage.  First, I want to share with you a personal story. I record the Deliberate Creative Podcast ahead of time and set it all up.  It’s not recorded live as you probably already know.  Earlier today, I recorded the entire episode and transferred the file to my computer only to realize I didn’t plug in the mic! I had a 45-minute file of complete silence.  It was quite entertaining.  So here we are, round two.  Hopefully, this will be a good one and I’m excited because I love the Ideation Stage.

In the previous episode, we went through the Clarify Stage of the Creative Problem Solving Process, which is the first step to generating and coming up with innovative ideas and innovative solutions.  If you followed along, you should have a challenge statement at this point and you’re ready to generate lots of ideas to come up with an innovative solution.  In this episode, I’m going to explain three different techniques to generate ideas and we’re going to move beyond that typical brainstorming process.  In the end, you’ll have dozens, if not hundreds, of new ideas.  To help you move to this process, I have put together a free workbook for you all and you can download that workbook at ClimerConsulting.com/005.  All right, are you all ready?  Let’s ideate!

The first thing you need before diving into an ideation session is you’re going to need a few supplies.  You’ll need these supplies if you’re generating the ideas alone or if you’re with a team.  We’re going to talk through which supplies you need for which situation.  If you’re working alone,

In this episode you will learn tools to use for the first stage of the Creative Problem Solving process – the Clarify Stage.

What You’ll Learn

* Why the Clarify Stage of CPS is important

* The 3 steps within the Clarify Stage

* How to develop a challenge statement that guides the rest of the CPS process

* Three activities to help you get clarity and develop your own challenge statement

Resources

* Book: Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change, 2nd edition, by Puccio, Mance, and Murdock

* Book: Creativity Unbound: An Introduction to the creative process, 5th edition by Miller, Vehar, Firestien, Thurber, and Nielsen.

* Book: Creative Approaches to Problem Solving by Isaksen, Dorval, and Treffinger

The Weekly Challenge

Your challenge for the week is go through the Clarify Stage with your own creative challenge. Share your challenge statement in the comments below!

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #004: Creative Problem Solving Process Stage 1 – Clarify

Amy Climer: On today’s episode, we’re going to walk through the first stage of the Creative Problem Solving Process.

Hey everyone, welcome to episode #4 of the Creative Problem Solving Process.  I’m really excited because this episode is going to be a little bit different than the past ones.  This is the first of four episodes that will make up a Creative Problem Solving Workshop to help you develop creative ideas for particular challenge you have.  Today’s episode, we’re focusing on the clarifying stage of Creative Problem Solving.

The four episodes are going to build on each other and you’ll be able to work on a real challenge you have.  You can either listen to all the four episodes first and then do the activities or do the activities as I present them by pausing the episode.  The activities will help you develop new ideas and help you implement those ideas for whatever your challenge is.  Accompanying this episode is also a free workbook that I’ve put together for you, a little bonus for you all.  You can download at ClimerConsulting.com/004.  The workbook has all the activities in there to make it easier for you to follow along.

The Creative Problem Solving Process begins with clarifying the situation, clarifying the challenge you want to focus on.  Think about a problem or a challenge that you have in your organization or that you just have personally – something that you’re interested and coming up with new ideas for.  It could be that you’re trying to develop a new product, maybe you have a product or a service that you’re looking at how to market better.  Maybe you want to engage your staff in a different way or more fully.  Maybe you want to design a really cool family vacation or perhaps you’re planning a wedding and you want it to be really innovative and interesting.

Whatever it is, pick a challenge that you want to focus on through these next four episodes.  Once you have your challenge, we’re going to start clarifying it.  The purpose of clarifying of course is to gain clarity about the situation.  You’re going to explore the background, assumptions you might have.  You’re going to look at data and ultimately you’re going to develop a specific challenge statement to focus...

In this episode you will learn tools to use for the first stage of the Creative Problem Solving process - the Clarify Stage.

What You'll Learn

• Why the Clarify Stage of CPS is important
• The 3 steps within the Clarify Stage
• How to develop a challenge statement that guides the rest of the CPS process
• Three activities to help you get clarity and develop your own challenge statement

In this episode I explain the Creative Problem Solving Process and how to use it to be more innovative in any area of your life.

What You'll Learn

• A brief history of the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process
• The difference between divergent and convergent thinking and why you need both
• The four steps of the Creative Problem Solving Process and an example of how it works

At the end of the episode you will get a challenge to start working on that will help you be more creative.

In this episode I talk about the three elements you need in order to be creative. We explore intrinsic motivation, expertise, and creative thinking skills.

What You'll Learn

• The three elements you need in order to be creative
• The three components of intrinsic motivation
• The four steps to the Creative Problem Solving process

Resources and Links:

• Amabile, T. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 77-87.
• Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.

In this episode I talk about the three elements you need in order to be creative. We explore intrinsic motivation, expertise, and creative thinking skills.

What You’ll Learn

* The three elements you need in order to be creative

* The three components of intrinsic motivation

* The four steps to the Creative Problem Solving process

Resources

* Amabile, T. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 77-87.

* Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? No problem, just download the free transcript (PDF) or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #002: 3 Elements Needed for Creativity

Amy Climer: Hey everyone welcome to episode number two. Today we’re talking about – what do you need in order to be creative. If you’ve heard me talking on Episode Zero or Episode One, you’ll know that I believe we all have incredible capacity to be creative. It’s really just a matter of tapping into it and figuring it out. You’ve also heard me talking about the importance of believing we are creative and that belief is really important but, it’s only the beginning. There are three specific elements that researchers have found are present in all creative people and that’s what we’re going to dive in to today. Most of this research is from Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School and I’ll put the reference in the show notes for you all. By the way the show notes can be found at Climerconsulting.com/002.

Let’s talk about what’s needed for creativity. Three things Dr. Amabile has figured out. The first is intrinsic motivation, the second is expertise, and the third is creative thinking skills. We’re going to talk about each of those one at a time. We’ll break them down and dive into each one. First is intrinsic motivation. If you want to be creative that desire to be creative really needs to come from within. Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from inside of you versus extrinsic motivation is when you’re motivated by something outside of yourself like money, rewards, or that you’re going to get something, if you do this you’ll get that or you’ll avoid something. The Carrot and Stick approach is extrinsic motivation. Daniel Pink has a great book called Drive where he offers a lot of information about intrinsic motivation. He says intrinsic motivation is about 3 things – autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let’s talk about those three.

First there’s Autonomy. Autonomy is where we get some freedom and say on how things go or how we contribute when we have no control it makes it harder for us to be creative. It also means we don’t have autonomy, but we need that freedom in order to be creative, we need that autonomy.

The second thing we need is mastery. Mastery is where we’re striving to get better at something. We have an opportunity for growth. It’s sort of related to your intrinsic desire to learn, like if you’re excited about learning then that contributes to your intrinsic motivation. Let’s say for instance that I’m trying to design a new website and I want this to be the coolest most creative website ever. In the process of working on that website I’m going to get better on what I’m doing and that will help motivate me and keep me excited.

In this episode I talk about why I'm starting The Deliberate Creative Podcast. It will help you decide if this it the right podcast for you. I share the podcast goals, my background, and what inspired me to start The Deliberate Creative.

What You'll Learn

• The purpose and goals of The Deliberate Creative podcast
• Amy Climer's background
• The reason Amy is nervous and excited about hosting The Deliberate Creative podcast
• Amy's inspiration for starting The Deliberate Creative Podcast

Resources and Links:

• Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn - my inspiration for starting this podcast
• Nick Palkowski - Your Podcast Guru - my podcast coach

In this episode I explain the definition of creativity and difference between creativity and innovation. You might be surprised at what you learn! Find out why how creative you think you are makes a difference and about two types of creativity.

What You'll Learn

• The research-based definition of creativity
• The difference between creativity and innovation
• Why your belief about how creative you are matters
• How revolutionary and evolutionary innovation are both important

Resources and Links:

• The Quirky Stapler
• Reference for Definition of Creativity: Hemlin, S., Allwood, C., & Martin, B. (2008). Creative knowledge environments. Creativity Research Journal, 20(2), 196-210. (Due to copyright we can not post the full article)
• FourSight Thinking Profile

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? No problem, just download the transcript at http://www.climerconsulting.com/001. Enjoy!