Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity

Description

We are about to enter an Age of Creativity that requires a new set of skills. This book introduces you to four creative superpowers that will help solve your biggest business problems and open up fresh opportunities, namely the powers of:

• Hacking – learn how becoming a hacker will help you tackle problems in different ways.
• Making – learn how getting your hands dirty and making things stimulates new parts of the brain as well as creating happy accidents.
• Teaching – learn how teaching yourself and others consolidates experience in a fast-paced world.
• Thieving – learn how looking to what already exists helps you solve your problems.

Notes & Highlights

BREAKING A PROBLEM DOWN (HACKING) This exercise is to get you in the habit of breaking bigger problems down into smaller bits. As Gareth Kay, founding partner of Zeus Jones, said in our last book, ‘Hacks, by definition, are more effective. They take big complicated problems that can be more easily solved, whatever the solution takes. As a result, they remove the gap between the commercial imperative and the creative solution.’ All you need is pen, paper and Post-it notes.

• Step 1 Take a big problem (e.g. gender equality in the workplace).
• Step 2 Break the problem down into smaller parts. E.g. for gender equality in the workplace it might be:
  • Unconscious bias.
  • Gender pay gap.
  • Parental leave.
  • Men’s resistance to change.
• Step 3 Take each of these smaller parts and break them down one step further. E.g. for parental leave it might be:
  • Gap between maternity leave and paternity leave.
  • Cost of childcare.
  • Lack of flexible working hours.
  • Reluctance for men to take shared parental leave (due to cultural issues).
  • The gender pay gap.
• Step 4 Keep on doing this until you can’t get any further (some may stop sooner than others).
• Step 5 For each end point, think of one thing you can do to solve that problem. How might you change your behavior as a business or as an individual? Write these down as a list.
• Step 6 Commit to make ten changes over a three-month period. Write them down and at the end of each month monitor your progress and the impact it has had on the problem. Repeat process as required.

Seenapse is an inspiration engine. It will help you to get more and better ideas faster by providing you with alternative non-linear and non-obvious results which are powered by the mental associations from people all over the world.

So, let us finish by abstracting the Genius Steals creative process:

• How can we expose ourselves to the most diverse set of influences, looking for non-obvious relationships, abstracting principles and concepts?
• How might we combine and recombine the elements?
• Can we transpose the patterns to distant domains of knowledge?
• Is the result, once articulated, ‘lucid, pleasing and strange’?
• How best to put it into the world, to make it public, to publish it and see what someone else can make from it?

Get a copy

Bookshop.org

Amazon