Edward Glassman : Creativity Triggers Are For Everyone

Creativity Triggers Are For Everyone

Excerpted from Creativity Triggers are for Everyone: How To Use Your Inventiveness To Brighten Your Life by Edward Glassman, PhD

Creativity Triggers Produce Golden Thoughts

Creativity triggers help everyone — whether you are a mother, father, doctor, lawyer, mayor, accountant, teenager, intern, police-person, business owner, soldier, president, vice-president, teacher, advertising executive, civic group leader, manager, government worker or official, fireman, nurse, district attorney, CEO, librarian, professor, scout leader, realtor, student, coach, etc.

This book will help you change from a person that has to be reminded to 'think outside the box,' into a person who can 'eliminate the box' from your thinking, a person that spouts unexpected ideas generously, and solves problems creatively.

Savor Your Creativity

I enjoy my creativity. Ideas pop into my head in an erratic stream. It adds spice to my life. And it enabled me to write this book and contribute to the quality and excitement of my life.

Savor your creativity. It helps you enjoy your life. To reveal some dimensions of your own creativity, finish these statements:

"When I am creating, I feel …"

The biggest help to my creativity is …"

The biggest obstacle to my creativity is …"

I need the following to be more creative …"

"If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten," maybe less...

Creativity triggers fuel your ability to generate an unexpected "new and useful" idea. The more unexpected the idea, the more creative we perceive it.

Today the process works even better. No longer do we have to wait for someone's brain to slowly churn out a new and useful idea. Now we have hundreds of creativity triggers to help spark ideas to achieve high-quality solutions to problems.

"Hold on," you say. "Didn't the old methods work for thousands of years to produce ideas? Didn't we construct our entire civilization using those old ways? Why a new way? If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

Of course, the old ways still work. And we did construct our civilization waiting for ideas to slowly appear.

Nonetheless, the new creativity triggers heat up the process, so we generate more new and useful ideas in a shorter time. And because we have more ideas to choose from, we turn out higher quality solutions, avoiding the quick fix.

Groups using brainstorming to generate ideas complain that they have trouble sorting and selecting so many ideas. How sweet to move beyond the old bottleneck of not having enough ideas to the problem of evaluating the myriad of ideas a simple brainstorming session produces.

And Alex Osborn invented brainstorming over 80 years ago, the era of the Model-A Ford and the DC-3 airplane. Not a modern procedure at all. Indeed, using only brainstorming today mimics driving around in a Model-A Ford or a DC-3 airplane, ignoring computers, antibiotics, TV, the Internet, the iPad, mobile phones, and the thousands of modern inventions from which we benefit. You need to use modern creativity triggers.

This book focuses on what works, not theory. I presented workshops for over 15 years, and I learned that while theory helps us understand, creativity triggers that succeed help us even more.

I emphasize the following ways to use creativity triggers to solve problems creatively:

• to shift paradigms and produce unexpected, fresh ideas and solutions.
• to change the climate so new ideas flourish.
• to stop pigeonholing people and stifling their creative thinking.

I describe all three types of creativity triggers in my book. You will also find more:

• Creativity triggers for an 8-step problem solving sequence that contains the three key creative steps, shifts paradigms, and achieves quality creative solutions.
• Creativity triggers to use in permanent creativity groups formed from people in your community.
• Creativity triggers to motivate people to create creative outcomes that succeed.
• Creativity triggers to avoid habits that suppress creative thinking.

Reduce Your Resistance to Using Creativity Triggers

Today, many people find that creative thinking contributes to a winning edge. People who work alone, or in groups, use creativity triggers to solve problems more creatively. Turn your complacency into dynamic creative outcomes.

Most people drop their resistance to creativity triggers once they accept some new ideas:

First, creative thinking involves an ordinary, daily activity.

Second, people can learn creativity triggers. Using these triggers does not turn anyone into an Einstein, but they do help people find better solutions to problems.

Third, people can change the habits that spoil creative thinking and doom the creative climate.

Finally, people using creativity triggers can achieve quality solutions which lead to success.

Skeptical people need to discover that many ways exist to perceive a problem, that diverse solutions exist, and that using creativity triggers works, a key change in attitude.

Creativity Triggers Do Help

Many people underestimate the power that creativity triggers provide, because they believe creative thinking comes from an exceptional, inherited gift. You either have it or you don't.

Not so. Most of us have creative ability and use it everyday. We don't recognize it as creativity or see it as special. We call it tinkering, ingenuity, intuition, trial-and-error, imagination, making suggestions, inventing — anything but creative thinking. We think creative thinking an exceptional gift inherited by other people.

Not true. Most people think creatively most of the time; it depends on what you spend your time creating that makes the difference. Best of all, creativity triggers helps solve problems more effectively in your life and your career.

We could not have survived as a species had we not been creative and adjusted to changing conditions.

Many levels of creative thinking exist, from low daily levels to hot, unexpected levels. To increase the probability you operate at a higher level use creativity triggers to analyze your problem, generate ideas, select solutions, and create a creative atmosphere in your mind without pigeonholing yourself or others. •

© 2012 by Edward Glassman. All rights reserved.

Edward Glassman is a former Guggenheim Fellow at Stanford University and a Visiting Fellow at The Center For Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. ...

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