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Believe that They Believe In You

When we keep reminders of how others have backed, valued and believed in us, we’re more likely to take creative risks.

The Evidence Board

Map your “evidence” (notes, to-dos, sketches…) to find patterns, track your progress, and reveal gaps.

Invest in your hobbies

By boosting confidence, self-expression, new relationships, and a sense of purpose, hobbies encourage you to take risks, adapt to feedback, accept new ideas, and bounce back after failure.

How to turn your SWOT ANALYSIS into a RISK REVIEW Strengths & Weaknesses: How adaptable can you be to challenges? Strengths & Opportunities: What do you have to lose? Opportunities & Threats: How might the effects interact? Threats & Weaknesses: Can you afford not to?

Idea Risk Review

Turn your SWOT Analysis into an Idea Risk Review

Analogous thinking uncovers ideas by drawing connections from other domains or industries. To apply the Wordtree method, combine brainstorming and tools like WordNet to find related concepts (focusing on the unusual and unfamiliar words) and delve into them.

WordTrees & Analogies

To facilitate analogous thinking with the Wordtree method, combine brainstorming and tools like WordNet to find related concepts and delve into them.

You’ve mastered your talent down to an art. But today it’s vanished! It's as if you’ve forgotten the motions that used to come naturally. Take a lesson from sports performance research: Quash the distractions of perfectionism and let your love for the craft guide you back to your natural brilliance! There’s a sports theory that perfectionistic performance anxiety can lead to “the yips,” a near-permanent inability to perform the motor skills of a talent, like pitching a ball. The yips appear to be caused or exacerbated by a mind-body interaction. A demand for perfection and anxious thoughts that don't help you meet your challenge override your abilities and reduce pleasure from playing. That decrease in dopamine, a pleasure chemical, disrupts activity in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that controls movement. Watching yourself underperform adds to your obsessive thoughts and anguish. According to Nick Siegel, a baseball coach who studies the yips, it's best to forget missteps, control preoccupations, and practice gratitude to avoid or break this destructive cycle. | Trust in your abilities | Clear your mind of distracting thoughts | Let yourself have down days | Nurture gratitude for the chance to do what you love

Curing the Yips: Exchanging Perfectionism for Gratitude

Embrace the wisdom of sports coaches by responding to down days with gratitude rather than perfectionism.

Get it wrong, on purpose

Reverse your goal to inspire bolder and more empathetic solutions

In a research study by Kim, Vincent, and Goncalo, for people who self-reported valuing their own uniqueness, being rejected or made into an outsider led to more creative content, connection-making, and problem-solving. It seems that when you value your uniqueness and have it reinforced, you feel empowered to let it shine.

Let rejection fuel creativity

Reflect on how rejection reaffirm your uniqueness

Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Lateral thinking puzzles are a playful exercise for challenging limitations and entering blue-sky thinking.

Channeling Pessimism: The Art of Expecting the Worst | What's the worst that could happen? | What can we do about it?

Channeling Pessimism: The Value of Expecting the Worst

When an idea triggers skepticism or anxiety, reflect on its weaknesses to increase interest and bring on constructive problem-solving.

Unravel the Mystery

Build passion and knowledge by treating it like a mystery. Be an objective observer, follow each new clue to the next, and expect surprises.

Job swaps infuse new ideas into organizational processes and shed light on blind spots. For a day or even a few months, a person takes on a new role, usually within their own organization, to build and share a new perspective. Creating or considering ideas from a new vantage point with different responsibilities leads to upgrades that make the ideas more feasible and impactful. And equipping a team with the power and perspective to elevate or enact these ideas boosts innovation quotient. Provide job swappers with mechanisms, budgets, and incentives for making changes. Make finding improvements an explicit goal.

Boss for a day and other Job Swaps

Job swaps shed light on blind spots — for leaders and employees.

3 tips for brighter retrospectives that learn from failure and make it safe to innovate

Encourage experimentation by applying insights, avoiding blame, and praising the biggest lessons

Embracing the Growth Process

Approach projects with patience and perseverance, embracing the reality that game-changing ideas require long development periods.

Nature offers a wealth of wisdom. Mindfully using your five senses to study nature will offer a vibrant symphony of potential analogies for problem-solving. It will also reduce your stress and restore your concentration. After your experience you may want to study certain themes to better understand the mechanisms and synergies at play.

Nature immersion

Nature might offer relevant analogies and can restore your concentration.

Apply divergent or convergent thinking

Understand when to expand and explore (divergent thinking) and when to narrow down and make decisions (convergent thinking).

Transect Walks reveal insights about an environment's resources, conditions, and systems. By immersing yourself in the surroundings, you can design solutions that align with people's needs and seamlessly integrate into their built environment. - Choose your location, route, day, and time wisely - Define potential focus areas but allow for spontaneity - Seek experienced companions to identify noteworthy elements, answer questions, and provide insight into typical experiences - Observe and listen attentively, suspending judgment - Document with detailed notes and photos

Transect Walk: Exploring Environments for Innovative Solutions

In a Transect Walk, you pass through an environment to explore its resources, conditions, and systems.

Rescaling isn't about just growing in size, area, or volume. It's about adapting and evolving across different realms or dimensions. Context Matters: Success often depends on cultural, historical, and socio-political influences. Interconnected Success: Linkages and synergies with other shifts or resources can make ideas soar. Smart Growth: Evolution should improve an idea without losing its core essence or making processes too bureaucratic. Scale Sensitivity: What works at one level might not at another.

Rescaling: Evolution before Expansion

For success and sustainability, rescaling is about carefully evolving and adapting ideas, not just making them bigger.

Move and Pose, Metaphorically Speaking Research studies show that you can tap into creativity or persistence by acting out associated metaphors, physically or virtually. So move, pose, and play—your Eureka moment might be a walk or gesture away. Free walking, or exploring new realms physically, enhances divergent thinking—exploring new realms mentally. Video games featuring roaming and breaking walls boost originality, ideation fluency, flexibility, and persistence. Fluid movements of hands and arms encourage "thinking fluidly," and switching hands during tasks prompts thinking “on the other hand.” Squeezing a soft ball improves divergent thinking while squeezing a hard ball benefits convergent thinking. Stacking or moving items, like “putting two and two together,” aids convergent thinking. An “open” posture with unlocked legs and arms opens you up to ideation and originality while a closed stance, having your legs and arms crossed, can stimulate persistence.

Movements and Postures, Metaphorically Speaking

Embodying creativity metaphors like “thinking fluidly,” “being open,” and “putting two and two together” can actualize creative mental states.

Learning Goal Example: Mastering archery skills - Promotes deep knowledge - Adapts to new information - Increases motivation - Welcomes feedback Performance Goal Example: Hitting the bullseye - Values short-term success - Based on first perspectives - Loses steam - Leads to tunnel vision

The Power of Learning Goals for Creative Problem-Solving

Learning goals focus on mastering, enhancing problem-solving and resilience.

We arrive at more creative solutions to a problem after we take a break and work on something unrelated, as revealed by over a hundred research studies. Not only do we reset our frustration and fatigue, but our brain continues to make connections during its more-efficient unconscious state. Moving our conscious awareness and busy inner dialogue off of a struggle makes way for powerful intuitive processing.

Take a break on something unrelated

Breaks improve chances for an aha moment

Find Success Daily

Set and celebrate daily achievable goals to deepen concentration, stir the imagination, and reduce the numbing effects of insecurity and apathy.

Guided Mastery is a research-backed technique of taking progressive steps towards proficiency. It increases our sense of competence, which combats anxiety and empowers us to face creative challenges.

Finding Confidence through Guided Mastery

Take progressive steps toward proficiency to increase your sense of competence, combat anxiety, and build the confidence to face creative challenges.

Innovation, whether it's adopting a novel method or integrating new technology, invariably arouses risk and resistance. Yet, not adapting can lead to collapse. This framework, which has aptly defined innovations across the social and business sectors, is a guide for discerning what type of innovation to undertake and the rationale for embracing the risk. Respond to anticipated shocks to the sector or the region by changing your approach. Address weak infrastructure or offerings that are nearly obsolete by adopting or investing in new technology. INCREMENTAL (same approach, same technology) - Keep a pulse on your performance to regularly reveal and apply these low-risk improvements DISRUPTIVE (new approach, existing technology) - When adjusting your operations, recalibrate your skill sets or align with strategic partners RADICAL (same approach, new technology) - Adopting new tech in existing models requires educating users and stoking demand ARCHITECTURAL (new technology, new approach) - For a dual shift, cultivate new, adaptive capabilities across your departments, partners, and suppliers

Type-casting Innovation: Matching Risk with Strategy

Discern the type of innovation needed and how to prepare for the jump

Role Play: Stepping into the shoes of key stakeholders to imagine their reaction to ideas or scenarios. (This is a quick reality check that should not eclipse engaging people with direct experience.) Investigative Rehearsal: Walking through a script of a potential service or idea with a stakeholder or potential user, prompting improvised reactions, questions, and feedback. 1. Establish the role's backstory, motivations, and concerns 2. Present ideas and scenarios 3. Assign a person to play the role 4. Encourage the role-player to respond authentically, sharing feelings, statements, and behaviors in reaction to the ideas or situations

Role Playing and Investigative Rehearsals for Creative Exploration

Walking through a script with a key stakeholder or asking someone to play their role will offer insights, empathy, and perspective

Discover your APEX

Your Unique, Winning Set: Abilities, Principles, and EXperience

Resource Budget Exercise

Explore priority, practicality, and interdependence for strategic decisions

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Self-inspiration

Ignite your imagination

Inspired Teams

Energize group brainstorms

Inspirational Governance

Magnify collective talent