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How to Get Crazy Creative

A new creative method may be just what you need to get your business back on track. Is your business floundering? Operations running on remote control? Business processes nothing more than a lifeless series of checklists? Marketing just picking something familiar from a smorgasbord of overly familiar choices? Welcome to the modern world, where despite all the talk of innovation, many businesses are caught up in change and haven’t a clue as to what to do about it.  

By Tony Wanless /

Creative-thinking methods | BCBusiness
Hammer it out: new creative-thinking methods can bring your team (and business) back to life.

A new creative method may be just what you need to get your business back on track.

Is your business floundering? Operations running on remote control? Business processes nothing more than a lifeless series of checklists? Marketing just picking something familiar from a smorgasbord of overly familiar choices?

Welcome to the modern world, where despite all the talk of innovation, many businesses are caught up in change and haven’t a clue as to what to do about it.  

Here’s one suggestion: be wild and crazy.

Becoming wild and crazy will take you away from the traditional methodology of innovation – which has become such a marketing buzzword now that even the most minor change is called innovative – and into something that may be far more non-traditional but much more effective.

This is the theory of ACT (Anti-Conventional Thinking), which eschews the usual problem-solving methodology such as brainstorming and creative problem solving in favour of being completely contrary in your thinking.

ACT was dreamt up by innovation writer Jeffrey Baumgartner, who created innovation process software and authors an e-journal called Report 103. ACT takes the opposite approach to creativity, which lies at the heart of both brainstorming and creative problem solving.

The problem with these two innovation processes, he says, is that they usually stress high numbers of conventional, derivative and “safe” ideas.

“Unless a brainstorm comprises highly creative people . . . participants will squelch their own outrageous ideas before sharing them with colleagues,” says Baumgartner. “This is doubly true if the creative challenge they are addressing is conventional in nature.”

If you and/or your team get wild and crazy, you’ll arrive at far fewer ideas – maybe only five or six – but they’ll be much more creative. And when the results of that creativity are further honed, they could result in a far more game-changing innovation that might revive your business.

Here’s Baumgartner’s formula for Anti-Conventional Thinking:

  • Frame a challenge that pushes you to think unconventionally. Instead of looking for new features you can add to a product, ask how you can deliver more value in creating completely unexpected ways.
  • As ideas appear, reframe the challenge and introduce sub-challenges to better define the solution.
  • Reject conventional ideas; they are too easy.
  • Criticize new unconventional ideas, but defend them at the same time to determine how to improve them.