Creative “Thinkering” Can Grow Your Business

Creative Thinkering | BCBusiness
Michael Michalko’s new book, “Creative Thinkering,” asks the question, “Why can’t everybody be creative?”

In a business world that demands more creativity to help companies survive, a new book is helping pave the way.

Recently I attended a meetup called Creative Mornings, the first of its kind in Vancouver (and Canada). It’s a meeting of representatives of the creative industries who are trying to grow their businesses.

Now, Vancouver has a large creative community – which includes anyone in the creative, film, or advertising areas, plus many technologists, writers, consultants, and ancillary types who are considered to be in “creative business.”

But their thinking is still way out of the mainstream of business. Too many businesses in this town still see creativity as a threat to order instead of a useful business tool.

But there is hope.

By an odd chance, the very next day I received a review copy of a book by one of my favourite creativity experts, Michael Michalko, whose previous book, Thinkertoys, was one of the seminal books on creativity tools and how to use them.

Michalko’s new book, Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work, asks the question, “Why can’t everybody be creative?,” then goes about showing them how to be exactly that.

The book shows readers how to resurrect their natural creativity. It explains that creative thinking requires the ability to generate a host of associations and connections between two or more dissimilar subjects, creating new categories and concepts.

Then Michalko goes on to offer practical examples of how to use this technique in a variety of ways to inspire new ideas and solutions to problems in both our professional and personal lives.

Among the examples is “conceptual blending,” where you combine two concepts and come up with an entirely new one. Traditionally, our ability to associate related concepts limits our ability to be creative. We form mental walls between associations of related concepts and concepts that are not related. Conceptual blending is the forced association of unrelated concepts.

I’m about half way through Creative Thinkering, but it is inspiring, not because I’m in a creative industry, but because I’m convinced that creativity and innovation is one of the best methods business has today to be competitive and to thrive.

Simply, doing the same things in the same old ways has a continually declining effect, and business operators big and small are constantly being exhorted to be more creative if they expect to survive in a world that is continually throwing new challenges at us.

Now they have a way to do it. I believe in it so much, I’m going to inquire into how I can lead these sessions.