Unlocking your creative superpowers

Unlocking your creative superpowers

Back in 2019 I have had the opportunity to be on a small roadshow with the wonderful team at CPA for the CPA Congress 2019. I delivered two sessions the first was Megatrends of the Future and the second was Unlocking your creative superpower.

It was Steve Jobs that said “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while”. 

I firmly believe that we are all creative in our own way, but a lot of this creativity gets hidden due to the systems and processes we all adopt when going about our personal and business lives. We need to take back control of our creative self and revert to using some of the techniques we did as our 4-year-old self. The quickest and easiest is to simply ask “why” a lot more. Make it a bit to ask 3 why’s in every conversation or meeting you attend.

For those not a CPA and hence not being able to attend the event I thought I would briefly mention my top 5 well maybe 6 techniques to help unlock your creative superpowers.

1. Build Energy for creative sessions – Energy is exciting and creates a base to build on
2. Use random pictures and word to stretch your thinking beyond your current thoughts
3. Introduce constraints – often when we constrain our thinking, we come up with new ideas
4. Build simple habits for creativity – don’t tackle big thinking to start with, choose 5-10 min per day to do something different
5. Experiment and Play – It’s amazing what we can learn when we keep things fun.

So that’s it my top 5, oh I mentioned that there might be 6. Well I have starting using single page canvas’ to help teams unlock creativity with a specific outcome in mind. I have found that it helps bridge the gap from our day to day world to something that is a bit more creative.