7 Ways To Stimulate Your Capacity For Creativity | Don Peppers, Fast Company

Peppers begins his article with a joke and follows it by describing experiences that stimulate creativity.

He explains that creativity depends on the context in which a person experiences it or manages it or tries to stimulate it.

He writes:

Your most creative insights are almost always the result of taking an idea that works in one domain and applying it to another. Every “new” idea you have, personally, is based on some combination of previous concepts in your own mind, even if you combined these concepts subconsciously. ...

You become more creative when you violate the context of your own expectations. So if you want to generate more innovative ideas, then you should purposely expose your mind to radically different facts and unusual, often conflicting concepts. ...

And then he lists the "hands on" creativity stimulators promised in the headline. I've used most of them at times but especially appreciated this one:

Drive a different route to work or school, or to church, or to the club. Take a long cut, on purpose.

I learned to do that as a reporter/photographer for a daily newspaper. Our editor made a similar suggestion not so much to stimulate our creativity but to be more observant, to be on the look out for potential news.

But the result is similar: We open our minds to new things to write about, to new ways of doing things.

You can find more advice and ideas about this topic at Garbl's Creativity Resources Online. Also check the Creativity tab above for daily editions of Garbl's Creativity Connections.