The Weekly Tutorial: On Being Creative

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The story so far:

To be creative you need three things:

A belief that you can be creative.
Time to allow your brain to be creative.
Some techniques to encourage creativity.

That's the priority order, too.

What about a few techniques to encourage creativity? These techniques essentially encourage the brain to get out of its pattern-in which mode the problem cannot be solved-and leap to another area where it can be. What these techniques are giving you-for a short period of time-are a new brain.

The best source of techniques is certainly Edward De Bono. Here are two to experiment with:

1: The Six Thinking Hats.
De Bono reminds us that we often get too emotionally attached to an idea, esepcially in discussion with others. To remove unnecessary emotion and stay focused on encouraging an individual to think in different ways, he proposed six hats:
BLACK: logically negative
YELLOW: logically positive
GREEN: start afresh; out of the box
WHITE: what are the facts?
BLUE: what's our process; how will we go about this?
RED: speaking with emotion and no need for logic.
Learn more here and try them out today.

2. PO
This stands for provocative operation and is used to propose an idea, which may not necessarily be a solution, or a 'good' idea in itself, but stimulates thinking and allows new ideas to be produced. PO can be used to notify others that they are deliberately making a provocative comment.

Start now!