Business Education - Keep your Mind Open and Harness your Creativity

During one of my MBA classes, we studied creativity. One of the keys to creativity is to always keep an open mind. This is easier said than done, but the tips below offer some tips that may help you along in this process.

• It is important to go through the whole creative process because the best ideas often show up when you are writing the presentation

• Don’t hang onto the idea you have in your head which you have cultivated and worked on like it’s a diamond.
• You need to be open to new and better opportunities that offer a better solution all the way though the process and beyond. It is important to remember that you needed to go through the whole process to get to where you are.

• Be open at all times for opportunities to be creative

• Don’t ignore the unexpected as it may provide an opportunity to turn chance into a creative opportunity.
• It may be a book someone lent you or a restaurant you went to when your reservation got cancelled. The key is to be open at all times.

• We tend to impose strong, subtle pressures on us to see the world as fixed, fragmented and static. Yet,….

• Everything in life is in a state of flux and change and it always will be. This is the only constant we can count on.

• In conflicts, it is often assumed that there are only 2 sides

• In reality, there are multiple sides to a conflict and all perspectives need to be considered in order to grasp the whole problem.

• Do you season your food before you taste it?

• Thomas Edison always thought in terms of challenging conventional thoughts by reversing them and trying to make the reversal work. Whenever he interviewed a job applicant, he invited them to lunch and ordered the applicant a bowl of soup. If the applicant seasoned his or her soup before tasting it, he would not hire the applicant. He felt the applicant had so many built in assumptions about everyday life that it would take too much time to train them to think creatively.

• The key to establishing dialogue is to exchange ideas without trying to change the other person’s mind.

• People tend to confuse dialogue with discussion. Frequently, people engaged in personal relationships crave dialogue. Instead, however, they almost immediately switch to a discussion, judging other person’s ideas and points of view. Precious time is then wasted on trying to persuade the other side how brilliant their own ideas are and how wrong that other person is about everything in the world. If people could fully understand the fundamental difference between a dialogue and a discussion, many personal and professional issues could be resolved much easier.

• In a conflict, start with the assumption that all sides are correct.

• I have found it useful to never try to decide the right answer.
• When you start with respect instead of presuming that someone is wrong (or off) from the beginning, this is the 1st step to creating together. Otherwise, you immediately begin to build a hostile environment and make people defensive.