How to Unleash Creativity at Work
Creativity can be unleashed at work through different triggers such as being assigned a project that requires new thinking, investing in learning to catalyze new and useful ideas, and pursuing projects for which you have intrinsic interest. There are other ways to unleash creativity at work that are thought to be in the purview of management but that employees at all levels can access. For example, addressing the behavior of others that is limiting your creativity and using strategic thinking to pursue future-looking but important problems. But accessing the triggers for creativity in the workplace does not always result in creativity. Ever been in a brainstorming session in which two or three people are generating all the ideas? We know from neuroscience that the same brain regions used for tackling non-creative tasks are also used for tackling creative tasks. Just like a computer cannot help you be a writer unless you have software like Microsoft Word, brain regions cannot help you be creative unless they are harnessed in specific ways. If you view your brain as hardware like a computer, then brain software is the way to harness that hardware to perform tasks. One reason that not everyone in the brainstorming session is generating ideas is a lack of awareness for the brain software needed to put that brain hardware to work on being creative. The good news is the brain software needed to be creative can be learned.
If you are interested to learn more, then I invite you to take my marketing survey for a new course on creativity that I am developing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FVZ2ZVZ. In exchange for your input, I will email you my white paper Five Ways to Improve Creativity for Innovation which provides the key idea, a description, evidence, and what you can try for each of the five ways to improve creativity for innovation. I will also give you free access to the course once it is completed for a limited time.
