Posts Tagged: creativity

Breaking Down the Fourth Wall on Project Management

Imagine your manager gives you a new project to manage and you are required to develop a strategy for the next year. A few other requirements are identified and you are sailing along great until it happens. You realize that the program requirements have now put you in a “box” where all the parameters areRead… Read more »

7 Ways You Kill Creativity in Your Meeting

Do your meetings have a creative killer? Newsrooms call them “story killers,” the naysayers at meetings who repeatedly shoot down stories while unsuspecting victims are trying to generate new ideas. Creative killers assassinate ideas, breeding fear and limiting impact for hundreds, maybe even thousands. These idea deaths never get investigated and their potential never getsRead… Read more »

Do You Need a Whack on the Side of Your Head?

More specifically, do you need help embracing your creativity? I can hear some of you saying right now, “what creativity”? Relax, you’ve got it. Even if you don’t think you use it often, it’s there. Let’s figure out how to brush it off a bit. Ready? If you haven’t read the book referenced in thisRead… Read more »

Lessons From the Upside Down Fire

In the middle of cold winter days, what could be better than making a roaring fire? But you’ve probably been building an inefficient fire. It’s probably hard to start. You have to keep adding logs and moving them around to get good burn. The edges of the logs don’t burn. It takes a long timeRead… Read more »

One Simple Strategy to Break Bureaucracy and Drive Creativity

I’ve been taking a course on innovation on Lynda.com, an online training and learning community. The course, Business Innovation Fundamentals with Drew Boyd, focuses on how to innovate using Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on several techniques to innovate on demand. It has been an interesting course, and one of the elements really caughtRead… Read more »

So You’re Stuck…Now What? Ways to Get Out of a Rut

Returning from long holiday weekends and vacation get-a-ways can often remind us of the places in our lives we feel stuck: in a job, a community or a relationship. Are you feeling like this little turtle? A few month’s ago, a dear friend and I were walking along a lake shore when we stumbled uponRead… Read more »

Why Teamwork is Overrated

There’s No “I” in Team – But There is a “ME”! Why Teamwork is Overrated Let’s all work together! Sounds great, right? Well, sometimes it is. But if you want to create an environment where creativity, imaginative problem solving, and attention to detail flourishes, you may need to let some of your team members workRead… Read more »

Standardizing Innovation

Originally posted at www.cpsrenewal.ca. Voices have been asking how government could take advantage of interesting models such as gamification, crowdsourcing, nudges, etc., looking for opportunities to innovate. I’ve tended to think that, if there is value in such approaches, the better question would be “Why are we not already using them?” And there’s a reasonableRead… Read more »