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Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves and their teams more creative. That’s according to management consultants Marla Capozzi, Renée Dye and Amy Howe, of McKinsey & Co. “Although creativity is often considered a trait of the privileged few, any individual or team can become more creative – better able to generate the breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance,” they wrote in a recent report in McKinsey Quarterly.
“In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams – ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps – suggests companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level.”
Accordingly, the key is to focus on perception, which neuroscientists believe is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. It’s said that to perceive things differently we need to bombard our brain with things it’s never encountered. Because the brain routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy, it’s only by forcing it to re-categorise information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns that we can begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.
4 Tips for creative thinking
1 IMMERSE YOURSELF: Would-be innovators need to break free of pre-existing views. Seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s therefore valuable to start creativity-building exercises outside the office by engineering personal experiences that directly confront the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions.
2 OVERCOME ORTHODOXIES: Exploring deep-rooted company (or even industry) orthodoxies is another way to jolt your brain out of the familiar in an idea-generating session, a team meeting or simply a contemplative moment alone at your desk.
3 USE ANALOGIES: By forcing comparisons between one company and a second – seemingly unrelated – teams make considerable creative progress, particularly in situations requiring greenfield ideas.
4 CREATE CONSTRAINTS: Impose artificial constraints on your business model. Imposing constraints to spark innovation may seem counterintuitive, yet without some old-fashioned forcing mechanisms many would-be creative thinkers spin their wheels aimlessly or never leave their intellectual comfort zones.
Source: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com
“In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams – ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps – suggests companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level.”
Accordingly, the key is to focus on perception, which neuroscientists believe is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. It’s said that to perceive things differently we need to bombard our brain with things it’s never encountered. Because the brain routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy, it’s only by forcing it to re-categorise information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns that we can begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.
4 Tips for creative thinking
1 IMMERSE YOURSELF: Would-be innovators need to break free of pre-existing views. Seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s therefore valuable to start creativity-building exercises outside the office by engineering personal experiences that directly confront the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions.
2 OVERCOME ORTHODOXIES: Exploring deep-rooted company (or even industry) orthodoxies is another way to jolt your brain out of the familiar in an idea-generating session, a team meeting or simply a contemplative moment alone at your desk.
3 USE ANALOGIES: By forcing comparisons between one company and a second – seemingly unrelated – teams make considerable creative progress, particularly in situations requiring greenfield ideas.
4 CREATE CONSTRAINTS: Impose artificial constraints on your business model. Imposing constraints to spark innovation may seem counterintuitive, yet without some old-fashioned forcing mechanisms many would-be creative thinkers spin their wheels aimlessly or never leave their intellectual comfort zones.
Source: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com
