I have been trying to experiment and read a load of books, articles and audios about creativity. I found the author Michael Mikalko and have bought two of his books.

Sketches inspired by the Book

The book I have been working with this week is “Cracking Creativity”.

Probably my favorite exercise was to set the “challenge” which is the statement about which you want to brainstorm. From there you then rewrote the problem for the perspective of 3 other people who know or have a stake in the challenge. Then once you have done that you compile a final statement which reflects all view points. It is like “perceptual positioning” used in NLP and coaching.

I am trying to rework my business plan and I used this technique trying to redevelop my Vision Statement. I found it really helpful. There are a lot of other techniques such as rewording, changing the verbs and nouns, transposing and narrowing it down to one word and then expanding it back out.

It is a great book and it is a pity that the style of the book is so lacking in creativity in itself. It looks and feels like a college text book which put my sister off the book initially when I showed it to her. However, the content is great and I will continue to experiment with it over the next couple of weeks.