Denial Is The River To Hell I’m not sick. It’ll be OK. Soon everything will be normal. These are things people say all the time. They are normal, comforting things to say. But they all have one thing in common: denial of a state of affairs. And denial is the … Read More
The Problem With This Pandemic Is… The Problem with this pandemic is that is has pushed nearly everyone into a state of mind that we’d rather not endure: uncertainty. As a creativity expert, this irony is not lost on me. Being open to ambiguity and complexity are two of the … Read More
When Goals Go wrong How Being Too Specific Can Derail You We’ve learned to admire the goal-oriented person: the character who states what they want and then goes out and gets it. And to be sure, there is something about a person that actually does what they say that is … Read More
Step Into The Bog How uncertainty and ambiguity deliver answers One of the key aspects of creative thought is the ability to step into the grey space between facts and entertain ‘What if’s’. To effect change, you must step into the bog of uncertainty. For some people, this is so … Read More
Do Drugs Help Creativity? Rockstars are known to be creative. They are also known to be wild rule breakers. This is not a coincidence. Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll (thanks Ian Drury) swiftly become the catch-all description for rockstars. So, do drugs help with creativity? Well, drugs have … Read More
Find Structure – Find Creativity Creativity as a concept seems to be very tied to chaos for many people. So much so that when I describe my highly structured creative routine or suggest that their creativity would benefit from some more structure, people look at me like I am nuts. … Read More
5 Good Reasons to Break Rules Whenever I say that we should break more rules, people are quick to assume I want to induce anarchy. I don’t. I want to induce something else: personal responsibility, accountability… actually thinking about what to do next. Rules create predictability. A lot of what … Read More
We all make snap judgements… we look at situations and, based on a gut feel or instinct, we decide what to do. There is no rationality involved in these judgements. Our society is in a bad way, with polarised, YES/No dominating public dialogues, poisoning social media and making our children … Read More
The book of Ecclesiastes in the Christian bible contains a much-quoted and painfully accurate phrase: ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ This simple thought is the reason why originality or uniqueness cannot be part of any definition of creativity or innovation. EVERYTHING is, on one level or another, a … Read More
One thing any creative person needs to learn really fast is: Never throw anything you have made away. It’s true, sometimes your ideas are not practical, don’t fit the situation, sound bad or silly. But this doesn’t mean they are bad ideas as such… maybe just that their time has … Read More