Question: When is a silly walk not a silly walk?

Answer: When it earns you a fortune and people blog about it forty years later.

I like this quote from John Cleese: “High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought”

Aha! Easy!

Except that critical thought is just our old friend the Tiger in disguise. “What if I get it wrong?” “What will they think of me?” “Could this be a career limiting move?”. Roooar. The Tiger and his demand for “critical thought” just killed the creativity and spontaneity.

How do you do it? Here’s one tip: Explore random juxtaposition.

For example – let a random object (ask a passing child to pick you one or ask your partner to bring you anything they like from the kitchen) influence your thinking on a problem. What is/are the object’s history, uses, oblique uses in the hands of an improvisation expert, smell, texture, imagined history from creation, imagined future until destruction, colour, what emotions or memories does it evoke in you? Relate these qualities randomly to your problem, the people, the history, the way you might approach a solution and so on. Now discard the object and create a little speech, out loud, in the car, perhaps, about the problem that you are looking to solve, linking words and thoughts from the previous stage into the speech. Do not judge it, nobody is listening (and after all this is just a silly exercise, right?).

Did you get an answer? Did you get to the unexpected, central, real nature of the problem that you have to solve?

Over to you…

Jim

PS Blaire Palmer, MD of Taming Tigers wrote about creativity in our July newsletter. Email enquiries@tamingtigers.com to request a copy and sign up for future editions at www.tamingtigers.com (there’s a box on the top of the homepage)

Click on the image to view the Rule 2 video.