Monday, January 21, 2008

Snooze Or You Lose!

Ideation sessions are one of the things we specialize in here at BrandVenture.

We do the sessions directly with corporate teams. We also sometimes bring in kids to assist.

Creative thinking requires letting go of conventional constraints. Kids seem to be able to do that much easier than corporate leadership.

Being able to think creatively is not easy.

I have written about it in this Blog and also shared it with clients…my best ideas usually come about in the middle of the night in my dreams.

Sounds like co-dependency, but this MacBook Pro I am typing on right now sits next to my bedside where I can quickly jot down the thoughts that come up at 2am in the morning.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Staples, the office supply chain, conducted a survey among small business professionals and found out that 51% dream about work.

And of those 51% that are work-addicted, 70% report that when they wake up, they take their dreamscapes and translate them into action items for their business.

Another 39% got their ideas from driving and 15% while taking a shower. I actually get some great ideas when I take my shower too.

Only 6% got them from brainstorming sessions.

I don’t know, we seem to get a lot of great ideas from brainstorming sessions… and we have conducted the sessions with everyone from politicians to physicians to academicians to Harvard MBAs.

So many people think that creativity all centers around originality or what executives term as “out-of-the-box” thinking.

I actually had the pleasure back in my college days to work with “the father of creativity”…Dr. E. Paul Torrence.

Dr. Torrence is to creativity what Freud is to psychotherapy.

According to Dr. Torrence, creativity actually consists of:
• Fluency – the number of ideas
• Flexibility – the number of different types of ideas
• Elaboration – the degree of detail of each idea
• Originality – the degree of uniqueness of each idea

We have some cool exercises that we do on ideation retreats tailored around Dr. Torrence’s creativity model.

But perhaps the best part of our ideation retreats is that we try to set them up as two-day retreats. A format that allows the participants to get a good night’s sleep.

According to Dr. Robert Stickgold, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a consultant on the Staples survey; “There is a growing body of research that indicates that sleep is a time when we can figure out patterns beyond our grasp during the day.”

The sessions post-lunch at ideation retreats are usually the most difficult. After a nice lunch and a break, a number of participants actually doze off.

The offsite retreat BrandVenture did with Church’s Global Marketing Team this past summer was great.

On the first day, after lunch, we actually staged a two-hour siesta time.

Looking back, some of the most creative ideas surfaced that afternoon!

Next time a client wants something immediately, the best response might be… “I’ll sleep on it!”

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