It is a common misperception that creative types stare at the ceiling,多米娱乐平台 muse among the stars and drink a lot of brown liquor waiting for the next great idea or solution to whack them upside the head. More frequently and, importantly, more dependably, truly creative solutions are the result of intense focus informed and inspired by concrete rules.

Rule 1: All people are equally creative, but some are more equally creative than others 所有人都有创意，只是多米娱乐有些人比其他多米体育平台人更有创意

There are proven techniques to be more creative and produce more creative solutions and some of these are identified below, but at some point, there are diminishing returns and it is best to recognize that among your team there are horses for courses. Accepting that some of your colleagues are more clever, more brilliant, more quirky, more tortured, more dedicated to creative solutions than others is, in and of itself, a very creative rule.

Rule 2: Trashcan brainstorming 垃圾的头脑风暴

The realization that not everyone on your team is or can become creative unfortunately only comes after the inevitable failure of the default (and lazy, and ineffective and inefficient) creative problem-solving tool, brainstorming. A greater time waster than brainstorming has yet to be invented. Give me six creatively skilled people to work independently for 2 hours (12 hours total) and I'll produces 100x the number of valuable ideas that Bob from accounting, Molly from finance, Jim from product management and three others will produce over cold pizza and warm soda in a stuffy conference room for those same 2 hours.

Rule 3: Ashcan crowdsourcing 垃圾的集思广益

A hundred monkeys may eventually type a coherent sentence, but that is random luck not an exhibition of creativity. The same holds true for crowd sourced ideas. Crowds are good at reflecting trends that have already started or echoing ideas that already exist. Crowds produce ideas with the lowest common denominator. Crowds stink at originality. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs; crowds don't know what they want, that's our job.

Rule 4: Out-of-the-Box Ideas Need In-the-Box Roadmaps 跳出框架的想法需要框架作为指导

Effective ideas, meaning those that actually work; be it a new product, an advertisement, a speech, whatever, are the offspring of closely written, insightfully shaped, inspirationally crafted direction. The highway of business history is littered with great solutions that answered the wrong question. For every hour of expected creative effort, half an hour should be devoted to understanding the issues, framing the problem, and uncovering the information that will fuel the innovative aha moment. Creative solutions do not come from loose direction. Unorthodox, wild, innovative, ground-breaking solutions are born of tightly knit strategy.

Rule 5: Solving a problem requires inspiration 解决问题需要灵感

The brain, surprisingly, is a dormant organ. It needs information and stimuli to work. It needs fuel to ignite the connections between neurons and the connections between problems and solutions. Staring into space hoping for inspiration is akin to your body sitting on the couch hoping to become fit. Problems, from a leaky faucet to the blank page of your first blog, need tools to fix them. The faucet needs a wrench. Your problem needs a wrench equivalent; it could be an encyclopedia, a newspaper, a recent experience, or a passage of music. Here's the point: When you have a problem, you need to seek out inspiration, e.g. toys, books, movies, Google, reference books--lots of them, hell even pieces of furniture, that will stimulate your brain to make the connections between the problem and the solution.

Rule 6: Time in and time out 开始和结束的时间

Creative solutions require time. Some people are able to solve problems instantaneously. We call them geniuses. But most of us are not geniuses. Creative people carve out time to be creative. Intense periods of focus alternate with downtime. Downtime, i.e. time not spent consciously thinking about the problem, serves an important role in allowing the brain to relax and, almost when it is least expected, discover the odd, innovative, previously unthinkable solution. Some might call this procrastinating, creative people call it thinking.

To produce solutions that break the rules, you need to know the rules in the first place.

　　作者：Mike Pile，President, Uppercase Branding

　　文章来源：Inc.