You may be in this situation before. There are times when creativity is needed: Ideas are flowing, someone says a sentence like “We don’t have the time”, and flows stopped. Dave Dufour developed a list called Fifty Phrases that Kill Creativity in the late 80s, to create an awareness not to kill off ideas – even…

We live in world full of pressures to conform: to believe what others tell us is true, to toe the line, to accept the values of those in positions of power, and to follow conventional, approved paths. That’s the way to get on in life and business, we are told. You need to fit in…

A book review by Reg Adkins. The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (2005, Dana Press), by Nancy C. Andreason. This book is not written for the technical reader. It has a conversational tone and does very little to address neuroscience as the title would lead you to believe. However, the book is a good place…

We’ve all been on one side or the other of this equation: we’ve done something new, something creative, and we’re really proud of it. We ask our friends to get involved, and tell us what they think, and the friend says, “Wow! That’s really great. I like it. I like it.” You, as the creative type…

Kirby Ferguson has written a summary for the book A Technique for Producing Ideas. Generating good idea is a fine art, if you have mastered it you will be successful in many fields. The author of the book, James Young, describes five steps on a technique of combining old elements together: Gather new material, both specific…

A leader forced to utilize “hamburger management” is like a cordon bleu chef told to work as a short-order cook and produce nothing but hamburgers with french fries every day. Any organization that uses this approach is like a diner who eats nothing else. The first becomes bored, frustrated and disillusioned; the second becomes sick…

If you want learning to work for you, you must create the conditions in which exploration can take place and discoveries can be made. It’s very clear what these are. Without them, all your efforts to learn and grown will be in vain.

Jessie James Garrett gives us Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store, where he talks about the difference between experiences and artifacts, context, messaging, consistency, change, and the human element. Every single bit of this piece is a storm of microcontent for you to consider. There’s a lot about the Apple Store experience that we…

Podcast Academy 2 wrapped up in Boston on Saturday with a reminder that the next Podcast Academy will be hosted by Yahoo! in Santa Clara, California shortly. One great thing about the hosts of THIS session, Boston University, was that their crack team of AV people had the podcasts and presentations up on the web…

Go create something. I don’t care what, how much it cost, the purpose, or the form, but the result must be supremely innovative, worth every penny, and profoundly significant to the human race. Take your time.

The reasonable person finds this overwhelming. Creativity’s root is the tension filled conflict between the imagination and the physical: input and output, insight and achievement, learning and performing. Remove conflict and there is no need for creativity. Imagination v. reality – like a courtroom battle — negotiation leads to creative solutions. In onerous jargon laden corporate speak: look for the win/win.

Look at Dad take pictures of little Joey go down the playground slide. Wait – hasn’t he taken about 100 shots of that little boy this morning? Oh yeah – digital – our lives are digital now. Content is overwhelming: words, images, sounds. That same proud Dad uploaded this week’s most precious 150 images to the Joey’s Cute website, so all his dedicated fans can view the little darling.

Those phone photographers are in play too. The phone is now a ubiquitous capture device making no one immune from the serendipitous photographer documenting our most inelegant moments. Unedited, they’re thrown up on Flickr.com for your viewing pleasure – often for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

Pleasure? I’m not so sure. Just like those jokes we used to forward through email as web-neophytes, they swiftly become annoying. We learned only to forward those that were extra-specially, extraordinarily hilarious. The best ones traveled the internet like a virus, but as with a healthy immune system, minor viruses are cured. Who’s going to cure the information overload virus? Who’s going to help me edit my life?

The doorway to real change isn’t open often, so the times when it is (those “teachable moments”) are too precious to waste. Here’s how to use them to the full.

We are all creative, but being “a creative” usually refers to someone for whom creativity is life’s goal: Illustrator, Architect, Advertising Art Director, Writer, Musician, Photographer, Designer, Etc. Scientists, Surgeons, Marketing Managers, CEO’s and other problem solving discovery professions are among our species most creative members, but typically don’t get the label.

It’s difficult to discuss emotions relating to creative artistic expression without digging at the roots of emotions themselves, but it’s not hard to experience the emotive nature of creativity. Artistic expression or performance has an emotional component: Etta James in full voice, an Ansel Adams retrospective, or a dance company performing the Nutcracker are good examples.

Chuck Frey over at Creativity For Life has some tips to increase your effectiveness on personal problem-solving skills. Think about there is a time you are solving a problem, and the challenge is too big that you want to give up. How should you tackle it? Chuck suggested two steps: State your problem clearly, and…