This week we’ll look at what creativity is and isn’t and I’ll explain how several creativity-related terms like ‘imagination’, ‘innovation’ and ‘incubation’. Creativity isn’t something that only applies to artistic endeavors. When businesses are looking for help coming up with creative solutions to their complex challenges, I don’t think they’re searching for oil painters! I’ll explain how we all had, then lost, all or most of our creative ability. Your best creative self is in you, it’s just buried and needs to come out. (Note: TW = trigger warning)

This week I'll share things you can do to release and reclaim your buried creativity and get back to doing and thinking things the sorts of creative things you used to do intuitively when you were a kid, but now shy away from. I'll also touch on the beliefs and assumptions you we all make about ourselves that restrict our potential.

Here I'll compare a creative and non-creative business culture and explain how you work can crush innovation. Organizations and individuals who adopt a creative, entrepreneurial mindset [aka, an innovative mindset] are much more likely to come up with truly great ideas and workable solutions.

Learn about problem-solving methods for tackling complex challenges, ones that seem to have no solution. There are many such methods, and we’ll be focusing on one of the more popular ones in the workplace, Design Thinking, which is a step-by-step problem-solving framework that is based on human centered design, a mindset that involves empathizing with the end-user, the people affected by your solution, to ensure it works for them.

I’ll teach you some tried and true brainstorming techniques for coming up with great ideas as well as how brainstorming in groupsworks, and doesn’t. I’ll also touch on a few techniques for organizing and prioritizing all those crazy ideas you came up with!