I received an email yesterday from a man taking exception to something I had written in a previous post. I’d described dreamers as little more than fantasists who do nothing with their ideas as opposed to creative thinkers who actually take massive amounts of action. Taking on board his comments that he is proud to count himself as a dreamer and someone who has taken action in his life I felt I should describe the differences between a dreamer and creative thinker as I see it.

A fantasist is creative without focus or purpose

A creative thinker has the ability to focus their creativity on a specific purpose or goal and achieve it.

A fantasist thinks creatively without an intention of taking action despite what they tell you

A creative thinker knows that to be truly creative he must take a...

I recently ran a workshop for some local business owners.

One of them was very sceptical, so sceptical infact that I wondered why he had bothered to come along.

“Its all a load of crap” he said. “I’ve seen people thinking creatively and its done nothing for my business.”

The funny thing was a part of me agrees with him.

I don’t want to go through the reasons why part of me agreed with him in this post. I’ve already ranted about them in past posts. In this post I want to take you through some of the principles I discussed with this gentlemen.

Principles that will, if you use them, ensure your business gains something of value from the creative thinking that you and your employees do.

1)Think within the box – regular readers of my articles will be sick of hearing this but you really need...

I recently saw a BBC documentary on the writer Ian Rankin?

Something he said led me to ask myself a question.

Can you anchor creativity?

At the beginning of the documentary we see Rankin struggling to start writing and find his voice. He wades through his music collection and selects a CD commenting “when my brain hears this music it knows its time to start writing.”

I was struck by this comment.

Anchoring is a term that those familiar with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) will have heard of. It’s a technique you can use to link selected emotions to a particular body part or a specific sound or colour.

The anchoring process is as follows:

• Identify the specific emotional state you want to anchor
• Experience the state you want to anchor
• Notice how the emotional state peaks and declin...

You’ve been stopped in your tracks by a problem. Initial thoughts and emotions turn from “why does it always happen to me to” to fear, frustration or simply weariness. Its at times like this I turn to the power of creative problem solving which is really just another way of saying intelligent problem solving. Having used it on numerous occasions I can testify to its effectiveness. Heres some of the techniques and tricks I use to solve problems.

Change your emotional reaction to the problem! - By indulging in negative thoughts around the problem you are giving your brain messages to shut down its creativity...

Working as a designer means you have to be able to be creative at the drop of a hat which is not always easy.

One of the things I find incredibly, useful especially when I am a bit stuck, is to create moodboards. It’s not just something for designers though, anyone can use it to get a real feel for a market and to inspire new ideas.

How to create a moodboard

Collect together imagery which in some way relates to your subject. This could be in a very literal sense, or just imagery which might appeal to your target market. For example, if you wanted ideas for gardeners you could search through garden magazines, but if it was young people you could perhaps look for images related to music, mobile phones, surfing, snowboarding, dancing etc.

You can find images in magazines, brochures, leaflets,...