Building creative habits for better business ideas

Creativity is not a garnish on your business activities. It’s not the exuberant sprinkles that are flung onto your raspberry ice cream as an afterthought. It’s not the sauce, all drippy and red, that is squeezed on top to try and enliven the dish. It’s not even the ice cream. It’s the punchy raspberry swirl that runs through that ice cream, bringing life, and taste, and making it different to all those boring vanilla ice creams on the menu that no one really ever wants to eat.

But enough with the ice cream chat, it’s making me feel chilly.

Building a business with ideas takes creativity, and that means putting ideas at the very heart of everything. So as a business owner, building creative habits into your daily or weekly routine is the first step.

So here is a list of 6 creative habits to try. Best served one at a time – overloading your plate with a pile of habits won’t end well and is likely to cause creative indigestion.

1.       Run a monthly challenge focus. There are a whole range of challenges in every business that are not time bound or customer critical, but still are an essential part of growth. How to design a brilliant onboarding process. How to delight our long-term customers. How to engage staff with a new initiative. Pick a challenge and dedicate a month to coming up with ideas. Stick the challenge on a whiteboard and take five minutes every day to add two ideas (invite others to do the same). Or have a monthly ideas session with the team to generate new ideas. Or keep a notebook just for monthly challenges and add ideas as they come to you. At the end of the month evaluate the ideas, create a plan and implement. This is a fantastic momentum-builder in terms of how ideas transform into growth.

2.       Open an Ideas Bank. There can be the potential for lots of wasted creative energy when you are consistently coming up with ideas, so opening an Ideas Bank is a brilliant way to conserve all that energy, and store it up for when you next need inspiration. This can be as low tech as a dedicated notebook, a Word or Excel document, or something more fancy. Reviewing past ideas can uncover solutions to new challenges or inspire new thinking. Make regular deposits in your ideas bank and there will be no end of interesting ideas accrued.

3.       Build ideas pipelines. You can read more about this in our blog here but building purposeful ways to ensure a steady stream of ideas into your business is a great way to keep your ideas bank topped up, and be able to solve new challenges quickly with the right solution. Make sure you are using your team’s creative potential by giving them easy ways to contribute ideas, and put ideas on every meeting agenda. Your ideas bank will soon be earning compound interest.

4.       Learn something new. Knife skills. Unicycling. Outdoor crochet. Commit to learning a new skill and reap the creative benefits. The process of learning that is not related to your business is a brilliant way to feed ideas into your business. It help develop problem solving, encourages a mind set of curiosity and reminds us that there is an art to not knowing, and not being competent, and that can be an exciting place to be. It will allow a fresh breeze to run through your brain, leaving you open to new connections and ideas. And that ceramics course suddenly becomes tax deductible (it doesn’t, but I live in hope).

5.       Engage in purposeful procrastination. Procrastination needs a better PR agency, because as a creative force, it can be really useful. If you’ve got a challenge that needs solving, and you keep putting it off, that’s not laziness. It may well be your brain telling you it needs a bit more time. So here’s a tip to get the most from your procrastination: write your challenge, or the obstacle you face, on a bit of paper and tuck into your desk drawer / back of the fridge  down your sock. Then get on with some procrastination activities: tidying your desk, sorting out your paperclips or alphabetising your tins of soup. Only after that, come back and relook at your challenge. You’ve given your subconscious time to do the creative heavy lifting and you’ll find it easier to come up with some creative solutions. (Oh, and don’t forget to take the paper out of your sock before you put it in the wash).

6.       Run Germination sessions. These will seriously power up your creativity if you run them regularly. Find a Germination buddy (not as salacious as it sounds) and meet regularly for short, focused sessions where you work on your challenges using a creative thinking framework. Handily, hung in the Tool Shed this month is a downloadable Germination Framework for you to use – and you can be whisked away to the Tool Shed by clicking here to get your hands on it.

There you go. Six creative habits to get ideas into the heart of what you do to boost business growth. Pick a new creative habit and give it a go – and once that is ‘business as usual’, add in the next one. Before you know it, you’ll have ideas coming out of your ears and your raspberry ripple ice cream will be the envy of all.

And if you want help evaluating all these ideas, pop over to the Tool Shed for our Ideas Evaluation matrix tool.

Keep your eyes on the blog, there’ll be another 6 creative habits along shortly…