Improve your creativity in doing business

your creation. Chances are you drew something that resembles other organisms in some way, perhaps you put in six arms but they still look like arms, the wings are borrowed from a bat or an eagle, the ears perhaps from an elephant.
Most people when asked to do this exercise engage in a process called structured imagery — using something that already exists as your starting point rather than creating something totally new and amazing.
Why did you give your creature a mouth to feed with, why not give it an “oolong” (I don’t know what an oolong is, it just sounded cool), in fact why would it need to feed at all?
In the same manner when asked to improve the way you do business, when staring a new business or when creating a new concept our natural tendency is to start with a point of reference that we are familiar with and tweak it say perhaps 10 percent for luck. We don’t move far from the established norms and if society has anything to do with it they will try drag you back to it.
Think of a paediatrician, they spend their whole day seeing sick babies. All day, every day babies that are sick, ill and struggling a little bit with life pass through their office. Now it would be a mistake for that doctor to think that all babies in the world are sick. Yet, we do that with business.
Zimbabwe is filled with businesses that are struggling to survive, businesses that have “a way” of achieving their goals that is not working, businesses that think that trebling a price in retail is great and standard practice.
We employ people who think that arriving at work at 8am on the dot is okay even if it takes them 30 minutes to get ready for work.
Some people even shudder at the idea of putting in even an extra five minutes after hours, and heaven forbid they should sacrifice tea break to get a project out on time. We have a lot of sick ways of doing business — and we think it’s normal.
After all, everyone else’s business looks like it. Then when we try and improve we start out with the image of what we already know — an image that is already distorted and try to improve from there, and because of the constraints of creativity we don’t get very far.
This is one of the reasons why travel is important — it exposes you to different cultures, different ways of doing business and different work ethics. Perhaps they are not totally healthy either, but it provides a different image for you to start with.
Fortunately, imagination and creativity are muscle type skills — they can be trained and improved to get better at it. The more you practise the better they become.
The science of getting your mind to work more creatively for you has been around for a while, it’s just that very few people bother to stretch their minds.
There are numerous techniques for helping improve your creativity and problem solving but the main thing is to be intentional about it.
This means taking time to think about problems, setting aside periods where you can structure your thoughts. Many people choose to avoid problems, they sweep them under the mental carpet and hope that they will just go away if ignored long enough.
Often they don’t, and your business continues to limp along because you refuse to face the reality that your accounting, sales, marketing, advertising, reception just is not cutting it.
Ironically, it is the action of staring reality in the face and realising that you need a better solution that stimulates the creative genius in your brain.
One way of looking for solutions is to analyse the essence of the situation and then looking at how other parts of the universe deal with similar essences. Struggling with flow of customers through your store? Perhaps look at how water flows, study rivers or the migration patterns of the Masai Mara, or run marbles through a maze, examine an ant colony or a beehive. This stimulates different connections in your brain. Or try a difference of perspective — literally. Pin a picture of the problem on the wall then sit on the floor or on the table while you discuss options.
Kick-start your brain to fire along new and different neural pathways rather than the well worn ones that are letting you down.
Then give it time to ferment, do something unrelated as thoughts run around in your subconscious for a while before allowing them to bubble to the surface.
Remember “You do not bend the spoon for that would be impossible . . . there is no spoon.” (quote courtesy of The Matrix).