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This week is an all new show with an all new format and is a jump into creativity. If you’ve listened before you know that it used to be myself and my co-host Katie Hendricks. Katie and I had a great time doing the show and it was time for us to end that iteration and now I continue on with a new creation. Some things will remain but somethings are definitely going to be different.

This week we are talking about the true essence of creativity and the reality that we are all making everything up. You can listen to other shows where I’ve talked about this topic in a different way too. Shows 82 and 34 are great to listen to if you want more.

So, creativity…everyone is just making everything up! And what happens when we leave our preconceptions behind? And is there a process we can use to support a team’s creativity and our own? So many questions that we will attempt to answer in this week’s show. This week’s show is really all about leaving old paradigms behind.

We start with a premise that I first heard from the great Steve Jobs. You can listen to him in this video. Out of the many quotes attributed to him, this is my favorite. We first need to recognize that everything truly is being made up and yet, we often find ourselves trying to find the magic bullet. The one thing that will solve all of our issues or that will allow us to be as smart as everyone else. In business we want to be effective and we want to find the processes that work.

But our world is ever changing…we don’t think it is but it is…right under our feet. And life seems to have a way of interrupting our “routines”. Entropy is always occurring and everything is being broken down. We need to harness our creative problem-solving and even find conscious ways of disrupting our routines to find the opportunities. In the show you can hear a couple of clips from an interview conducted by Daft Punk of Giovanni Giorgio Moroder too that adds to the concepts here. We need a vision to pull us.

And there is a process that we can use that comes to us from Min Bassudur from McMaster University to support our creativity. He identifies 4 steps:

• Generating ideas (new problems that could be solve and new opprotunities)
• Conceptualizing (creating options for alternate ways to see an issue and coming up with good ideas to solve it)
• Optimizing (creating options for setting to the application phase and how to get the solutions to work)
• Implementing (creating options for implementation).

In between each stage is the application of “non-judgment” and at every stage in this process notice that it starts with “creating options”.

And this requires us to leave a lot of our preconceptions behind. Oh, and one more awesome discovery from his research…homogenous teams do better with the creative process than homogenous ones…diversity of thought really matters in the creative process.

What are some preconceptions you need to let go of right now regarding an issue you are wanting to solve? And, how do you support creativity with your teams?