10 Creative Ways to Unlock Your Creative Side

Unlocking your creative side as well as nurturing your organisation’s creativity is a necessary business skill to stay ahead of the curve.

These 10 ‘creative’ ways will help you encourage creative thinking with guaranteed results.

1. From whiteboards to sticky notes

Visually representing an idea is a powerful tool for brainstorming and collaboration. Take your idea to the whiteboard, use multi-colour pens to represent its creative offshoots. Let your team scribble along until you have a masterplan.

Tim Brown, a creative powerhouse and CEO of innovation company Ideo has employed sticky notes many times to find his eureka moments. He exclusively mentions this technique in his book – Change by Design.

2. Odd ideas come from Odd venues

A boardroom meeting can lack essential elements that encourage creative thinking. Add elements of competitiveness, sensory involvement and adrenaline rush to your team meeting by changing your venue to an odd place like a water park and the results can be startling.

Genera Games is a mobile game publishing company known to take its team meetings out to a basketball court. Shooting a 3 pointer surely motivates them to come up with bold ideas.

3. Learning a new skill

On the personal front, learning a new skill exposes us to new concepts that are used in learning that skill. A coder who learns how to play a piano will see his keyboard in an entirely new way. Possibly get better at typing.

Learning new skills also exercises your brain by making new connections and uplifts confidence as every little achievement is a reward of applied thinking.

4. Constructive distractions

Many organisations discourage their employees visiting social media pages and Youtube at work labelling them as distractions. At times, these distractions are necessary to get you out of the mental block. Mental breaks are a key factor to develop employees creative thinking

Dell has something similar for its employees called “speak for Dell” where it allows them to use Social media to encourage free thinking and collaboration.

5. Draw a line beyond deadline

A revelation for many CEOs to why their teams are not creative enough is that they are overburdened by projects and deadlines. While the employees do get creative in becoming efficient, they might get locked in a tunnel vision.

Allot one day, or one hour every day at work to doing something outside their scope of work.

Google has a 20 percent policy that allows its employees of spend 20 percent of their working hours on side projects. This policy has resulted in some of the best Google products like Google News.

6. Revisit the beginner’s mindset

Often thinking afresh needs one to have a clean slate. The greatest hurdle in front of creative thinking is the fear of failing, something top management cannot afford. Encouraging a beginner’s mindset is a vital step towards nurturing a creative culture in every company.

Pixar president Ed Catmull has beautifully encapsulated this in his book Creativity Inc.

"Our fear stems from the need to make the non-existent into being ... people often try to overcome this fear by simply repeating what has worked in the past. That leads nowhere--or, more accurately, it leads in the opposite direction of originality. The trick is to use our skills and knowledge not to duplicate but to invent."

7. Don’t stop kidding

As unbelievable as it may sound, discussing your business problem with a kid can help boost your creativity. Children can bring in a fresh perspective to your thought process.

Swetleena Zenith, an 11th grader from Allahabad, invented multicoloured headphone wires to help headphone users untangle them easily. Simple yet effective.

8. Cross-pollination of ideas

Setting up teams with different skillsets encourages diversity in thought process. Further, blend in employees from different ethnicities to get a potent mix of creative thinkers capable of unmatched out of box thinking.

9. First principles thinking

One can acquire creative thinking through an existing framework for thinking out of box. One such model followed by leading CEOs is first principles reasoning.

The idea is to question every assumption until you get to its fundamental truth. This thinking approach is entirely opposite to analogical thinking, that is borrowing concepts from other worlds.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and co-founder of Paypal credits his innovative thinking to first principles reasoning.

10. Flexible work hours

It’s a fact that some people are more creative after midnight, while some get their creativity flowing in the morning. By letting employees break out from a 9 to 5 schedule, you facilitate them get out of the box as well.

Companies like Mindtools, American Society of Clinical Psychology are using ROWE (Result-Only Work Environment) to help their employees get more creative at work.

Sowing seeds of creativity

Creative thinking is the fuel driving companies towards unprecedented success today. Start-ups and hole in the wall companies armed with novel creative ideas are changing the competitive ecosystem in almost every industry, at times challenging well established giants like the Fortune 500 companies.

Today, we have the tools to assess and enhance creativity and ensure an innovation driven culture in every company, big or small.

Image source:

• ideo
• chartboost
• youtube
• Moneycontrol
• The Creative Mind
• Hollywood reporter
• Indiamart
• 123RF.com
• CNBC.com
• Sales Rain