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Archives of #creativity

Living Art: how art can help you create a meaningful life.

(Final chapter and excerpt from my new book Working From Home: An artobiography, out January 2022) I remember it was sunny. It was mid-2001, and I was in the office, as usual. Working on a doomed and contentious pitch for IKEA or something equally unfulfilling. (I love IKEA, but this pitch was a politicised non-starter.)…
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What is Creativity?

Creativity. How do we unpack it, let it out and work with it? How do we make it safe for our teams to play with it? How do we handle failing (which, let’s face it, few people really enjoy)? I recently discussed the ins and outs of creativity in the workplace via webinar with the…
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When Design Thinking Doesn’t Stick

Much of what I do involves design thinking, whether I’m teaching it at business school or practicing it inside companies, helping them use it either as part of a project or helping them change their creative DNA and “way of doing things”. And for all the universal appeal of it being a proven process, legitimised…
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The Art of Artistry

The biggest difference between famous artists and “normal” people is artists are driven to do what they do. They have to do it. What they are making is important enough to pursue for it’s own sake, regardless of its financial returns. And surprisingly, it’s often less about innate talent than the compulsion to keep going.…
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The ROI of Mess: the secret sauce of innovation

How messy do you like it? Mess is inevitable. It is an essential part of any creative process and an unavoidable by-product of making anything new. You cannot innovate without it, and often it’s a case of the more mess the better. However we appear to have been seduced by the whole concept of production-line…
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Want Real Innovation? Fire The Prom Queen Committee!

Why is consensus around new ideas seen as a desirable thing? Because it isn’t.  It’s like kryptonite. New things are by definition disruptive. They have to challenge the status quo: to be heretical. So surely what we should be looking for is healthy controversy rather than consensus? After all, we don’t all agree on whether…
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Creative Structure: Skeletons In The Closet

So what’s your taste in skeletons? Structure is critical. I had a fascinating discussion with a friend of mine the other day. Joanna’s an ex-lawyer and writer who teaches creative thinking amongst other things, so we have a lot of overlap in where we play. The fascinating thing is where we differ, and we tracked…
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Perception Is The Root Of All Error

ANY CHARACTER HERE Well, maybe not all. But about 90% of all mistakes we make apparently come down to errors in perception (how we map the information we take in) rather than faulty thinking. That’s a phenomenal statistic, because it implies that by just changing how we see things we can have a profound effect…
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