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I recently attended a clinic on using magic in presentations and training presented by Ken Jones an army officer, PhD candidate and dang good magician. He opened the class with a presentation of  a magic effect performed 4 different ways. It was the classic effect of picking a card and then it is identified by the magician.

All 4 of his presentations interesting.  Each of the first 3 had about the same impact interested but expected. They were impressive but not amazing. After all you expect a magician to be able to identify your selected card. But the last presentation blew you away.  This time he had someone just think of a card. He was able to draw a picture of it. Before he drew the card, he did not ask  the volunteer any questions. Or do anything that could have indicated what the card was. Believe me I not all of them and I was watching. He got it right and the crowd gave and audible gasp. It was amazing. He then explained how he was able to did each one. The techniques went from requiring a lot of technical skill to a simple trick deck you could buy in any magic store. But the last one, the amazing one, required no technical skill. It did not even require him to go to the magic store an buy a trick deck. The technique used was simple. Before the class began he recruited someone to think of a specific card. All he had to do was draw the agreed upon card on a blank piece of paper. It was the easiest, the cheapest. It was the quickest to learn of all of the four methods.  And it was the most amazing.

This got me While there are multiple ways to accomplish the same result, we tend to work with some of the most complicated ones.  If we want to be amazing we need to trim away all the extraneous things and take the straightest path to the result desired. Simple is usually faster, better and cheaper. If you think like a magician simply is also the most amazing.

Having been away for a long time, I am just now starting to catch up on some of the past blogs. I just read a post from Seth Godin “Who Will Save Save Us.” This was a great way so stating the importance of innovation. As Seth says, “the status quo is leaving the building.”  Trying to preserve job is fertile. Thank back to your high school bilology class. When you preserved something you kept it from decaying. You kept it from changing. Which meant it was dead. There was no life to it. But it was preserved.  That which is alive changes. Trees dogs and children all change  as long as the live. They only keep them from changing when the are dead and we place them in formaldehyde. Jobs are the same. Not allowing a job to change will cause it to die. Why morn the demise of the newspaper or the print publishing industry? News is not going away. Books are not going away. The only thing that is changing is the way we receive them. If newspapers, book publishers, television, recording and entertainment and yes your industry, do not change they will all go die.  If you want to stay alive you must change.

Innovation allows you to both react to the change and create change.

The business world has traditionally favored analytical thinking over conceptual thinking. Conceptually is the type of thinking required for innovation. Our educational system at all levels from elementary to graduate schools produces young men and women who think along strict parameters. But times have changed. We no longer need to train people to work for Henry Ford. That is where they check their brains and the door and simple do a job without thinking about what is being done or why. The jobs we need to train for today are not the types of jobs that require strict adherence to rules and simply following instructions. Those jobs are going overseas.  And they are going quickly. We need a work force that can imagine, create and innovate.

While innovation and creativity are tightly linked they are not the same. Creativity is a key component of innovation. Creativity is both the ability to use an idea in a completely new and different context and the ability to combine two or more ideas to form a completely new idea. Innovation applies creativity to create value. Today businesses need people who can create new ideas and then evaluate those ideas to determine how to use them to provide value.

Businesses that do not currently have a cadre of creative and innovative people may be tempted to try and recruit them or simply buy ideas from some other source. If you do not have in place a culture which values conceptual and creative thinking, trying to hire creative people is a fool’s errand. Businesses that attempt to fill the creative and innovative void by simply trying to purchase it will often find they have purchased a “me-too” solution.

In order to bring innovation into an organization it must create a culture of that supports innovation and creativity. Without first creating a corporate culture that supports creativity, organizations are unable to retain their recruits or worse these once creative souls will conform to the culture and unlearn their creativity. The organization must first develop a culture that values and encourages creativity.

Everyone can be creative. However, our education system and business environments cause them to unlearn their creativity.

If you doubt that everyone can be creative just ask yourself, “Who are the most creative people on the planet?” Children! If you watch children play you will see amazing creativity and innovation. Every child is creative and since the probability is very high that every one in your organization was, at one time, a child then everyone in your organization has the ability within himself or herself to be creative. The impact the environment has on creativity was demonstrated by a study conducted by George Land and Beth Jarman. They gave 1,600 five-year olds a creativity test used by NASA in selecting innovative engineers and scientists, and 98 percent of the five year olds scored in the “highly creative” range. Those same children were re-tested five years later, only 30 percent of the 10 year-olds still rated “highly creative”. Again five year later at age 15, only 12 percent ranked “highly creative”. It appears that every year a child spend in our educational system reduce their ability to be creative.  Land and Jarman tested over 200,000 adults over the age of 25 and only 2 percent were ranked as “highly creative.” Creativity is not learned it is unlearned.

In the next few posts I will discuss some specific ideas on how to build creativity in your organization.

The Christmas season is over and the reports from retailers are in. It sucked! Many blame the rescission. I am sure that was a major impact. But in previous rescission items that were truly innovative, regardless of the economic outlook, tempted consumers to buy.  Truly innovative products such as flat-screen TVs and smartphones tempted consumers in recent years. But this year the greatest innovation was the $8 Zhu Zhu robotic pet hamster.

At many companies, quick turn and product extensions replaced more costly, though more rewarding, investments in revolutionary inventions. Let’s face it most of the recent innovations such as Hummer SUV and collectivized debt obligations (CDOs) were not, well innovative. They were simply the same ideas and products with a new coat of paint.

Research and Development budgets have been slashed in favor of sucking what life still exists out of current markets. This is the classic short-term thinking that put us in this rescission. When we come out of this rescission (which we will) the next will be caused by lacking competitive products.

Creativity is like a muscle it must be exercised. If you let it just sit then it wastes away. Here is an idea to use to help exercise your creativity muscles. It was developed by the Panamericana School of Art and Design. It encourages people everywhere to test their creativity.

The objective is to draw as many things as possible from X’s or O’s. How far does your creativity go?

Test your Creativity