CreativeThinkingasaFocus

Teams or Groups: Introverts, Ambiverts, Extroverts Over the 38 years since 1980 when I was hired to do my first workshop and my first keynote speeches about leading, communicating, teaming and creative thinking, whether as individual topics, combined or integrated I have developed my understandings of TEAMWORK. Introverts make good team players when matched with people of similar to the same commitment, degree of knowledge and skills Extroverts make good team players but sometimes those teams border on becoming groups and end up group thinking. My work with thinking styles helped me develop a model of TYPES or STYLES of Teams. I used 4 types of sports as metaphors or analogies. Football (american) Baseball Basketball Olympic teams Meditative  - Football--logical people prefer to work on Football teams with lots ot thinking, strategizing, planning and with lots of breaks Directive - Baseball -- systematic, rule following, highly structured, pre-planned or specifi...

005 Follow-On, Follow-Up, Follow-Thru One of the benefits I have gained from having had 49 jobs in 8 professions and studying for 9 degrees and competing 5 of them is that I have learned to look for the same wisdom from many different sources Sales Marketing Training Teaching Strategic Thinking & Planning Creative Problem Solving Follow-On, Follow-Up, Follow-Thru Is a 3-stage process or system that works in all 4 of these professions. Follow-On - short range, short period of time contact your potential customers, markets, trainees, students within a short time after you have made your first Call Sale Contact Training Program Class Problem Solving Session Follow-Up - mid range, moderate amount of time (week, month, quarter) contact them again to learn what they have been doing or using since you first met and them provide them with additional information Follow-Thru - long-range (weeks, months, quarters up to a year) review what their succe...

STIMULATING YOUR CREATIVITY (I am reshaping this blog because it is relevant in 2018) A book I just became aware of and ordered arrived yesterday and I started reading it this morning as a daily read/study for the next few days to a week or so. STIMULATED! by Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade I became aware of them over the internet as creativity consultants: product design/problem solving focus. Stimulation  is one of the factors Timing is another Need/Desire... Challenge and many other factors ...all come into play to yield, produce, spark, explode our creativity: amount, level, type, energy etc. These are some of the variables I have discovered, learned and experienced over the 30 years I have CONSCIOUSLY explored, examined and focused on creativity and creative thinking. Some times it is just DUMB LUCK! One of the early writers about creativity and creative processes described a 4-step process being required for creativity Graham Wallas Preparation .....

Out-of-Box, In-the-Box, New-Box, Other-Box, No-Box Thinking For years supporters and detractors of creative thinking in the workplace have talked about Out-of-the-Box Thinking The supporters, often consultants and researchers, have stressed the easiest way for people to be creative was to think out-of-the-box , to break their paradigms or mindsets, their ways of thinking. The detractors have pointed out often the damage such thinking can produce and stressed the counteractive effects upon the total organization and its more global goals and mission. Within organizations particular departments have been labelled out-of-the-box: R&D, Marketing, Human Resource Department and Creative Services and resisted by the finance, purchasing, administration, shipping, and other departments who prefer to stay in their carefully constructed boxes or the boxes provided for them. As a consultant, speaker and college professor I have promoted the development of out-of-the-box thin...

002 Articles: Wandering in Search of Creativity http://www.cre8ng.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/20-wandering-in-search-of-creativity1.doc COMPLETE TEXT Wandering the World in Search of Creativity  For 73 days the summer of 2001 I wandered completely around the world in search of creative thinking, creativity and creative people, while challenging myself to be creative every day.  What started out as simply a dream trip to fulfill a fantasy of a life-time:  travel around the world like  Philleas T. Boggs did in Around the World in Eighty Days;  became partially a research project. My initial attempts at preparing this article for the 2002 edition of Moe Stein's Creativity’s Global Correspondents were more like Alan’s attempts at out writing Bill Bryson and Rick Steve, both excellent travel authors or Charles Kuralt and Peter Jenkins, both excellent authors of the human experience based on their travels throughout the world.   To read t...

2018 - Creative Thinking as a Focus Welcome to 2018. This is the first of my Creative Thinking as a Focus articles. I will be creating and posting these daily, Monday to Friday based upon my 40+ years of working to help develop Creative Thinking Skills, Abilities, S.T.A.M.P.S. (Systems - Tools/Techniques - Attitudes/Approaches - Methods - Processes - Strategies) with individuals, teams, departments, entire organizations. If you have comments or questions please leave them with this blog or send them to me at alan@cre8ng.com 2018 - 001 52 Ways to Become More Creative During the next 100 days I will be posting varied ways that we all can improve our creativity.  Among them will be 52 traits of Creative Thinking that each of us can continual increase and improve in both our work and personal lives. One of the first traits that was explored of creative people in the 1950s was FLUENCY , the ability or tendency to generate many ideas while other people only gener...