After six months of living and working in a new paradigm due to bushfires and Coronavirus, is your organisation looking for new ideas or do you personally need re-energising for the work you are currently doing?
Creativity can give you that spark. It is important for all individuals and organisations and for communication.
During the Coronavirus lock-down, I revisited Dr Amantha Imber’s The Creativity Formula that features 50 creativity boosters.
Amantha is an organisational psychologist and says: “new ideas are formed when two existing thoughts in your brain combine in a new way.”
We saw a lot of that during lockdown as it was a whole ‘new way’ of living!
Some people dressed up to take out their bins (two thoughts that hadn’t previously been put together) and others performed on balconies to remotely make that human connection. The ‘new way’ explains why companies take their teams away from offices for strategic planning days. The ‘new way’ of working from home during the virus also delivered lots of creative solutions for many firms.
For Fishbowl PR to develop a strategy or campaign we need to harness our creativity. While communications planning and research involves facts and figures, in order to engage the audience, you need an imaginative response to drive the main idea and deliver the tactics. Creativity is vital for bringing key messages to life, for the choice of tools, to direct style and graphic design elements and to get noticed.
So, what do you do to generate creative sparks?
I’ve been learning basketry for a couple of years and having a lot of fun with random weave.
During lockdown, I sorted through 20 years of family life in preparation for moving house. I came across my son’s childhood Lego collection, board games and puzzles. More than once, in The Creativity Formula, Amantha recommends an office toy box – well, mine was ready made.
“One of the best ways to provoke creative thought is to surround the brain with lots of diverse stimuli. This increases the number of connections sparked in the brain and therefore the number of new ideas popping up. An office that has the bare minimum furniture and accessories will not provide much stimulus to drive creative thought,” she says.
Creativity is important for all organisations and especially for keeping you interested and open to new ideas. Could an office toy box help you through the next six months?