Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity

Today, it seems like companies are "creatively bankrupt" and only focusing on cost cutting, efficiency and top-down control. But what they are forgetting is that creativity really is a fantastic competitive advantage and focusing on developing and expanding on creativity will make the business more successful!


Josh Linkner's book Disciplined Dreaming brings readers to a realization that creativity is the only sustainable competitive advantage for individuals and companies because it is innovative and cannot be exactly replicated. The book offers creative techniques that will prepare you to take this creativity challenge within your own organization, and will allow you to discover and ignite your own creative abilities. To do this, Linkner organizes the book in a 5 step methodology:

1. Ask: identify and clearly define your specific creativity challenge
   
2. Prepare: prepare yourself mentally and physically for the creative process to maximize creative output
   
3. Discover: explore every avenue that might lead to creative ideas
   
4. Ignite: proven techniques for sparking creativity and generating better, and more, creative ideas
   
5. Launch: make your best creative ideas a reality!

For this post, I'm going to focus on some of the techniques I found interesting from the "Ignite" phase of Disciplined Dreaming. This will give you a taste for the book, and hopefully sparks your interest to read the whole thing!

"If you're unwilling to be different, you'll never get to the next level. The very fact that the entire industry does something a particular way is a great reason to explore the exact opposite approach" -Josh Linkner

Linkner writes that one of the most common stumbling blocks is the feeling that you need to imagine and perfectly design the entire creative solution BEFORE beginning work...this is not true! Creativity is an evolutionary process. Below are a few of the techniques that I found especially innovative for sparking creative discussions. These techniques allow for creativity and are part of this evolutionary process:

• Imbizo Groups- a Zulu expression for "gathering"- this is a group of people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines who have come together to simply discuss an idea. This group has NO end goal in mind, other than the goal of exploring. The groups needs to let go of the outcome goal and simply allow for creative, diverse discussion.
• The Hot Potato-put everyone in a circle except for a note-taker then toss a football to random person who will then shout out an idea that is no more than one sentence. The person isn't allowed to think about it, analyze it, or contemplate phrasing. This allows for spontaneous creativity and creates a situation that removes obstacles such as fear.
  
• Personas-rather than thinking about a generic, one-size-fits-all audience, try crafting personas (EX: two kids in college, age 52 living in Chicago, risk-taker). This allows you to get inside the head of your audience and make them into a specific person you can relate to instead of a faceless, nameless target. Then have creative conversations while having this person in mind.
• TDWR (Think, Doodle, Write Repeat)- A doodle-unlike a chart, diagram or illustration- carries an unfinished quality to it that makes it the ideal breeding ground for new ideas. Let your mind wander without limitations or rules, don't edit, judge, plan or re-read your doodles. Many people learn and process things visually, so doodling can help spark ideas!

The book offers many more creative techniques that spark new, innovative ideas, this was just naming a few. After reading, I found that these ideas allow us to open up different paths and generate different ideas compared to regular, structured meeting that occur frequently within organizations.

Lastly, I will leave you with this quote:

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system” –Machiavelli

It might be scary at first to jump away from your normal way of doing things within your organization, but if you have a positive outlook in mind and are motivated from these new creative techniques, your organization could become more competitive in today's shifting marketplace through tapping into the power of creativity.

You can purchase Linkner's book here,
see it on Google Books,
...or find it at your local library. Enjoy!