World Creativity and Innovation Day, April 21

Friends, today, April 21, is World Creativity and Innovation Day, named in 2001, it was expanded to World Creativity and Innovation Week in 2005.

I hope you experienced inspired joy, delight. opportunity, and potential during this week, together with so many others all over the world.

Let’s continue to keep the energy moving for new ideas, decisions, actions and products to make the world a better place and make your place in the world better too.

WCIW happens every year from April 15 – 21. I look forward to sharing it with you in 2015, 2016, ….

Marci Segal, MS. Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures and Founder, World Creativity + Innovation Week April 15-21

There is always more than one right answer

Your task, if you choose to engage in and/or lead innovation, is to

• Open thinking to new ideas, new potentials, new solutions, new opportunities
• Explore what might work within the current context that takes things forward
• Smile

Marci Segal, MS, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

Wishing you flexibility, inner strength, and ingenuity during this World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21, 2014.  And joy…always joy…

Appealing to people now, in the moment, of this age

Thought to bring you a very well put together generational profile of the millennial generation produced by Brand Amplitude LLC. You can see their 22-page deck here.

Shout out to Velvet Chainsaw Consulting for the link.  BTW one of their more popular posts is 25 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Next Event.

Creativity in meetings and events anyone? 

Are you looking for useful ideas, novel decisions, and surprising outcomes?  We help firms move away from the expert model of conferences (aka talking head) and move toward engaging the talent in the room to participate and collaborate with each other and the content. Get in touch. Give us a call/email/etc.

Marci Segal, MS frees leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

Design Thinking Bootcamp Slides Redux

Greetings all.

Hope you enjoy this refresh of the Design Thinking Bootcamp slides. The original post disappeared….

You might like to scan this design thinking slide deck to generate new ideas, make new decisions and take new actions in your organization.

Before you do, a reminder it’s helpful to entertain new ways of perceiving and putting things together, and to risk stimulating your curiosity about what might emerge…

Marci Segal, MS
Freeing Leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures

Looking for an online resource to inspire creativity? Use Everything is a Remix Part 3

This 10-minute video presents enough information to set anyone in motion who has an outlook of besting what happened before and creating something new.  Knowledgeable facilitators and trainers will be able to make at least a 90-minute workshop/program from using this as a resource, and determined innovation leaders can use this to set something new in motion to help their ‘engineer’ types take a next important step forward.

Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they may create new futures.

Directing our feelings and thinking to be more creative

Do you remember how much you felt and thought as a child? Probably a lot, especially if you were gifted and creative. As an adult, we may have learned to cover up or set aside much of our inner life, in order to get along with others and do our jobs.

But if we want to be more fully alive and creative, it can really help to understand and stay in charge of our thinking and feelings.

See on talentdevelop.com

Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership; Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures; founder and steward, World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15-21

Fun Failure: How to Make Learning Irresistible | MindShift

See on Scoop.it – Creativity and Learning Insights

Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said. Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs can advance their learning through having fun.
See on blogs.kqed.org

Marci Segal, MS. Creativity and Change Leadership. Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

What ‘going viral’ looks like

As someone with a preference for information that is concrete, practical, tangible and real, I appreciate Microsoft Labs infographic and 3-minute video describing the power of social network viral: what it is, what it looks like and how to track it moving forward. (Source Fastco’s Infographic of the Day: Watch Microsoft Visualize Viral Content.)

In what ways might Viral Search impact your view the world and your place in it?

Knowing about and seeing Viral Search leads me to wonder what’s next, how will it influence innovation, behaviour and business moving forward.  Your guesses on how your business, start-up or personal activities might change as a result of viral search?

Insights into Imagination

‘Seeing’ what people are talking about sparks my imagination; it provides an entry-way into the conceptual/theoretical dimensions. Others have different pathways to entertain new ideas, new decisions and new actions, so to assume everyone’s path is the same is naive.

Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership; Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

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Use Flitch Meetings to Bring your Organization’s Silos Together

Flitch meetings blur boundaries between organization silos.  Strategic and brave leaders, those with an open mind to innovation and sustaining a culture that supports gaining insights and cooperation through collaboration, use them.

What’s a flitch meeting?  A meeting where a problem in one area is solved by another department.  If you are looking for something to do for World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21 – this might be just the thing for you to pivot yourself and your team into a new internal relationship.

What’s the hardest part, you ask?  Accepting the solutions the other department suggests as valuable.

A great tool to get access to the value of the other group’s offering is to respond to each of these question stages

1. what’s good about the idea first, as it is
2. discuss what’s good about it for the future
3. list the obstacles to moving forward on it
4. generate alternative ideas to make the original one even stronger.

(You might want to try this approach at home first, to experience how it feels.  Ask the kids for a holiday suggestion, for example, and work it through. Or better, use it with your team to discuss the idea of using Flitch meetings; and with a colleague in another department…)

Let us know how it goes.  Bet you’ll be delightfully surprised.

Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

Is there a Drone in your future? Hints on innovating

Drones are the future says Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of Makers, The
Long Tail and Free: The Future of Radical a Price. The video clip below shows him talking about how easy it is to make them, so wouldn’t you think they’d proliferate over time?

I’m not sure, I keep seeing a very cluttered sky, and people balking at their use.  Still, if they could suck out air pollution, now that would be cool. What other uses of drones come to your mind? (click on the photo to get to DIYDrones.com. Fascinating inventions.)

Innovation Hints: Imagine applying these questions to your current challenge

In Makers, the New Industrial Revolution Chris writes about how the world is changing away from big box producers to individuals, Makers. For you MBTI® instrument enthusiasts – here’s an additional question for you… does this post describe sensing creativity or iNtuiting creativity?  Hm?

He says that all an entrepreneur needs these days is a computer and a credit card.  As an example he describes how he innovated on sprinklers. He took look at what already exists, pretended he could fix challenges and invented ways to do so. He asked:

1. How would the product be improved if they were connected to the internet?
2. How would the product be improved if the designs were open, so anyone could change or improve them?
3. How much cheaper would they be if manufacturers didn’t charge for their intellectual property?

What resulted?  A sprinkler system operable from a smart phone, set up through a website, that anticipates weather conditions and starts when the timing is just right.

What if you were to use the same questions on what you are currently working on?  What innovations might you imagine and then make real?

These are just some of the insights from his book – well worth a scan…

Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership: Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.

^® MBTI, Myers-Briggs, Myers Briggs, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust in the United States and other countries.

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