So, you’re managing all that work, all those interruptions, all those texts and pesky emails. You get home or stop your reading at some reasonable hour, kind of tired, and need a recharge. Sound familiar?
Well, that’s probably because you’ve “wasted” a significant portion of your time on tasks others could have done effectively. So, where do you get those sparks of genius that could change your company and change the world?
How most entrepreneurs work today
Creative entrepreneurs find niches for their business that are not full of competitors fighting over the last dollar of margin, or niches that are mature and shrinking in size. They search for areas unexplored, or those covered by companies with less vision for quality, service or innovation.
Outside the box? Think of the Titanic tragedy.
[Email readers, continue here…] Even creative entrepreneurs are often trapped inside the box of their experience. Recently in a discussion of this very subject in a roundtable of CEO’s, one CEO reminded us of the Titanic tragedy. She stated that those in charge during the last hours aboard had options probably never considered that could have saved many more lives, given the limited number of lifeboats available. She listed several, including pulling up the teak floorboards and throwing them overboard along with the deck chairs and dining tables, all to be used for floatation. It made us all think that we had never considered such solutions when contemplating that disaster after the fact.
So, how can you create a culture of creative thinking?
With that challenge, we turned as a group to discuss how CEOs could make a culture of thinking outside of that restrictive box of experience. We considered adding questions to the interview process that could bring surprising answers from a job candidate, pointing to a creative thinker that might complement the team.
We challenged ourselves as a group to think of answers to problems that a writer of fiction might create, unconstrained by conventional thinking. We worried about the fact that we may have hired people in the past that fit our image of the proper addition to our core staffs, people with similar experiences and training, constrained by the same experiential thinking as ourselves.
The result could change your life
Our CEO group members left from that meeting each more willing to search for talent to help us and our enterprise find creative alternatives that would challenge us, expand our product, marketing, sales and process abilities beyond the constraints of our present definition of our company and its core.
And the most important lesson of all
The whole lesson taught us that restrictive thinking, remaining in the comfort zone of present operations, and reacting to events all suppress the creative process. Growth and success can come organically, or from creative ideas that change and expand our totally available market as we previously defined it, creating a new niche or opportunity not recognized before as we lived within and were trapped inside the existing box of our lives.
Images created using DALE-E 3 with the prompt: “Young female casually dressed in business environment “thinking outside of the box” showing the box in sme form visible. Realistic images. Pure white border of 8 pt white.”
