Conventional ideas are safe. They may produce acceptable results, and offer a low risk of catastrophic failure, but don’t offer much in the way of innovation or breaking away from the pack. You may be avoiding the crash-and-burn, but you may also be stuck in the mud.
When you encourage the expression of outrageous and impractical ideas, you pull your whole team toward the more creative side of the curve. Even if acting on wildly outrageous ideas is a bad idea, using those ideas to generate creativity and to encourage out-of-the-box thinking is a great idea. When you get your employees’ creative juices flowing, you may make some mistakes, but your odds of taking your business to a higher level increase dramatically.
Here's an example. Suppose I ask you to come up with as many uses as you can for a metal paper clip. Go ahead. Write some down. Tell me when you're ready.
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Being the creative person you are, you've probably come up with quite a few ideas. Some of them pretty unusual. But if I suggested, "String a bunch of them together and make a leash for your cat," or, "Bend them into letters to send a coded message," or, "Wear them as earrings," you might find that you're inspired to come up with even more.
Wacky ideas shift your perspective, and open up new possibilities. If you're stuck thinking of a paper clip as just something to hold things together, then the image of wearing them as jewelry opens you up to a whole set of new ideas. And if you're a paper clip company, looking for new ways to sell your product, you could do worse than convincing all the 15-year old girls in the world that it was cool to wear them in your ears.
To be truly innovative, you need to find ways out of the box. In order to get to the next level, you need to have the courage to think creatively, and to take a risk to break the rules.
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