How to warm up your creative-thinking brain

You arrive at the doors of your gym, walk up the stairs, and hop onto the treadmill for your standard five minute warm-up. Your legs start moving underneath you, your body temperature rises and slowly you start to become fully conscious. By the time five minutes has passed, you are warmed up and ready for a full-blown workout.

For those of us who do exercise regularly, the thought of doing a big workout without a warm up seems a bit silly. Our risk of injury increases dramatically and it also makes it hard for us to perform at our best.

Just like in exercise, it is critical to warm up your brain before engaging it in a creative thinking ‘workout’. This is to combat the fact that in general, most idea generation or problem solving meetings are scheduled immediately after a strategy or finance meeting, in which your brain was in analytical or linear gear.

Most of us can appreciate how difficult it is to come from a meeting that requires analytical, rational thinking into a meeting that requires us to think laterally. Indeed, most of us probably experience this on a regular basis.

When our brain has been in linear thinking mode, coming up with creative solutions is very difficult. Our brain naturally wants to jump to logical solutions (given the mode that it is in) and finding lateral and creative solutions becomes increasingly difficult.

Scientific research suggests that warming up the creative thinking parts of your brain will help you perform more effectively and efficiently at tasks requiring creative thought. It will therefore make it easier to jump from a finance meeting to an idea-generation meeting.

And warming up this part of your brain needn’t take long. Indeed, it only takes a few minutes of effective warming up to shift your brain into an open-minded and lateral-thinking mode.

There are many ways in which the brain can be warmed up to this type of thinking. One such way is through use of an Inventium tool called Fat Chance.

Fat Chance is a tool that was designed with the specific purpose of warming up the creative thinking parts of people’s brains. The tool can be used before quick idea generation and problem-solving workshops that may only last 30 minutes through to one-day blue-sky-thinking workshops in which brains need to think laterally for an entire day.

Fat Chance requires no materials or stimulus other than one thing: an impossible challenge. For example, cure cancer by tomorrow lunchtime.

There are two key elements to creating an impossible challenge:

· The first is to pick a goal or an objective that is almost impossible to achieve with technology as we know it today.

· The second is to add an incredibly tight time frame. The tighter the better. For example, Raise Paris Hilton’s IQ by 100 points by the end of the week. Raise $10 billion dollars by dinner tonight. Marry Brad Pitt by noon tomorrow.

After you have developed an impossible challenge, the next step is to divide the group of people who are participating in the creative thinking meeting into pairs or groups of three. The purpose of using small-sized groups is to ensure that everyone gets a good chance to participate.

Once groups are assigned, instruct people to generate at least three solutions to the problem in five minutes. Encourage those who are finding it difficult and remind them that the solutions do not have to be logical or rational. Indeed, those types of solutions won’t actually solve the problem.

After these five minutes have passed, you can feel confident that the divergent thinking parts of people’s brains will be sufficiently warmed up.

Why does this tool work so effectively? It all comes back to the impossibility of the challenge. Given that it is impossible, behaviour that is not conducive to creative thinking (e.g. non-lateral solutions) will be extinguished due to the lack of reinforcement. That is, non-creative thinking behaviours will not lead to a solution. The problem can only be solved through taking a leap, and through thinking very creatively and laterally.

So before all meetings and workshops that require genuine creative thinking, be sure to warm up their brains to get the most out of everybody.