Page 260 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

Appendix 251

Yes, when you brainstorm you’re usually looking for the idea. But a
big part of creativity is simply a numbers game. Generate more ideas,
and you’ll simply have more ideas from which to choose the best. You’ll
have more good ideas and, sure, more bad ideas. But bad ideas can
often be fertilizer for the creative process. The best creative thinkers
produce more fertilizer than most people. (Maybe that’s how they got
to be great thinkers.)
If your answer to question E was 10 or less or 11–25, your people do
not generate anywhere near enough quantity of ideas to ensure a high-
quality outcome. Using quantity to get to quality is one of the easiest
ways to get people to overachieve creatively. Plus, it minimizes that
destructive judgment element. The same is true if your answer was
26–50 or 50–99.
If your answer was more than 100, it appears your people are ready,
willing, and able to generate many fresh ideas. They probably generate
a lot of fertilizer, too. Your people are obviously high achievers.

EXHIBIT 3:

Creative ForceField Analysis

What’s your Creative ForceField? This is a quick self-assessment to help
you better understand the forces that enable your creativeness and the
forces that limit you in this area.
Your level of creative realization is a direct product of the condi-
tions inside and outside of you that either contribute to your creative
achievement or inhibit it. What are the forces helping you to be cre-
ative? What are the forces limiting you? These forces strongly influ-
ence your individual achievement on the job and elsewhere in life. If
you understand them more clearly, you’re in a better position to
improve your creative ability.

Your Creative ForceField
When you complete the Creative ForceField on page 255 (or online at
www.Do-It-YourselfLobotomy.com/book) you make a document that
you can use personally to survey your own creative landscape as you
begin the development of your creative skill set, which this book aims
to help you do. You should address this exercise as it relates to you, not
to others in your personal or work life, unless of course you are doing
this for your organization, in which case you’ll interpret the directions
a bit differently. Please be candid and forthcoming, but also realistic