How to Get Creative

Here are four fab techniques for getting 'jiggy' with it...

Creating, or even adapting humour requires you to be innovative, to question the status quo, and to use your unique point of view to look at the world in different way. Here are four great ways of increasing your creativity for generating humour, or generally coming up with some cool ideas. (I've also thrown in my 'creator and critic' infographic in the header to use in conjunction with these techniques below.)

1) Assumptions

This is a way of generating new perspectives...take a set of assumptions about a given topic and ask ‘what if this wasn’t true’? This will give you a new viewpoint to look at things.

2) Mind-Map Branches

Here you start with your central theme or topic and each of the ideas you come up with then become further topics to be brainstormed. The idea is to get around three levels deep. An unemployed Marketing Manager used this technique to generate the idea of taking out an advert offering a significant financial reward, the fine print said that this would be the amount they would save in agency fees by hiring someone of his calibre directly. He got 45 job offers!

3) Wishing

Wishing helps expand thinking and encourages you to take a childlike approach, going beyond sensible, beyond practical to think about what would be really nice or really interesting. Step outside the box, act as if the box wasn’t there. Be wishful, wistful and fantastical. Start ideas with “I wish …” or “It would be nice if…”

Henry Ford was a man that didn’t let logic, convention or science stand in the way of what he wanted. He decided that he was going to build a car engine with eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was drawn, but all the engineers agreed that it was impossible to achieve. Ford said “Produce it anyway.” They reiterated that it was impossible and Ford said “Go ahead and stay on the job until you succeed.” 12 months passed and they still hadn’t found a way to achieve what Ford wanted. Ford simply told them “Go right ahead, I want it, and I’ll have it.” Not long after they discovered a way to do it and Ford got his ‘impossible’ engine.

4) Worst Idea

This is the end of the day technique, when you feel like your creative side has all the innovation of a luddite. This is where your inner child can wreak havoc, and all they have to do is to create a list of naughty, terrible, stupid, illegal or gross ideas. Once you have your list challenge yourself to turn those ideas into good ones, by either considering it’s opposite, or by finding some aspect within a terrible idea that can be used to inspire a good one.