Develop your creativity: The Ideas Reservoir
A practical system for working with creativity’s natural rhythms.
Creativity can feel fickle. It arrive when it wants to. It leaves when it likes. All the while, you either experience bouts of ideas all at once, or …crickets.
While lumpy outputs are a very natural charm of the overall creative process, needless to say, this is not particularly practical. When applying it to business, organisations, or any other systems, what creativity needs, paradoxically, is constraints.
Enter this month’s Mental Model.
The instinct people have — if they don’t already have their own creative process — is to try to summon creativity during deliberately blocked time. This only elicits unnecessary pressure to come up with something ‘good’, now. Predictably, the well more often runs dry.
Instead, work with creativity’s natural behaviour instead of fighting it. Understand that it will natural incline to wander at random moments. Your job is not to control creativity, but to capture it whenever it arrives.
By getting into a regular practice of capturing ideas, without judgement or force, you quietly build your own personal taste; your creative inventory. This is a library you can return to at any moment, and gives you more to work with at any given time than a blank page.
The result is simple but powerful:
What this means is that you remove the pressure to be brilliant on command, and replace it with a system that makes creativity available when you actually need it.
Here is one way to do that.
This month’s Mental Model: The Idea Reservoir
Key idea: Capture ideas as they emerge, so innovation is never dependent on timing, mood, or pressure.
Use it for: Strengthening your personal aptitude for creativity — particularly strategic, conceptual, and lateral thinking.
