Do You Exercise Your Idea Muscle?

In 1975, after a year of intensely hard creative work, a young electrical engineer Steven Sasson was ready presented his new invention.  As history tells is "the device was huge, ugly, and took 23 seconds to record an image with a resolution of only 0.01 megapixels.  When Sasson finally showed the  gadget to his bosses, they were dumbfounded. 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on TV?' they wondered, as he wrote in a blog post decades later.  Sasson earned a patent for his trouble but otherwise his project was forgotten." (from "I Want to be in Pictures" by Farhad Manjoo, FastCompany, Dec 2011/Jan 2012).  

The device?  You guessed it - a digital camera.  The company that failed to embrace creativity?  You guessed it, the same on that saw it's stock price plummet 60% on a single day in September of this past year: Kodak.  

So what lessons can you and I glean if your New Year's resolution is to become more creative?  Here's a few suggestions:

1. Get comfortable with failure.  Creativity means you are thinking outside the box, which means that the conventional approaches to the issue(s) you are working on changing do not apply.  And uncharted waters are full of jagged rocks.  Take James Dyson as and example (you know, the vacuum guy).  He tried 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before succeeding.  That means he "failed" 5,126 times!  If I was him, I would have given up around the 500 mark, which means I would have given up 10 times faster than him.  If you want to be more creative, settle in for a long-ish season of "non-success" and be prepared to hold the line and defend your experiments against the critics.
2. Exercise Your Idea Muscle.  It seems counter-intuitive to link creativity and discipline but listen to the advice of finance columnist James Altucher: Creativity "is not a talent.  It's a learned ability.  The idea muscle, like any other muscle, atrophies in weeks of non-use.  You start ever day with 10 ideas: people I should talk to, businesses I should start, books I should write.  It has to be a solid, doable next step.  You'll come up with nothing but bad ideas for the first month.  Between one and three months, you'll start coming up with good ideas.  After six months, honestly, life should be completely different.  it's not that your ideas are so good.  It's the sheer quantity and the honing of the muscle so you start to know more and more what ones are actionable and good." (Macleans, Jan 9, 2012, p.16-17).
3. Broader Your Horizon.  The challenge with the execs at Kodak is that they saw their world in very narrow terms: they perceived themselves as a film company.  This prevented them from understanding that in more broadly understood terms in the shift towards digital culture, they were actually a well-positioned company that provided pictures and images to people.  If they had been able to realize that (and they still could), they may be able to resurrect themselves from the doldrums of patent trolling.  The take-away here is to think beyond your traditional definitions or constraints.  What would it look like if you thought of yourself not only as a "youth pastor" but as a community advocate?  What would it look like if you thought of yourself not just as a "stay at home mom" but as a person with creative talents and passion to invest in your kids and school?  

Broadening your categories, generating and acting on as many ideas as you can and being increasingly comfortable when most of them bomb can help unleash some new creative ideas that just might change your thinking and your organization in 2012.  even if not organizationally, it might change you personally.  It sure did for Sasson, who ended up being inducted into the Inbventors Hall of Fame in 2011 and recieving a medal of honour from the US President.  It turns out that exercising your little idea muscle just might have the potential to change the world!