How To Put On Your Cape-abilities

In this blog post, you’ll continue to find strategies that you can use to shake up your thinking and unleash your innovation superpowers. Each post defines a tool you need, gives you a summary of what that tool can do for you, some questions that stir your thinking, and an exercise to get you started using the tool. You can either use the tools from start to finish to understand all the tools in your toolkit or you can pick up any tool — play around, use it, and discover how it works for you. 

The next ability in our Cape-ability series is … Believe-ability!

Vocabulary.com definition is “The quality of being believable or trustworthy.”

Gert’s definition is “Bringing your ideas to life in order to get ownership and excitement from other people.”

How might you get people to believe in your ideas like you believe in them? It’s all about the creativity behavior of Realness. 

To take your ideas from idea to realness, you must make them believable. Bring your ideas to life by prototyping, the process of testing and trying out your ideas. Use other methods such as pictures, videos, demonstrations, and storytelling.

Appeal to each of the thinking styles:  visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual people need pictures – give them something to look at (even if it’s just naked, bald stick figures). Auditory people love words and sounds. You must give them sexy descriptions with sensory details that they can bring to life in their minds.  And those kinesthetic people in your life (your pen clickers) need to touch something. They are tactile so make a prototype of your idea to get their buy in.  When you appeal to each of these three thinking styles, you can garner believe-ability.

“The truth will set you free; believability will give you credibility.”

• Garrison Wynn

Provocative Q’s to ask yourself:

• What about this idea do I find so intriguing that I want to sell it to people? How might I bring this idea to life to get them as excited about it as I am?
• In what ways can I appeal to my audience to make this idea and its success believable? How do I win over the visual people? The auditory people? The kinesthetic people?

Exercises to help you explore believability:

• Bring your idea to life by becoming the product. By bringing inanimate objects to life, you gain all kinds of awareness about your product. Say you are pitching an idea of a new desk that has to be put together … grab some friends and each of you act out a piece of the desk (someone is the legs, someone is the table, someone is the screws, etc.) and act out putting yourselves together to give better directions and helpful tips to the consumer as well as selling points for you and your audience.
• There’s no business like show business, so add drama to your sales pitch! Role play or bring in real target market people and ask them to help you sell your idea to higher-ups because you are meeting their needs. Get their insights and perspective on your idea and add them to your sales pitch. Talk to your target market. You’ll be surprised at the inspiration you’ll get and can add to make your idea pitches more robust.

--gert--