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 … Possibility

Capability of existing or happening or being true.

Vocabulary.com definition

Being divergent or expansive in your thinking — stretching your ideas. 

Gert’s definition

In one sense, a possibility is an option: "One possibility is that the UFO is just a shooting star." It can also mean potential: "This house might look like an abandoned shack, but it's got so much possibility!" All meanings of possibility share the sense that something is able to happen or is possible. The Latin root is possibilis, "that can be done."

Possibilities are all about asking that provocative question “What if?” Capturing all that low hanging fruit off of the bottom of the tree, and then reaching for the richer, tastier ideas at the top of the tree.

Aiming for quantity of ideas helps get you to the quality ideas. Even exploring some of those naughty thoughts – take the ideas you would never do and then twisting them to work as solutions to your challenges.  The creativity behavior of playfulness fits in here so nicely. Playing with purpose and not being married to the outcome of your playfulness will yield different, move-the-needle types of ideas.  There are plenty of tools to help open up the possibilities available to you!

“I have a habit of letting imagination run away from me.  It always comes back though … drenched with possibilities.”

• Valaida Fullwood

Provocative Q’s to ask yourself:

• Where are you when you get your best ideas? What are you doing?  Showering? Exercising? Falling asleep? Cocktailing?  I mean, that is why they invented the cocktail napkin … so you could doodle your brilliant sparks of thoughts.  Even Delta airlines is giving out napkins that have a space for journaling thoughts.  I get some of my best thoughts on a plane, so I especially love this!  Replicate these behaviors where you get your best thinking done to help you jump start divergent thoughts and get yourself in the place where possibilities come to you.
• Who were you with the last time you had a brilliant thought? Gather those thinking partners again to help you.

Exercises to help you explore possibilities:

• What if someone told you, “You can’t”, “You mustn’t”, “You shouldn’t”, or “It’s impossible”? You know better. What ideas COULD you generate?
• Ask yourself how some celebrity would answer your challenge? What ideas could you come up with by ideating from their perspective, channeling their personality? How might Lady Gaga or Darth Vader solve for these challenges?  Now, what might you borrow to apply back from this role playing?
• If you had five minutes to come up with as many thought-starters as you could, how big would your list be? Once you get a quantity of ideas, then ask yourself how you could morph some of those into workable ideas?  Combine a couple of them and see how you might create new collaborations of ideas.

So many times, we just get stuck because we get so caught up in the minutiae.  I often ask people, “Do you work in horticulture?”  After they look at me like “Hmmm? No” I say, “Great … stay out of the weeds then.”  There is plenty of time for details later on.  If we just take a few minutes to stop and think, we can come up with so many possibilities around any challenge we face.  Quick story here …

I was working with a group made up of first responders.  Brave people who don’t always have a chance to do deliberate creativity.  They kept poo poo’ing every idea because they’ve been trained to think in a linear fashion … that’s how they save lives every day.  So, I showed them some videos on how people think differently and collaborate with other agencies to get things done from another perspective and it was amazing what they came up with as solutions.  They took it to a whole other level.  I always say that everyone is creative, they just need to be properly inspired and quite frankly, be given permission to think in a whole new way. 

--gert--