IDEAS can come from the most unexpected places and in the most inopportune times—think: brilliant ideas for a campaign popping into your head while you’re in the middle of a shower, soapy and all. But, believe it or not, there can be rhyme and reason for ideation and creative thinking. You can train yourself to think creatively.
In one of the modules for its Digital Marketing Professional course, Dublin-based Digital Marketing Institute (DMI) presented a five-stage process to enhance your creative thinking and ideation skills: Prepare, Incubate, Illuminate, Verify, Practice.
Stage 1: Prepare
THIS is the research phase. As with any problem-solving activity, you have to know what exactly you are up against if you want to come up with the best possible solution. For example: You’ve been asked to help address your company’s difficulty in securing government permits for your projects, but you have no idea where to start.
Try breaking down the issue into component parts and explore each part. Reach out to project implementers to find out about their firsthand experiences. Research on relevant frameworks that you can use in your strategy formulation. Benchmark against the experiences, strategies, and tactics of other companies in the same industry. Look into relevant laws and policies regarding permit issuance turnaround times. Deep-dive into your own data: average number of days to secure each permit, current and past practices that worked and didn’t work, and so on.
Gather tons of data. Once you believe you have enough data and information to guide ideation, you can already move on to the next phase.
Stage 2: Incubate
THIS is where you allow your research findings to incubate. Write down exactly what it is you are hoping to achieve. Organize your research findings, curate where necessary, then just let everything marinate and simmer. Go through everything you’ve written, then leave it for a while.
Go back to what you’ve written, and try to frame it another way. Leave it alone. While waiting for your re-angled findings to brew, go do something fun and relaxing. Have a coffee or a chocolate bar. Take a walk or a shower. Read a comic. Listen to a podcast. Just do something other done additional work on what you’ve written so far.
Stage 3: Illuminate
NOW that you’ve refreshed your mind a bit, it’s time to get those ideas and solutions down on paper. You don’t need to follow any sort of structure here. Just write down your thoughts before they get away from you (like many a brilliant idea that come to you in the shower).
The assumption is, by the time you reach this stage, findings from your research and the general direction on how to proceed should have swirled around enough in your mind to form any number of possible solutions to your problem.
Stage 4: Verify
THIS is where you go back to your idea and evaluate if it’s the correct approach to addressing your original problem. Does it cover all bases? Will it give you your desired results? Will permit acquisition turnaround times be reduced when you implement this strategy? Will this help contribute to your enterprise objectives?
The whole exercise allows you to look at your idea from different angles. The biggest question it has to answer: will this solve the problem? If, after careful and deliberate assessment, you realize that you’re not exactly on the right track, set that idea aside and work on your next one. Don’t waste too much time holding on to an idea that might do little or nothing to solve your original problem.
Once you’ve arrived on the idea that would address your issue, take time to refine it. Present it in such a way as to be understood by all your stakeholders, with emphasis on those whose approval you need to get your idea off the ground.
Stage 5: Practice
NOW that you’ve completed the whole ideation loop, you already have a feel of the steps involved and how each step works. The next time you’re faced with a problem or issue, go through the process again. As with any skill, the more you practice, the better you become. This will not just allow you to generate ideas faster, but also train you to discern which ones to discard, and quickly. You’ll be spending less time dwelling on ideas that will likely flop.
By practicing, you can also improve your overall approach to problem solving, which can lead to more effective ideas at the onset and less need to discard ineffective ones. Creative thinking will then come more naturally for you.
As the Digital Marketing Institute put it: “Anyone can be creative. However, it’s important to remember that creative thinking doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s a skill that needs to be consciously applied, honed, and practiced. When practiced successfully, it can reveal effective and innovative solutions to various types of problems, from marketing communications to operational roadblocks, and it can generate new ideas.”
Next week, we will be looking at some common creativity roadblocks so we’ll know how to overcome them.
(To be continued)
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier organization for PR professionals around the world. Abigail L. Ho-Torres is AVP and Head of Advocacy and Marketing of Maynilad Water Services, Inc. She spent more than a decade as a business journalist before making the leap to the corporate world.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer our readers’ questions about public relations. Please send your questions or comments to askipraphil@gmail.com.
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