From the course: Optimizing Human Performance on Your Team as a Manager

Priming for creativity

From the course: Optimizing Human Performance on Your Team as a Manager

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Priming for creativity

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- According to Adobe Hiring For The Future 2014, 78% of college-educated workers over the age of 25 wish that they had more creative ability. Soon you'll have three evidence-based approaches to help anyone optimize their creative thinking. The key to generating creative ideas is to give your brain the chance to activate the Default Mode Network. The Default Mode Network in the brain is a network of interconnected regions that are typically active when you are at rest, and not focused on anything on the outside world. It's often engaging in tasks that involve self-reflection, daydreaming, envisaging the future, and recalling memories. Activating the Default Mode Network can enhance creativity and problem solving, by allowing the mind to wander and to generate new connections. Give people space to daydream. Create the time and space for your team to allow their minds to wander freely. This process often involves drifting thoughts that are not focused on the external environment, but are instead reflective, integrative, and inward-looking. It may help to provide or permit familiar repetitive tasks to aid the daydreaming. Things like knitting, gardening, or gentle hiking can really shift the brain activity towards the Default Mode Network. These activities allow the mind to wander while the body's occupied, stimulating introspective and memory-based thoughts. Encouraging the reading of fiction, immersing yourself in a narrative through reading fiction can activate the Default Mode Network. This occurs because you are engaging in an imaginative process, picturing scenes and empathizing with the characters, which are all introspective activities that stimulate the Default Mode Network. Maybe set up a book club where people can discuss great books that they've discovered. When people take the perspectives of others, like imagining what they might do if they were a character in a book, it can open up the mind further. Offer art to experience. Engaging with art, whether creating it or viewing it can also activate the DMN. This includes painting, listening to music, or visiting a museum. These activities encourage the internal reflection and emotional response, leading to activation of the DMN. What could happen if you had crayons at your next team meeting? Giving the brain space and the right environment to be creative requires planning something different to the normal working day. Schedule to do one of these sorts of things yourself this week, and see if any new thoughts come to you.

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