Boost Your Ability to Make Creative Connections
We’ve come a long way since the Greeks first described creativity as the whisperings of the Muses. Yet for all we’ve learned, there’s still an air of mystery around it—and much more to unlock.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for a greater understanding of creativity to use it. In fact, it happens naturally even when we’re not trying.
Creativity is how we humans roll.
When it comes to cultivating this mysterious ability, it might be best to keep things simple. And no one stated it more simply—and profoundly—than the late Steve Jobs, who famously said, “Creativity is just connecting things.”
That’s Creativity 101: Taking two or more ideas and combining them to produce a new concept of value. And, such ideas don’t have to be similar—in fact, the most profound breakthroughs often come from ideas that have little or nothing in common.
Here, then, are 3 tips you can use to make connecting those ideas floating around in your head a little easier.
Enrich your experiences
Before you can connect things creatively, those things have to exist as knowledge in your mind. You can’t connect what you don’t have.
The more expansive your life experience—all of the knowledge, skills and wisdom you’ve accumulated during your sojourn on planet earth—the richer the well of ideas you’ll have to draw from.
For maximum richness, you should strive to deepen and broaden your experiences.
For the former, that means diving deep into what may already be familiar territory: your work skills (emergency response and otherwise); your hobbies and avocations; and all the other things that attract your interest. Become a walking encyclopedia of your passions.
But you should also attempt to broaden your experience—go beyond the comfortable and explore the unfamiliar. That includes areas that have seemingly have no practical application to your current circumstances.
Why do this? Because a broad field experience, much of which has nothing to do with the other—is the richest seedbed for creative connections. Here’s an example we’ll look at in more depth in a later post.
In the mid-2000s two sets of professionals in Houston, Texas took an interest in each others’ industries. And those industries couldn’t have been more different—the oil and gas industry, and interventional cardiology. But they had one thing in common: they both worked with some form of “pumps and pipes,” with one kind transporting fossil fuels, and the other blood throughout the human body.
What started informally became a regular seminar program called, what else, “Pumps and Pipes.” During these annual meetings, participants would make presentations, exchange notes and try to massage ideas from the other industry to innovate their own.
In other words, they broadened their experience into areas vastly different from their own to increase their chances of breakthrough connections.
Connect through play
Horsing around comes naturally to humans of all ages, especially firefighters. Hem up a bunch of firefighters in a station house on a lazy Sunday shift, and some bit of tomfoolery is bound to erupt.
We don’t need to learn to play, anymore than dogs, cats or polar bears do. We do, however, need to learn to play intentionally to help us make better creative connections.
In other words, make problem-solving a game. For example, think of five outlandish or nonsensical solutions to a problem before you try to develop more “workable” ones.
You can also use play in group settings when you’re brainstorming ideas. Prompts, which we touched on in a previous post, can be used in this way, especially as open-ended questions like, “What is the most audacious thing we can do, say, or imagine?” (You can find more questions like this in this article from SmartStorming.com.)
So, what’s the value here? When you’re engaging in a bit of playful “insanity” you’re using the creative side of your mind. And by doing so, you may eventually make the connections to more practical and doable solutions.
Keep an idea journal
Many regard Leonardo da Vinci as the quintessential renaissance man. His accomplishments span a wide arc of both the arts and sciences: from painting The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, to designing a more efficient battlefield catapult.
According to Michael Gelb in his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, we know a great deal about his many insights because he wrote or sketched nearly all of them in notebooks. Scholars still study them today with fascination.
Da Vinci wasn’t unique in keeping notebooks: A great number of successful people kept some sort of journal to record their thoughts, impressions and ideas. If they hadn’t, then some of those free-floating connections might have dissolved in the winds of creativity that brought them.
There are several ways you can do this: digitally, with a note-taking app like Evernote, Mem or Notion, or a physical notebook like Moleskin that can be linked to digital storage—or simply a pen or pencil and an old-fashioned sketchbook or composition pad.
The key is to find a notetaking method that works for you. Just be sure whatever method you use is convenient and flexible enough to catch your incoming ideas on the fly.
And, for it to work you’ll need to habituate yourself to recording your thoughts as they come. That can prove difficult, especially if you’ve never tried it before. But once you do, magic can happen: The simple act of recording your ideas helps you take notice of them, and may even stimulate them to occur more often.
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The creative process is chaotic by nature. But by improving your ability to make connections, you can reduce the chaos, and increase your chances of connecting with a breakthrough idea.
David Webster served twenty-seven years with the Hattiesburg Fire Department in Mississippi before retiring as fire chief in 2013. Besides The Creative Fire Officer, He also writes marketing content for businesses.
