High-leverage Thinking
Taking the time to visualize and analyze complex situations gets easier with practice. Are you getting in the mental gym?
Creativity is a misunderstood and often misused term. It’s not just about coming up with new ideas-it’s also about applying those ideas to solve problems, communicating them, or turning them into something tangible.
Introduction
Creativity and innovation are the lifeblood of any industry. If you can’t come up with new ideas, you can’t grow your business or find a better way to do things. But creativity is also about knowing when not to be creative.
We all know that it doesn't make sense to drive in reverse while going forward-you'll just strip the gears on your car's transmission! The same is true for creativity: You need to create and evaluate at different times.
I want to explore how we can separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first then judging their worth later.
Getting into the zone
I’ve always said that if you can figure out a way to get into a your best thinking area, on-demand, do that as much as possible. Like with Orange theory (which I've never done by the way), you want to stay in your zone as long as possible. The more frequently you enter it, the better you become at leveraging it.
My zone is kicked off in two ways:
Showers
Long periods of time with my eyes closed and listening to scores from movie soundtracks
It took a lot of time for me to get there. I've tried a host of different ways to do it, and in various circumstances. My goal from the outset was to acknowledge that my best use as the CEO of KnowCap.
If you are a leader in a company especially if you are the CEO, you are a force multiplier. Your job is to make everyone more successful. It's not easy.
Making space
The problem with being a CEO though, especially in early startups, it's almost impossible to get enough thinking done. There are too many fires to put out and not enough resources to handle them. You still need to prioritize your time to think strategically - these are the moments that allow you to look at innovating product, expanding into new customer markets, and thinking through growth decisions.
If you are a leader you really can have the best impact on your organization by when you’re thinking through a multi-layered, complex problem. When you think more deeply and construct a process for how to work through problems, I believe that your decision-making will be better.
When you can think of pros and cons all at once, it’s easier to enter the mindset of how someone would go through a problem. Juxtaposing the present and future repercussions of each decision. This becomes a powerful tool when you are having less and less time to make high-impact decisions.
That’s why I want to call this title high-leverage thinking because depending on where you are the better your strategies can be the better they will work. Learning how best to think about a problem gives you a competitive advantage for how well your teams perform and if you are at the highest level of an organization then learning how best to think.
Closing it out
Creativity can be applied in any job or industry. Whether you're a leader trying to make everyone at your company more successful, or someone who needs help with innovation initiatives for their business, high-leverage thinking is key.
The steps towards leveraging our best ideas are simple: dedicate time and space for coming up with new things (which means being mindful of where and how often), then take the time later on to judge those ideas' worthiness based on factors like feasibility, desirability, and viability.
If all of that sounds intimidating - don't worry! You'll get used to it. Over time you'll get better and better at getting into and out of the zone.