Your right brain is an amazing factory of creativity and insight. All it needs is a chance and it can produce truly breakthrough innovation seeds. However, the left brain is a bully, full of facts and logic, which hardly lets the right brain in on the game. That’s why you frequently get great ideas when you’re performing some rudimentary task, like taking a shower or brushing your teeth. The left brain is concentrating on the necessary motor skills and the right brain jumps in with an idea or solution to a problem you were thinking about hours or days ago.
The problem is not having good ideas in the shower, though; it’s remembering those ideas when you get dressed. See, the right brain is not in charge of speech or memory, so after it provides its brilliant and creative thought, it moves on. So how do you make sure you remember your idea gem? WRITE IT DOWN! Capture it in some way, such as in an audio message to yourself on your smartphone or a written notation in a journal.
For me, it’s notes. I make dozens of notes every day, then I go over them at the beginning of each new day to codify them as to-dos in my electronic calendar, clear them off as done or create a tickler for future follow-up. In order to maintain the viability of this system, I have lots of blank note paper everywhere—just 4.25 x 5.5 pieces of paper I physically write on. They’re on every possible work area I might use: on the counter, in the bathroom, by my bedside, in my car, in my carry-on bag… everywhere. And since I wind up with a lot of extra paper, anyway, such as hard copies of presentations, I simply cut these into quarters and use them as notepaper. Call it my way of being green.
Recently I gave a presentation to a group of banking executives in Texas, and in the audience were a couple of officers from The Bankers Bank of Oklahoma (TBB). I am big fan of TBB and think they provide amazing services to community banks, both directly in the Southwest and through their web-based correspondent banking, which extends their influence to banks all across the U.S. After my session, I chatted with these TBB officers and they were giving me some jazz about recycling old presentations into notepaper. One of them made an offhand comment to “watch the mail in the coming weeks.” Frankly, I enjoyed the conversation but promptly forgot all about it.
Sure enough, a week later, I got a package from The Bankers Bank. Inside were multiple tower cubes of TBB branded note paper (with Sticky Note glue!) inside.
Literally thousands of pages of blank notes–just waiting for ideas! As it turns out, only about 1 in 30 ideas is any good, so it takes a lot of bad ideas to get to one good one.
What are you doing to capture your thoughts and ideas so you can iterate on them and convert these “seeds” of creativity into innovation “fruit”? Even if you don’t have cool notepads from TBB (thanks Steve!), you must work out a system that will allow you to capture these ideas, or you can kiss them goodbye. Reach out to me at david@davidpeterson.com and let’s talk about how you can harvest ideas and turn them into Innovation-Driven Growth for your organization.