CREATIVITY

After surveying over fifteen hundred CEOs, IBM found that the most critical skill required to be a successful CEO is creativity.

In 2015, Red Bull (the energy drink company) completed the first phase of “Hacking Creativity,” the largest meta-analysis of the subject ever undertaken.After reviewing more than thirty thousand scientific studies and conducting hundreds of interviews with experts, researchers concluded that creativity is the most important skill for success.

Creativity requires thinking outside the box and challenging your assumptions. It’s about doing something others haven’t done and discovering or developing a new path to improvement. IBM’s 2010Global CEO studyconcluded, “CEOs and their teams need to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organizations for 21st Century success.”

Studies by Clayton M. Christensen, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, indicate that your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind; it is also a function of the following five key behaviors that optimize your brain for discovery:

• Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields.
• Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
• Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers and competitors to identify new ways of doing things.
• Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives.
• Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.

To be more creative, you need to train your brain to think more creatively. You do that by practicing being creative.

In 2009, psychologists at the University of North Carolina found that even four days of meditation significantly improved both creativity and cognitive flexibility.

The protocols below were developed at Google. Over a six-week period, with sixty minutes a day of required practice, the subjects in the Google study experienced substantial increases in creative flow and heightened performance. These are the protocols:

• Enforce rigorous sleep habits: Sleep in a dark, cold and quiet room.
• Prioritize the first hour after waking: How we start our day is critical. Take time to hydrate, reflect, move, stretchand fuel.
• Make the most of your first ninety minutes of work: Eliminate distraction. Push calls and meetings to the afternoon andfocus only on your most important tasks, not your inbox.
• Allow for recovery: Get up and move for five to ten minutes after every hour spent working.This will allow you to stay in peak productivity longer.
• Practice active recovery: Work out and meditate. Build time into your calendar to soak in an Epsom salt bath or take a sauna before bed. Get outside and move. Studies have shown that hiking in nature or even walking on a treadmill boosts creativity and memory.
• Plan experiences and adventures: Book a float tank session. Go on a weekend silent meditation retreat. Train for and compete in something that challenges you. Travel or go to a concert or a festival. Anything that gets you out of your routine pays big dividends over time.
• Create quiet time for yourself: Recent studies show that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to complex environments. Silenceis associated withthe development of new cells in the hippocampus, the key region of the brain associated with learning and memory.

Google found a two-hundred percent boost in creativity, a 490 percent boost in learning and a five-hundred percent boost in productivity from following the above protocols.