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Techniques For Cultivating Creative Insight


Joel Magin - November 18, 2018 - 0 comments

Creative insights into innovation and ways to go about it.

Working towards innovation. Ideas need action.

Working with Innovation

Software design techniques are increasingly becoming more creative. We are using incubation, active play and relaxed focus to help open the doors to new opportunities in business through innovation.

Many businesses are partnering with technology partners that can fill in the gaps. Especially when it comes to using psychology in both their business and software.

This suggests to us that they believe the most important application of psychology towards investment and trading is the enhancement of creative insight. We see this in early discussions with our potential clients.

Businesses now talk of “idea generation” as one of the keys to investment success. They recognise that, to achieve returns above and beyond the herd, they must perceive unique opportunities and/or express and trade consensus opportunities in unique ways.  Our customers discuss how software can help them be more competitive.

We use many different techniques to become more creative, however some common ones include:

Incubation technique for problem solving in teams

A key creative insight is to take a break from our explicit thought processes known as incubation. For us, we work around our offering of short intensive workshop(s) exploring and focusing in which we immerse ourselves in solving worthy problems. In stepping back from our often deep analysis of the problem we become able to process-and synthesize-the information in new and often exciting ways, especially when multiple team players come involved at different, but early stages.

Active Play technique for re-framing problems

People recognise how we process information relevant to problems greatly impacts any ability to generate unique solutions. This requires working by ‘active play’ and combining a high degree of cognitive control with highly flexible control. This insight does not just lead to novel solutions, but actual re-framing of problems themselves.

In other words, freshness of perspective leads to a redefinition of the problem, which then opens the door to new possibilities.

Relaxed Focus for creative problem solving

Some well known studies suggest that active efforts to force creative insight actually backfire. An activated brain is susceptible to distraction.  It is important to maintain a relaxed focus during efforts to process new information. Often people are more productive when working in different environments (such as home, or in a cafe).  Here they reflect in a stream-of-consciousness way about everything they are processing. One thought leads to another and soon are coming up with new ideas, fresh questions. 

Having a quality Product Manager on your team working closely with Designers in a managed team environment is essential in product development.

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