How Creative Friction Can Help Your Team
Creative abrasion is Jerry Hirshberg’s term for the kinds of friction that helps develop better ideas. Hirshberg, a former design…
Category: Creative Thinking
The Three Gaps of Creativity: Effort, Skill and Quality
[This is an excerpt from the book The Dance of The Possible.] The great surprise for people with good…
The proof that we’re all creative: losing your keys
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question is from Crysel…
Does “think outside the box” help? Popular creativity cliches explained
While researching The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent, guide to creativity, I studied the history of…
What We Can Learn From The Eiffel Tower
We take great works for granted. We forget, but the fate of even our most famous ideas and creations…
How Ignorance Drives Creativity
[In the countdown to the release of The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest completely irreverent guide to…
Inside the messy invention of the microwave oven
[In 23 days my latest book, The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest completely irreverent guide to creativity,…
How the Post-it Note Was Invented
[In 27 days my latest book, The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest completely irreverent guide to creativity,…
Why no one cared about the Wright brothers airplane
[In 28 days my latest book, The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest completely irreverent guide to creativity,…
The Dance of the Possible
The Dance of the Possible is a short book that captures my best advice from years of work as a…
Hidden Insight and The Third Donkey
There is a viral video making the rounds of several donkeys at an animal sanctuary trying to work their…
Creativity Is Not An Accident
[This is an excerpt from The Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest completely irreverent guide to creativity] Many…
The Many Mothers of Invention
[This is an excerpt from chapter 3 of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation] All the clichés about beginnings…
My Creative Burnout
I’m ten days into the worst burnout of my life. I’ve discovered, in times like these, it’s a challenge…
How Do You Know When You’re Done?
The more creative the project, the more subjective the answer is for when it’s finished. If the project was…
The Myth of Epiphany
One of the most provocative chapters of The Myths of Innovation is The Myth of Epiphany. Do you love…
Why Small Ideas Can Matter More Than Big Ideas
[Originally published at Harvard Business as Does Size Matter For Ideas?] Americans are preoccupied by the size of things: big…
Saving Your Creative Soul (video)
We share a mass confusion about creativity – why are ideas are so fun in our minds but so…
Don’t Be Precious (with your ideas)
[This a chapter from The Dance of The Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent, guide to creativity] Three magic…
Saving Your Creative Soul
I spoke at TEDXDepaul last month, on the invitation of Daniel Gurevich. He gave me free reign to decide what…