Category: Blog

Quite seriously it takes a lot of work to be creative. There is effort and as we learned earlier there is quite a bit of failure and the need for perseverance. In order to sustain this level of energy over the long term, you need to have the motivation to keep going and the ambition…

I am a firm believer that people are naturally curious. The area where you find yourself the most curious is generally the area where you are the most creative. But how can we increase our curiosity or even evaluate our curiosity? That is why I have the concept of a “Tolerance of Ambiguity” included. There…

Out of all of the different pillars of creativity, incubation times the one I struggle with the most. So what exactly is incubation time? incubation time is the time you set aside to allow your unconscious mind space to work on the problem at hand. This is the time when creatives need to take a…

Many types of creative work require a set physical space or specialized equipment. And the place we are has a much more profound impact on how we feel than we think. In their book “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans they remind us just how different we feel in a football stadium than…

Most of us understand what a routine is. But building a solid routine and intentionally setting our habits to work for us can free up the mental energy for our creative work. In the book “The Power of Habit” Charles Duhigg reminds us just how much of our lives are made of habit, routine, and…

With instructional design being a creative act it’s important for us to practice, but what good is practice if we’re practicing the wrong thing or moving in the wrong direction. In order to make practice work most efficient, we need feedback. One of the things that I enjoy about my time in academia is that…

It’s undeniable that having knowledge and skills related to a certain domain will give you a creative advantage in that game. That is why knowledge and skills are a key pillar of creativity. Sometimes people are lucky and their paid work gives them an opportunity for daily practice and growth but not always. In order…

With creativity being so central to our work as instructional designers it’s important that we do all that we can to boost our creativity. And since most of us came into the field because we wanted to be creating things that boost our creativity are usually valuable in other ways too. The third pillar of…

One of the most fundamental things we can do to be more creative and have more creative output is to connect with the importance of our work. This can mean connecting with the “Big Why” regarding what we do, or it can be the little every day “whys” such as helping out our coworkers or…

Divergent thinking is the act of coming up with as many ideas or options as possible, and in creativity studies, divergent thinking gets a lot of love because it’s relatively easy to measure. Convergent thinking is the ability to come together and find the “ONE” answer for a given problem. Equally important for creativity but…