One way to stimulate a creative mindset is to avoid the typical focus of organizations on what is and to ask, instead, what if questions. Doing this regularly tests your ability to see things anew.

Ideas invite others to respond with imaginative gusto. Big imaginative ideas succeed by building on two principles. They are democratic (shared by everybody) and demotic (like art, they convince by being suggestive, not merely by making rational sense). By being evocative rather than explicit, they invite participation.

Facts do not have control of you; your imagination does, and it need have no limits.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Models and concepts and frameworks are—to use another phrase—mental boxes within which we comprehend the real world. And ever since the 1960s, we have been taught to be creative by “thinking outside the box.”

The trouble is this: once you have mentally stepped outside the box, what happens next? The space outside the box is very expansive—infinitely so—and there can be no guarantee that you will find a solution to your problem. So the answer is that you need to find a new box. And you must consciously build or choose that box yourself; if you do not, an unconscious process will do it for you.

The way we think means that we cannot be creative in a constructive way without inventing models or boxes. Ideally, you need to develop a number of new boxes—new models, new scenarios, new ways of approaching a problem—to structure your thinking. The challenge—and the real art of creativity—is to know how to build those new boxes and, in the process, provide the framework for fresh imaginative effort.

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible - by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that you might not otherwise encounter? Creative people let their minds wander, and they mix ideas freely. Innovation often comes from unexpected juxtapositions, from connecting subjects that aren't necessarily related.

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up -- like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear that everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.

Jim March, professor emeritus at Stanford University…pointed out that our understanding of how to manage creativity is impeded by the lack of a theory of novelty, and proposed the beginnings of one. Three conditions seemed to him to be necessary for novelty—slack, hubris, and optimism—which suggest mechanisms that organizations could employ. Slack in an organizational setting means sufficient time and resources for exploration. Increasing hubris means inspiring managers to take risks. Optimism takes hold when a vision of something truly different is made to seem more promising than the status quo.

How often do you get a blinding insight out of your own head? You usually get to blinding insights when you listen to somebody and take that little snippet of logic or data, merge it with something that is in your head, and whammo, out comes an interesting new idea. You systematically prevent yourself from getting there by being dismissive of users, clients, and colleagues who don’t agree with you.

If we...create pictures [by] breaking down any problem and its corresponding picture into distinct "who," "what," "how much," "where," and "when" elements, we can convey the "how" and "why" to anyone in a way they will understand.

Design legend Paul Rand once said that design is the method of putting form and content together. This implies that content is as important as form. Design is not a purely visual exercise. The results are visual, but the entire process of design is not.

Some would argue that creativity is a sudden flash of insight, something which just happens magically while one, perhaps, takes their morning shower. This is not creativity; this is simply spontaneous inspiration. Creativity and inspiration can happen spontaneously, but it is possible to achieve these through a process, and not leave everything to chance.

For somebody with a valuable skill, it is possible to completely ignore the idea people strewn like beggars around the landscape, and have a good life just working on validated, low-risk mature ideas. The demand for good, big ideas isn't as high as people think, because of the simple constraint of execution bandwidth. One Einstein (a classic idea person) can occupy a couple of generations of more-skilled peers. This means a few idea people can basically meet the demand for interesting work from vast numbers of more talented and skilled virtuouso execution types.

Opportunists are humble enough to realize that the random forces of nature are more powerful than themselves. That these random forces often conspire to make things ridiculously easy just as often as they conspire to create hurricanes and earthquakes. Most people realize that a lot depends on being in the right place at the right time. Very few realize that this situation is not the outcome of hard work or trying to identify and move to hotspots. It is the outcome of a cultivated ability at recognizing when you are randomly in the right place at the right time (which also implies that there must be a certain amount of deliberate randomness in your wandering through life).

My mantra is "Look for the Second Right Answer." This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years. Much of our educational system tries to teach us to look for the "one right answer."

I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, when I'm looking for information, this mantra tells me to go beyond the right answers that have worked in the past and look for others. When I'm trying to be creative, it playfully advises me to put my ideas in unusual contexts to give them new meanings.

When I'm evaluating concepts, it implores me not to get stuck in the negative, and not to fall in love with one particular approach. And, when I'm implementing ideas, it reminds me that if one idea doesn't work, a different one just might, and to act accordingly.

Don't fall in love with ideas. By ideas I mean: systems, marketing approaches, technologies, partnerships, whatever. Because as soon as you as you fall in love with one approach, you lose sight of other possibilities. ...Every right idea eventually becomes the wrong idea.

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they will have a goÂ…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we're running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, 'All children are artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.'

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you'll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this-and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories.

Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That's a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don't have the skills or emotional endurance for it.

The creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

Numerous people have studied the process that creative people go through to develop their ideas. Most of these students of creativity agree that ideas come from a subconscious process that takes two relatively unassociated thoughts and combines them together to produce a new thought-a new idea.

Because of patent law, which exists to protect intellectual capital, we often think the value of an idea lies in its creation. Yet the value of an idea lies in the audience, not its source, and one idea can be ‘created' many, many times. Creativity exists in a chain: an idea comes from this group and goes to that group, and that group then carries it over to another group. An idea is a multiple sequence of creative acts. This is important because it means that creativity isn't just the domain of brilliant people, it's also the domain of average people who travel to other groups. The simplest way to feel creative is to find people more ignorant than you. Nobody knows that better than academics, who are constantly in the business of reading widely, coming up with ideas, then shipping them to groups unaware of the ideas.

There are two qualities that usually determine a creative person's potential...curiosity and determination. The curious learn, grow, and develop potential. The determined have the resolve to overcome the obstacles they encounter on their way to fulfilling their potential.

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible -- by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.