Innovative Thinking: Change Your Starting Point

Innovative thinking is a critical skill, not just for cutting-edge technology companies but also for any professional who wants to solve problems, be more efficient, and move forward in their career or organizations. It can also be a tremendous help in improving your person life. In this video, Avish explains (and demonstrates) how to improve your innovative thinking by “changing your starting point.”  (Transcription below)

Innovative Thinking: Change Your Starting Point

Quick. Think of a location where two people might have a conversation. Say it out loud.
What did you think of? Chances are you probably thought of a bar, a coffee shop, a beach, a grocery store, or the bathroom. I know because after twenty five years of performing improv comedy when I ask for a location, these are the first few suggestions that always come out of the audience. It is a little bit odd that people say bathroom because the last thing I want to do when I go to a bathroom is have a conversation but hey, I am not judging.

That’s often what we’ll get from the audience as a starting point for an improv scene or an improv game. Now what I have found is that while great improvisers can make any suggestion work, the starting point can actually have a big difference on how easy it is to be creative and have a great time. And that same principle can apply to you when you’re trying to be more innovative in any area of your life.

In this day and age, innovation is critical. The world is changing faster than ever. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, things change again. And the end result of this is that we start to feel like we are constantly being asked to do more and more with less and less. It’s like departments are being downsized, budgets are being cut but our workload keeps increasing and it’s going kind of crazy. Now we need to innovate in those situations simply because if we keep doing everything the same way as more and more is added to our lives, that’s when we start drowning with too much to do.

Think about it. If you’re doing 50 hours of work a week and someone comes along and adds five more hours to your load, if you keep doing everything the same, you’re going to do fifty-five hours of work. If however you step back and be a little innovative and say how can I come up with new creative ways of doing what I was doing? You can maybe get those fifty hours down to forty-six. Now you’re only adding up to fifty-one and if you’re really creative you might find a way to get those fifty hours down to forty-four so even adding five hours takes you to forty nine.

As a short form improviser, I play games where I get suggestions from the audience and then I use those as the basis for the scenes and exercises that I am going to do.

IMPROV GAME:

I start this story, every speaker has kind of like their motivational system, their process, and their step by step techniques, so from this side of the room, Can I get a verb? Some kind of action word other than sleep, walk or run.

Party – ohh yes. Everybody say yes. Party and from this side of the room can I get a descriptive word like an adjective or adverb? What was that back there? Hard oh wow, I’m sad I’m missing this Cuba Libra Party tonight. “Hard” is a little on the nose so how about someone said animal lover here, right? I don’t know if animal’s a verb, it’s not really an adjective but it’s alright, we’re going to roll. So I’m going to give you a brief motivational speech on the power of animal partying.

Alright here we go. Let me mix up things a little bit. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining me. I’m here to show you the power of animal partying. Most people don’t know this but if you’re a stupid, you’re a stupid, and you cannot fix stupid. So what I’m about to share with you is not a magic bullet for you dumb people in the room, find a smart person and have them help you along. But for you smart people, animal partying maybe the thing for you. You see I learned about animal partying when I was a young lad. My mother one day pulled me aside and she said to me be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

END IMPROV GAME

Now when you do improv a lot as I do, you start to hear the same suggestions over and over as I said in the beginning. Locations – you get things like bathrooms, bar and coffee shop. In fact so much so that now that when I’m asking for a location, I will say “how about an unusual location. Something beyond your normal bar or coffee shop or beach,” because I know that’s the first thing people are going to yell out.

Here’s the thing. When you hear a suggestion as a starting point from the audience that you have done before it is very tempting to take it because it’s safe. I’ve done scenes set in a bar before and I’m like, “oh I’ve done this, I know I can do it.”

The problem is it completely cuts your creativity because when you’re going with the same suggestion, you’re not doing anything new. And of course creativity is creating, coming up with new stuff. So I really challenge myself and push myself every time I perform to try to do different things and take different suggestions that I haven’t taken before. Not just because I like the challenge but because I know that at the end of the day that’s going to make me more creative and it’s going to make the scene and the improv work much stronger.

Offstage, when you’re trying to innovate in your own life to try to solve those problems or cut down on your work load, you’re going to run in the same issue. And I have seen this all the time in groups and individuals who are trying to solve a problem or come up with a new way of doing things but they keep starting from the same place.

It’s like if you’re planning an event, you start at the beginning of the event and think you’re way through it. It makes total sense. But if you want to be creative and you keep starting at the same place your mind is going to give you the same ideas. So why not think about the end of the event first? Why not think about the middle, why not think about something unrelated?

Where we change our starting points and starting points doesn’t mean just time. You can change your starting point by thinking of something completely unrelated to the problem. You can think about something outside of it and then work your way in. Just change the initial discussion point because that’s going to drive your creativity in many different ways.

So the next time you sit in there, trying to be creative, trying to solve a problem, trying to innovate a new system or process and you’re getting stuck – try changing your starting point and see how that drives your creativity in new directions.

Here are some of the most common suggestions called out at improv comedy shows:

Bathrooms, Undertaker or Mortician, sky diving, proctologist – yes it’s true – scuba-diving, pineapples, spelunking which is cave exploring if you don’t know, and most common of all for some reason when I ask for an object: the spatula. Don’t know why but people like to say spatula.