Fitness, Business, Fitness Business, & Achieving Life Goals

In his book, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies, Michael E. Gerber talks about “The Dreaming Room”.  At the creative company, IDEO, their brainstorming room is where they “encourage wild ideas”. Innovation and creativity flourish in a room/space where all ideas and dreams are considered, played with, and questions asked like “what if?, why not?, how would that work?” To have a safe place to suggest new concepts and ideas without fear of ridicule is essential to keeping a company ahead of the competition, or even better, away from the competition.  (Check out Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant for help in sidewards thinking.)

Get you staff, colleagues, and/or friends together, and create your own Dreaming Room. Pick an issue or problem to be solved and just start tossing ideas out without censoring. Let it be wild and wacky. That may generate some great ideas and it makes the process more fun. a side note: I performed improvisational theater for 10 years in New York City. One of the biggest rules in improv is to never negate. You can’t say “no” or “you can’t do that”. Whatever is said, must be accepted as reality. That’s a great way to start. Give full focus to every idea and the presenter of the idea with an open, non-judgemental ear and just imagine it working. Ask questions of it as if it were already a reality. “Where is the…”, “How does it…”, “Who are your customers/users?”

Good luck, Mark

“You see things and say, “why?” but I dream things that never were and say, “why not?” – George Bernard Shaw