Todd Henry just posted his TEDx talkon his blog outlining the five areas we need to monitor in order to remain prolific, brilliant and healthy as creatives. Great talk. Check it out.
Archives For creativity
At any given moment I’m asked to solve a problem.
Right now some of those problems are:
- How do we create a compelling environment for older elementary in a preschool space? (We use a daycare center for Children’s space.) How do we do this portably? (We also load in and out each Sunday.)
- How do we engage 5th graders when our groups are too small to divide them from the younger kids?
- How do we create consistent relationships with a rotation of small group leaders?
Leaders are in the business of solving problems. In fact, if there weren’t any problems there probably wouldn’t be a need for any leaders. But as a leader, ever feel like there are more problems than solutions? Or that your reservoir of solutions is pretty much depleted?
According to Todd Henry (author of Accidental Creative)—our ability to solve problems are tied to managing five things:
- Focus: Identifying what’s critical and eliminating distractions
- Relationships: Working with others who understand the problem and committed to finding solutions. We are truly better together.
- Energy: Managing the things that deplete our energy
- Stimuli: Exposing ourselves to a variety of sources of information. You never know where a solution could come from, but it helps to have a plan.
- Hours: Scheduling time to focus on solutions. Placing yourself in the path of a solution, rather than just waiting for a solution to drive by.
Your ability to create new solutions to existing problems is “largely influenced by your depth and breadth of knowledge in diverse domains of expertise.” (Todd Henry, Accidental Creative).
Our problems often demand taking the various things we have and combining them in new ways. Some call this creativity, I like to call it resourcefulness. It’s using what you have to get the job done. We do that by bringing all of the relevant information that we have at the moment to bear on whatever issue we are dealing with at the time.
A great way of ensuring that you get the job done is to constantly be adding to what you have to get the job done. Todd Henry recommends keeping a stimulus queue. Part of that is a reading plan. Here’s mine.
What do you do to ensure you have what you need to get the job done?
Here is a short presentation I gave on creativity at Gospel Light.
Creativity for Non-Creative People from Damon DeLillo on Vimeo.
Creative boards changed my life.
We made our own–six of them actually for about $200.
Thanks Jayne, Dave and Allie for sewing 18 yards of fabric into River Park Community Church’s creative boards.
We are a church plant that will be launching services in September 2008 . . . that takes a lot of creativity.
Our first project is to design what each of our environments is going to look like (worship experience, guest services, signs on the street, children’s check in, kidstuf, bathrooms, resource tables etc . . . )
So yesterday I took 90 pictures of Rio Vista Middle School–our current facility.
I arranged the pictures of the school around the site map. Our goal is to get a feel for the school–the layout of the facility, flow from street, to parking entrance, to gate to building, to children’s ministry rooms.
I also took pictures of the color and textures used in the school facility.
These creative boards will be on display at tonight’s launch team meeting.
When we have our creative meeting we will be cutting pictures out of magazines that represent what we want each area to look like. We will make a collage of pictures around the photographs I took.
These collages will become the inspiration for what we will purchase to create our environments.
That’s just one way of using a creative board. Check out my friend Carlos at Buckhead Church for what they do with creative boards by clicking here.
What do you do to organize your creative processes?
