by Keith Tully, partner at Real Business Rescue
As an entrepreneur, business owner or gig worker, the key to making your business successful is to establish a clear-cut strategy, unique vision and hone in on a memorable brand personality which is relatable to your customer base. To reach this point, the operational and marketing functions of the business should work cohesively to maintain brand visibility and the creative appeal of the brand, helping it reach both financial and reputational success. This can be driven by either one instrumental individual or collectively by a team passionate about curating distinctive campaigns, exclusive products and a practical business strategy.
To induce creative ideas, you can use fuss-free tools to help visualise otherwise complex or overly simple ideas. This process can help develop a straightforward idea into a fully-fledged, detailed strategy. Separate to working life, using fool-proof visualisation tools can help generate creative flair in everyday thinking, changing the way you perceive and react to real-life scenarios.
Here are some resources which can help you creatively visualise your ideas:
Using science to spur creativity in your thinking.
During an inspirational talk at the 2019 Search Leeds Conference, Kirsty Hulse, founder of SEO consultancy, Many Minds, and confidence training initiative, Roar Training, shared her view on how integrating science into ideation can help you generate better ideas. By defining a set process which untangles your web of thoughts into structured ideas, there’s more clarity, giving you a better chance to engineer originality.
If you’re a visual thinker, splashing your ideas onto a page can help process your thoughts, making them easier to digest and dissect. If the structure of brainstorms, sketches, timelines and flowcharts appeal to you, here are some tools which can prove helpful:
Idea Keep – This is a simple ‘idea management bot’ which has been designed to store your random ideas. The dedicated hub allows your ideas to be visible to friends or colleagues with the option to like, suggest and discuss. You can propose improvements and upvote ideas to encourage an idea to be actively actioned, rather than leaving them to rot on a thought board.
Evernote – This multi-purpose tool is now a household name for those seeking satisfaction from the art of organisation. The platform is essentially a digital notebook which simplifies list and note making, along with smooth media integration, such as excerpts, voice memos and handwritten notes.
My Creativity Skills – Founded and developed by the renowned scientific brain, Dr Robert Epstein, the expert in creative expression produced a creativity test to help you identify and strengthen competencies. He founded the big book of creativity games to help you train your mind and form a habit of thinking creatively based on ground-breaking scientific discoveries.
Serious Creativity – Dr Edward De Bono is a pioneer of creative thinking, having founded the term ‘lateral thinking’. This means developing solutions which differ from existing strategies which the brain is comfortable and accustomed to. Tools and strategies developed by De Bono help exercise creativity and train the brain to craft solutions using tools other than the ones it is already familiar with.
Serious creativity is a book which teaches you how to hatch a solution using the contents of a random word you are provided with, structuring your creative thinking. A random word generator can also help strengthen your ability to think creatively by forming a solution based on the contents of a word. By training the brain for a couple of minutes every day, you can help the brain form connections with different things.
Brainstorming and visual cues: If you are a visual thinker, using illustrative cues such as brainstorms, numbered lists, bullet points, graphs and charts can help visualise and process ideas. This can help release creative thoughts and encourage team contribution as it’s a visual reflection of the task in hand. By visually fleshing out an idea, you are able to deconstruct it easily and thoroughly explore each stage.
Keith Tully is a partner at Real Business Rescue, one of the UK’s largest business recovery firms with over 70 offices nationwide. His personal specialities lie within taxes, financing a company, business recovery options, business exiting strategies, director support and consultancy and more general content around running a successful company. Connect with Keith Tully on LinkedIn here.
