by Macfadden Michael | Sep 27, 2022
Fail Your Way To Creativity The creative genius is remembered for their successes, but the reality is their tally of failures is far greater—orders of magnitude greater in fact. Edison, for example, failed over 1,000 times before he found the right filament for his...
by Macfadden Michael | Sep 19, 2022
Your Brain Doesn’t Want You To Be Creative Your brain doesn’t want you to be creative. It prefers order, structure, and predictability. Don’t believe me? Try the following exercise (borrowed from The Eureka Factor by John Kounios and Mark Beeman): In ten seconds,...
by Macfadden Michael | Sep 15, 2022
Find The Whitespace Draw a dot in the middle of a whiteboard and ask your audience (students, colleagues, etc.) what they see. Chances are you’ll get the obvious responses: a dot, a circle, a round mark. You might get something a little more abstract like a bug, a...
by Macfadden Michael | Sep 7, 2022
What Brainstorming Is Actually Good For If your eyes glaze over at the thought of conducting brainstorming exercises, you’re probably thinking about the activity all wrong. The goal of concept webbing, group sketching, or listing all of the things one could do with a...
by Macfadden Michael | Aug 26, 2022
Creatively Stuck? Add Constraints Here’s a fun experiment: tap the rhythm to happy birthday and ask someone to guess the song. Want to know the likelihood that they’re going to guess it right? A stunningly low 2.5%. This simple experiment, first performed...
