When I’m in need of a creative spark, one of the places I turn to for inspiration is the design consultancy, IDEO. Their founder, the brilliant David Kelley, built a company that not only reinvents brands, but more importantly, one that helps each of us rediscover what he calls, our creative confidence – ‘the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.’
Inside each of us is an amazing reservoir of untapped imagination, but the sad irony is that few of us will ever claim it. Kelley attributes that to four crippling fears; fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of taking the first step, and fear of losing control – those fears are certainly real, and it takes courage to face them; but in today’s world, we must.
One of the recurring mantras at IDEO is “don’t get ready, get started”, and I can’t think of a more timely blueprint than Bill Jensen’s new anthology, Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic. In it, he shares 25 habits that anchor the thinking of today’s greatest disruptors; it starts with questioning everything: