“Does anyone have any ideas?” We’ve all been there. Everyone round the table, thinking faces on, waiting for that something called … creativity. However, as creative thinker Karl Raats points out, “Does anyone have any ideas” may just be the most idea-killing question to open any meeting, which often turns into a game of “guess what the boss is thinking”.

Why do we have such a difficult relationship with creativity? What happened to that kid that came up with the craziest ideas? As focused adults, we only seem to call upon creativity when things go wrong.

In fact, to be more creative, we need to get ras-ional, with RAS being the acronym for Reticular Activating System. It’s the function of the brain that enables us to filter out the clutter and focus on what’s relevant. However, if we only focus on what’s relevant, our new solution will always resemble the old. And, well, then it’s not really a solution.

Time to reprogram the RAS, is what Karl says. He challenges you to write down one idea a day. At first, this will seem easy: you already had some ideas anyway. Then comes the hard part: you’re out of old ideas, and you need to go out there, coming up with silly thoughts. But that’s good news: you’re now reprogramming the RAS.

As it turns out, creativity is just a word invented by a 17^th-century poet. It’s a label, more than anything else. Let’s stop being creative and start creating, Karl concludes.
—Mike Beyers