Here is an article co-authored by Marla M. Capozzi, Renée Dye, and Amy Howe and featured online by The McKinsey Quarterly (April 20110),  the business journal of McKinsey & Company.

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Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more creative.

Source: Strategy Practice

Although creativity is often considered a trait of the privileged few, any individual or team can become more creative—better able to generate the breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance. In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams, ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps, suggests that companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level.

The key is to focus on perception, which leading neuroscientists, such as Emory University’s Gregory Berns, find is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. To perceive things differently, Berns maintains, we must bombard our brains with things it has never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital because the brain has evolved for efficiency and routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy; perceiving information in the usual way requires little of it. Only by forcing our brains to recategorize information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns can we begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.

In this article, we’ll explore four practical ways for executives to apply this thinking to shake up ingrained perceptions and enhance creativity—both personally and with their direct reports and broader work teams.

While we don’t claim to have invented the individual techniques, we have seen their collective power to help companies generate new ways of tackling perennial problems—a useful capability for any business on the prowl for potential game-changing growth opportunities.

[Here’s the first. To read the complete article, please click here.]

Immerse yourself

Would-be innovators need to break free of preexisting views. Unfortunately, the human mind is surprisingly adroit at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out evidence to the contrary. Indeed, academic research suggests that even when presented with overwhelming facts, many people (including well-educated ones) simply won’t abandon their deeply held opinions.

The antidote is personal experience: seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s therefore extremely valuable to start creativity-building exercises or idea generation efforts outside the office, by engineering personal experiences that directly confront the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions.

We’ve seen that by orchestrating personal encounters with their and competitors’ customers, companies predispose their employees to greater creativity. For executives who want to start bolstering their own creative-thinking abilities—or those of a group—we suggest activities such as:

• Go through the process of purchasing your own product or service—as a real consumer would—and record the experience. Include photos if you can.

• Visit the stores or operations of other companies (including competitors) as a customer would and compare them with the same experiences at your own company.

• Conduct online research and gather information about one of your products or services (or those of a competitor) as any ordinary customer would.

• Try reaching out to your company with a specific product- or service-related question.

• Observe and talk to real consumers in the places where they purchase and use your products to see what offerings accompany yours, what alternatives consumers consider, and how long they take to decide.

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Executives looking to liberate their creative instincts by exploring company orthodoxies can begin by asking questions about customers, industry norms, and even business models—and then systematically challenging the answers. For example:

What business are we in?

What level of customer service do people expect?

What would customers never be willing to pay for?

What channel strategy is essential to us?

[To read the complete article, check out other resources, and register for free email alerts, please click here.]

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Marla Capozzi is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Boston office, Renée Dye is a senior expert in the Atlanta office, and Amy Howe is a principal in the Los Angeles office.