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    Get More Creativity Now

    Creativity is a Choice and a Habit

    Join the Creative Flow Challenge

    Starts Jan. 11th — 18 Days to Creative Power

    Learn How to Apply Creativity to All Your Projects

    Yes, you can improve your creativity. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re creative or not. It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw, write poems, paint lovely pictures, play guitar like Eric Clapton, sing like Joni Mitchell, or improv like Robin Williams. You have more creative power than you know, Click through for details on The Creative Flow Challenge.

    You can improve your creativity, through attitude, tools, methods, and daily practice. Experienced “creatives” can up their game. Those who believe they aren’t creative at all might just transform their lives by choosing, and practicing, creativity.

    Get Into Your Creative Flow, Now

    Join the Creative Flow Challenge, unblock your creativity, learn, and establish the creative habit. 2021 won’t know what hit it. Facilitated by Gregg Fraley, author of the seminal business novel about creative thinking, Jack’s Notebook.

    Benefits:

    Improve your ability to explore anything. This leads to better ideas.

    Improve your ability to shift perspectives. So, you’ll be working on the right problems and make better decisions about what projects to take on.

    Get better at generating ideas. Learn how to brainstorm alone. Learn how to get into that elusive Flow.

    Learn how to refine and enhance ideas. Big ideas need tamed to be workable, small ideas need to be amped up to be meaningful.

    Get into habits and creative flow that focus and have you creating every day. Establish habits that lead to greater creative effectiveness.

    Join facilitator Gregg Fraley in the January Creative Flow Challenge.

    It’s 18 days of daily provocations via email. Weekly Zoom calls. Private Facebook group to share thinking and results.

    Participants of the December challenge report:

    “I wrote eight songs in the first ten days of the challenge.”

    “During the eighteen days I switched focus and ended up writing four short stories.”

    “I was familiar with a few of the tools used in the challenge. I’d grown jaded and stopped using them for work projects. Imagine my surprise when on the second day, using a MindMap, I reframed an innovation project that had lost momentum. This is really useful.”

    “I was stuck before I started the challenge. I was so depressed I couldn’t start anything. This got me going and broke the bottleneck. I’m taking steps now I haven’t taken in years.”

    Register Now

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    Creative Flow Challenge

    18 Day Challenge Builds Creativity Create An Amazing 2021 Register now for a transformative experience The Creative Flow Challenge is an 18 day adventure in personal self-expression. The benefits of better access to your creativity AND consistent creative effectiveness are achievable. You’ll create daily, inspired by prompts to get you into flow. Don’t wait for lightning to strike. Join the challenge. Learn how to light your own candle. The challenge starts December 14th and goes through December 31. It requires at least a half hour of daily creative work. Every Day during the challenge. Register now. Benefits of the Creative Flow Challenge Strengthen your belief in, and access to, your creative power Gain fluidity in generating better ideas Get perspective

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    Schools Kill Creativity

    We Still Can Learn From “The Ken” Sir Ken Robinson Leaves a Legacy That Still Inspires Educators, Creators, and Innovators, Revisit His Work! The creativity and innovation world has lost one of its finest just this last week. Sir Ken Robinson was the most articulate speaker and author in the field of applied creativity we’ve ever known. His insights are profound, and his unique verbal delivery is simply unparalleled. His sense of humor colored his work and is the secret sauce of his success; he had the wit of a natural born comedian and the incisive insights of a brilliant satirist. His original TED talk (“How Schools Kill Creativity) is without a doubt the most influential 18 minutes of video

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    Vote In-Person

    Pack a Lunch Mail-in voting is already problematic. Like many Americans I’m appalled at the use of the Post Office to suppress votes. If you don’t agree this is happening, you can skip the rest of what I say here. In my view, the Post Office and Mail-in voting is already compromised, with some exceptions. For those of you who read my blog for innovation, this blog is not about that, I’ll return soon with more writing on creativity and innovation. But the stability of our elections and our government does impact innovation in the long run, and maybe the short run. Too Late To Fix This It would be great if this problem of mail-in voting could be fixed

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    Persist Like a Zen Mushroom Hunter

    Lessons a Forager Can Lend Business Relax, Stay Hopeful, Keep Looking I’m a mushroom hunter. I wander the woods foraging, especially in the fall season. Southwest Michigan has a lot of edible varieties but there is one particular delicacy I love. It’s called a Hen-of-the-Woods. It’s a unique shape, something like a cauliflower, and about that size or larger. Very safe — not one of those “eat once” mushrooms. They are not rare exactly, but one can wander for miles and not find one, even in season. They hide under a brownish leaf-like surface. I have a lesson here for business people. Let me start with this story. Know that “Hens” are simply delicious. A hearty, meaty, solid texture, with a

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    The Innovators Monologue

    The Innovators Monologue with profound apologies to William Shakespeare by Gregg Fraley To innovate or not to innovate — that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to stagnate or create while feeling the slings and arrows of peers and loss of fortune or to take up arms against inaction and seek to disrupt or improve and if I fail to find sweet perfection or green fields, I die — no more to market, sell, deliver, enrich, enable — the end of the enterprise, alas rarely mourned but the heartache, the thousand friends who lose jobs and life stations that families, tribes, regions, spirits, depend on. ‘Tis a grand frustration devoutly we pray to avoid, the death, and

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    Crossing the Innovation Delaware

    Hope is a Four Letter Word in Innovation Hope — the cornerstone of innovation culture Hope is inspired by successful projects; the lesson of Washington at Trenton In the innovation space there is a great deal of discussion about mindset. Rightfully so, attitude and thinking patterns have everything to do with setting the table for a productive innovation culture. Leaders and followers with the right mindset have a chance to create and succeed with innovation. There’s a lot to learn about inspiring hope from American history, but before we look at that George Washington “crossing the Delaware” example, let’s examine what mindset means, and let’s see what is systematically left out (hint: it’s hope). When people talk about mindset, they are

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    Innovation is a Brutal DIY Project

    Innovation Learning Points From the Great Faucet DIY Fiasco DIY is a Form of Innovation I’m the Abraham Lincoln of home fix-it DIY projects. Like Lincoln, I ultimately win, but painfully fail many, many times before I “git-er done”. (FYI: DIY = Do It Yourself.) As an innovation consultant who is a facilitator, team builder, idea person, and strategist, my need for hands-on engineering skills are minimal. I’m not bad at prototyping and am excellent in concept development, but I’m horrible when it comes to hands-on maker skills. As a home owner, this is really Not Good. But I try. And I learn. So after I finished the bleeding on my latest DIY effort, it strikes me that, on a larger

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    Free Workshop at Workspring Chicago — Creative Choices, Innovative Results

    Notice: Gregg Fraley Speaking at Workspring Chicago Wednesday August 2, 2017 — 8 am to 10 am The free workshop at Workspring Chicago will focus on creative behaviors that enhance creative effectiveness. The habits/behaviors and associated tools and techniques apply to both personal and business roles. As the graphic says, you’ll learn approaches you can immediately use. Highly useful for innovation teams, team leaders, and anyone who wants to enhance their creative effectiveness. This will be presented by Gregg Fraley, author of Jack’s Notebook, co-inventor of IdeaKeg, and originator of MoshPit Innovation. RSVP with Workspring: rsvp@workspring.com Cheers.

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    Retro Motorcycles Signal Innovation In Goshen, IN

    Manufacturing in America — Using the Past to Create an Innovative Future It’s heartening to learn about a small USA manufacturer who’s doing something creative, new, and interesting. Janus Motorcycles in Goshen, Indiana is creating hand-crafted, small batch motorcycles. These are simple, accessible, easy-to-work-with bikes. They are throwbacks in a certain way, but don’t get me wrong they’re elegant. The retro-ish designs are informed by old American bike brands like Indian, and old British bikes like Triumph and Norton. It’s not hard to imagine that famous Hoosier, James Dean, riding one of these bikes around the countryside. The bikes look like James Dean era rides because Janus purposefully leaves the bikes open, in the sense that all the parts can

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