Mark Simmons

Mark Simmons Speaking Topics

• Why Creativity Matters in Competitive Organizations

  What’s the secret weapon that will give a business an unfair advantage over its competitors?

  Creativity. More specifically, the ability to come up with ideas and to successfully bring them to life in the marketplace. Creativity is vital for successful business, yet all too often it’s not part of the culture. Most businesses just aren’t designed for creativity. Instead, they tend to be efficient machines with established processes, systems and rules that allow little flexibility for the more unstructured thought that is necessary for ideas to form and flourish.

  Creativity is about exploring the unknown and so it feels very risky. It’s tempting to cordon it off into certain departments, assign it to off-site meetings or outsource it to agencies and consultants. That’s a shame, because we all have the ability to be creative.

  Let’s learn why creativity is vital to gaining a competitive edge!

  Attendee Activities:

  • How creative organizations think different
  • Choosing when and how to think creatively
  • Taking risks to leap forward
  • Always looking for ways to innovate

• How to Make Creativity Part of the Workplace Culture

  By not making creativity a part of everyday business we’re missing a trick. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, urged corporations to: ‘Use the brains of every worker. Make sure that it is the person with the best idea who wins. Reward and celebrate new ideas to encourage others to want to contribute as well. Reward those who live the company’s values, show “guts”, and, in doing so, make the numbers.’

  We were all born with great creative skills, it’s just that sometimes these skills get sidelined or smothered through the rigidity imposed by schools and in businesses. There’s plenty of evidence that the parts of our brains responsible for the logical thought processes inhibit the ones where creativity occurs, and that without the freedom to play it is not allowed to flourish. Play-deprived adults are often rigid, humorless, inflexible and closed to trying out new options. Playfulness enhances the capacity to innovate, adapt and master change in circumstances.

  So let’s use play to unlock creativity!

  Attendee Activities:

  • The importance of creativity to gain a competitive edge
  • Demonstration that just below the surface we are all creative
  • Ways to motivate employees to be creative
  • Removing the fear of failure

Fun and Effective Techniques for Generating Ideas

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ (Pablo Picasso).

Saying creativity is child’s play is not to say it’s easy, but to children it’s second nature. It’s what they do: they explore, they question, they build and they destroy and the next minute they do it all again. As we get older, things get in the way of our creativity. We learn rules. We have to go to school. We get a job. We fit in and conform. And, little by little, we forget how to do it. Studies show how as children get older they lose their ability to think divergently, which is a key component of creativity: 98% of 5-year-olds could think in divergent ways, but by the time they were 15 years old, only 10% could think in this way. And when the test was used with 25-year-olds, only 2% could think divergently.

Even when we’re older our creative abilities are still lurking down there, waiting to be reawakened. And the good news is that there are ways to tap into our innate creative abilities. We can exercise our creative muscles so they become strong again, as strong as they were in childhood.

Let’s do a bootcamp for the brain to rediscover our inner creative strengths!

Attendee Activities:

• Learning how to come up a large quantity of ideas
• How to ask better questions to come up with more creative solutions
• Using visualization techniques to tap into our right brains
• Using humor and lateral thinking

How to Collaborate with Others to Create Big Ideas

For businesses to be truly creative they need to embrace the spirit of collaboration, not only by tapping into internal resources and those of hired hands, but by working in partnership with other businesses (once thought of as competitors) that share similar goals and have complementary skills. Gone are the days when a silo mentality of total ownership and control was possible or even desirable.

Technology has changed all that and the power has shifted into the trigger-happy hands of the masses (the trigger being a computer or mobile phone key, a button on a remote, or whatever other device they might be holding that zaps their attention to something bigger, better, faster). And yet, this same technology has made it possible for businesses who understand the new regime to play, so that the collaborative whole can be greater than the sum of the parts and for ideas to emerge and blossom that no single entity could have created.

Let’s work together to come up with creative solutions!

Attendee Activities:

• How to conduct the perfect brainstorm
• Putting yourself in others’ shoes to get alternative perspectives
• Fostering healthy competition to reach high goals
• Thinking big to break out of iterative thinking

How to Turn Ideas into Action and Bring them to Market

'Vision without action is hallucination.’ (Benjamin Franklin).

Following through with ideas is as important as having them in the first place so they don’t just become conversation fodder for cocktail parties. Most great ideas only saw the light of day as a result of the tireless perseverance of an individual or group of dedicated people, each of whom had battled against all odds. Inventor James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner, the Dual Cyclone, before he perfected his design, yet all the major vacuum cleaner manufacturers who were making too much money selling vacuum cleaner bags rejected it.

Having conviction in the idea is vital. Even if it’s not perfect yet, belief in it will have an effect on others who might realize it’s an unstoppable train that they should get on, or miss and lose out on a big opportunity. Henry Ford said, ‘If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.’

Let’s turn our great ideas into action!

Attendee Activities:

• Killing the ideas that don’t make the cut
• Coming up with a coherent launch plan
• Getting buy-in from other stakeholders
• Thinking through and overcoming obstacles to success