Richard Morris, Accredited Trainer
Creativity in business enhances success. It fosters engagement, teamwork, innovative ideas, product and service enhancements. Breaking old thinking habits and work patterns. But how often do businesses actually promote creativity in their business writing?
In creative fields, people often discuss being in the ‘flow state of mind,’ a space where they can easily express and create new concepts, ideas and options. Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as:
‘the focus that, once it becomes strong, leads to a sense of ecstasy and clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other.’
In a 2004 TED talk ‘Flow the Secret of Happiness’ he added “You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing.”
Yet, flow is regarded as existing in our subjective well-being, we need to deliberately create the right conditions for ‘flow’ to come into existence. Imagine if you could apply this state of flow to your business writing!
Develop the WRITE tools
At Indigo, two of our core focus areas are: Creativity and Communications. Within two of our workshops Six Thinking Hats® and Writing Dynamics™, we can help create that ‘flow state’. Encouraging creativity in business writing, grants authors the freedom to express themselves, while ensuring that the key message, stance or the topic’s significance isn’t compromised.
The Six Thinking Hats® is a systematic approach to critically assess any given situation, opportunity or problem. Either individually or collaboratively, we can consider the context behind the document we are writing by creating a thinking pathway:
- Creating the focus – the Why?
- Consider the reader – the Who?
- Understanding the data and information required – the What and Where?
- Identifying the key logical benefits to the reader – the What?
- Overcoming the logical concerns the reader might have – the What?
- Creatively positioning our thoughts, ideas and suggestions – the How and When?
Once we’ve established this way of thinking, we support ‘the How‘ by using Writing Dynamics™ to write quickly and effectively, utilising the three stages: Planning, Drafting, and Editing.
Creating the WRITE environment
Writing Dynamics™ provides a toolkit of writing techniques and a clear process. By focusing on the planning and drafting stages of the workshop, the writer starts to create an environment where flow and creativity can be applied and maintained.
Through planning we expand our thoughts, ideas and suggestions via two stages – creatively expanding key areas where we want to write about using the Writing Dynamics™ ‘Clustering’ technique, it ensures we think freely to create an initial pathway for the document.
Once we’ve established creative direction, we build a clear and organised outline. This outline enables us to maintain a smooth flow in the drafting process, as it serves as the foundation for our writing.
We’re now in an ideal writing environment with the right flow conditions. The planning process has given us clear direction and focus, so all that’s left is to start writing.
No more writer’s block
Learning the right techniques to focus on planning, helps you avoid writer’s block while in the creative flow. You won’t need to stop and search for details. This allows you to write freely and, importantly, stay focused – sounding like the expert you truly are!
Of course, its unlikely that your first draft will be the finished article. This is where we use the ‘Six Editors Obsessions™’, learnt on the Writing Dynamics™ workshop, to ensure your document:
- Grabs the attention of your reader.
- Has energy and flow.
- Has visual impact.
Creativity in your business writing is so easy to achieve
Developing the ‘write’ tools and fostering a conducive writing environment, you empower your team to craft documents that are both creatively developed and concise. These documents will be clear and impactful when put into action.
More about the workshops
Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats® – critically analyse any given situation, understand the real problem, investigate improvement and build a collaborative opportunity – unlocking the creative thinking power of your team. It’s also a great meeting management tool.
- Public workshop calendar
- Enquire about in-house training.
- Find out more about our training for trainers.
Writing Dynamics™– Learn the secrets of how to achieve written skills of the highest quality, while saving time, by following a special system developed and used by professional writers. Our professional writing trainers guide you through each step, using business documents that you’ve written. This means you see the immediate impact to your own regulatory documents, as well as proposals, reports, briefings, emails, project scopes, in fact any document you write.
- Public workshop calendar.
- Enquire about in-house training.
- Find out more about our training for trainers.
More about Richard Morris Richard is an accredited Think on Your Feet®, Writing Dynamics™, Lateral Thinking and Six Thinking Hats® trainer and has delivered these workshops to numerous clients.
From an organisational development context, he has created and implemented a new leadership behavioural framework and set of associated flagship leadership development programmes.
