The best-kept secret to cultivating creativity and innovation

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is a muscle - and this muscle needs to be exercised if you want to be more innovative or deliver creative work. But like anything that needs to be developed or worked on, most of us are looking for shortcuts. From workouts to productivity tools to errands...we're all drawn to time-saving hacks that offer quick results and immediate solutions.

This can happen in creative work when we look for shortcuts or try to speed up the process by taking inspiration from design galleries or third-party websites. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with your team members trying to optimize their time by looking elsewhere for inspiration. Your team should do it. Often.

But if that's all they do, if they rely solely on inspiration from other people's work, then they stunt the growth of their curiosity. Without a well-developed sense of curiosity, they will fail to become the brilliant creatives they are meant to be.

Related: How to Make Your Employees More Creative at Work

Explore outside your industry

By increasing your curiosity, you will not only be able to ask deeper and more meaningful questions, but also imagine ideas more quickly. How to build this muscle? By learning new things. Proactively. You can build this muscle even more successfully by learning things you don't know and even exploring ideas you might be uncomfortable with.

Don't limit your learning and exploration to ideas directly related to your work. Get out of your industry to learn new things.

A designer can cultivate their curiosity by learning to bake and studying why yeast makes them rise, why a second rise makes better bread, and how yeast, baking soda, and baking powder are all baking agents. rising but require very different conditions. let the pastries rise.

If you're a nonprofit leader, you might find out why Six Sigma tools, techniques, and strategies are important in manufacturing. You could study processes like the production system or the five whys technique. Or you can explore the relationships between things in different ecosystems. The goal is to broaden your curiosity across a variety of disciplines.

The best kept secret of creativity

So why is it important for your creative muscle? Why bother investing so much time and effort into learning ideas so far removed from your creative endeavors? It's about getting your reps.

We live in a world that offers endless possibilities for reflection, discovery and investigation of ideas. And each time you seize one of these opportunities, you develop your curiosity. And perhaps more importantly, you are creating a deeper well of experience to draw upon. By soaking up all this new information, you have a broader set of ideas to apply to your current challenges and reiterate. It's the best kept secret for cultivating creativity and innovation.

Related: The 9 Steps That Will Help You Learn Everything

3 questions to cultivate your curiosity

So how can you and your team develop this curiosity to grow your creativity and innovation? Use these three questions to guide your curiosity:

"Am I learning anything new?" That's a pretty common question, right? Most people ask themselves this question several times a year when they feel thoughtful and introspective. But this is not enough. The most successful creatives ask...