Sometimes you just have to get off the highway and take a road that is not the straightest line to where you are going. I recently completed a week-long trip to New England to teach with the fine folks at Technicians Service Training.
With a different town every night and a lot of driving, it becomes easy to do what the GPS tells you and miss all of the things surrounding you.
If you have traveled through New England then you know that the roads wind all over and often have a surprise at every turn. You can run into a gorgeous 18th century home and half mile later come upon a picturesque lake. Despite all the beautiful fall foliage along the highway you will not really see anything unless you go off GPS and get lost. I made the decision to do just that in Danbury Conn., and discovered a town founded in 1698 that’s modern and historic at the same time. A short trek around the streets gave me the idea for this column.
As many of you know I am a devout follower of the LEAN methods of streamlining processes. By design, I am always looking for the straight line between two points or the unnecessary step so that I can get more done in less time. While that is very effective once the process is designed, it occurs to me that while predictability is a great thing to have in business all of us need some happy surprises to spawn the creativity that makes us better at what we do. The problem is that we may have to schedule those opportunities.
For those of us who repair cars I think you will relate when I say that often some of the best lessons in my craft come from the least expected place. Many times someone will tell me a story about a problem they had with a car that could not be fixed and I have to go and get the story by researching the problem.
Like that dog in the movie “Up” I have a tendency to be distracted by squirrels so I have to give myself permission to go down a path for a time and then get back to what I am supposed to be doing.
I wonder how many things we could learn if we took those five minute “down times” and learned something new rather than burying our face in a phone and playing some game or checking out the 80 junk mails sitting in the inbox.
Coming up with new ideas and solutions takes creativity. If you subscribe to the left brain, right brain theory then you just might find happiness comes from giving the left side permission to manage a daydream or satisfy an irrelevant curiosity. Letting the creative part of your mind run wild can lead to solutions that might not hold water, but from which the logical part can derive some useful ideas to pick apart and reassemble into a working plan.
Many writers wake up in the morning and free form journal the first things that come to mind as a way to harness and aim their creativity. This is done in the morning so that all day you have the chance to let both sides of your brain work on the ideas. If you do it before bed you are likely to either become an insomniac at worst or at best your brain will take your ideas into your dreams and create something completely out of context, such as that dream where you are solving the same problem over and over again until you just wake up for a reset.
I have found that journaling is a very useful way to spend five minutes when I am working on something that requires creativity. The point is not to force an outcome, but just let it rip, sort of like getting off the highway to see what lies behind the next turn. There can be a reward at each turn and after the time you have allowed yourself to explore is up you can always put your face back in your smart phone and ask that soothing female voice, “Where the heck am I?”
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