Creative Thinking Strategies Build Better Solo Businesses

Business professionals need to develop their creativity. Creative professionals need to develop and extend their critical thinking skills. Does your business need you to be more creative? Or does your business need you to be more strategic?

Maybe:

• You want to grow your business
• You want to save your business
• You want to start a new business

The right mix of creative thinking and critical thinking is fuel for strategic thinking. The right mix helps you to improve existing services, products and process. When you use critical and creative thinking effectively, it aids in the development of entirely new or innovative services, products and processes. For solo and micro business professionals, the right mix can reduce the stress and anxiety of running your business.

Creativity improves productivity. Developing your creativity is an efficient and effective strategy for driving success in solo and micro business. It provides fuel for managing the changes brought about by technology and its impact on socio-economic conditions. Customer needs and competitors change, and so does the market. When circumstances change it makes sense to change your standard response in order to manage it. You need to survive the change. You might even dare to thrive because of change. Logic, reason and order tend to prevail in business, but when it becomes the only way things are done, it can drain your creative spirit. This is why creativity is becoming the single most important business leadership quality. It’s the high road to creative genius.

Not everyone is naturally creative, but like many business skills, creativity can be taught. It can be enhanced. Creative blocks can be bypassed. You can learn how to work with your creative power and make the most of it when you unlock your creative genius.

There are two types of thinking. There’s creative thinking and critical thinking. One is imaginative. The other is factual. One is expanding, experimental and inventive. The other is logical, ordered and reasoned. Some businesses apply both creative and critical thinking, while others tend to favour one above the other. When you use both types of thinking, barriers to creativity are overcome, and creative blocks and lack of inspiration are dramatically reduced, if not eliminated.

Business owners need creative thinking skills and critical thinking skills to help solve problems, conquer personal challenges, manage change and reduce the impact of internal and external threats to business success. Without creative thinking, developments in technology and changes in socio-economic conditions can change the market beyond your ability to adapt. Your business needs the right measure of creative thinking and critical thinking in order to develop, sustain, and grow. When you apply both types of thinking skills, you get the insights and inspiration you need to solve problems, overcome challenges and cultivate your business through good times and bad.

Creative thinking allows you to take a light-hearted, meandering stroll through your mind. Creative thinking lets you speculate, take risks, break rules, make mistakes and have fun. Creative thinking asks, “what if?” Creative thinkers explore the possibilities.

Critical thinking orders you to march your way through your thoughts. Critical thinking lets you be objective, evidence based, organised, measured and rational. Critical thinking asks, “what is?” Critical thinkers are systematic.

Creative thinking allows you to lose the fear of getting it wrong. Critical thinking helps you to get it right, but if you haven’t lost your fear of getting it wrong, then your fear can stand in the way of you getting it right. This is when mistakes happen and business fails. Fear of change, or resistance to change, is a barrier to business innovation and longevity. There are effective strategies and techniques to develop creative thinking skills and maintain creativity. Creative development can save your business time, energy and money.

Developing and improving creativity in the workplace provides the right balance required to solve problems, find inspiration for new ideas, and gain a different perspective or to find a new approach. Creative and critical thinking in action means you can analyse the problem, imagine solutions, plan a solution, apply the solution, evaluate the solution, improve the solution, and implement the solution. This is how Google, Facebook and Apple do it. They allow time, energy, space and money for developing and extending creative thinking skills in the workplace. You don’t need to be a corporation to be creative. It’s imperative that solo and micro business operators play a variety of roles in business: you’re the marketing manager, financial manager, event organiser, customer service officer, business administrator and receptionist. When does it end? On top of working on your business, you also need to work in your business, doing what you do best. You need creative thinking skills to do this.

Creative thinking encourages you to doubt your habitual mental models because without doubt you remain a prisoner in your uncomfortable comfort zones. The right combination of creative thinking and analytical thinking skills help you to think – and step – outside the box with confidence. Creative thinking and critical thinking promote leadership and inspire innovation, giving your business a competitive edge. Genuine longevity is the result because you have the skills to adapt or reinvent your products and services.

Your thoughts, and therefore your thinking, precede behaviour and action. When you make a decision to think outside the box, sooner or later your behaviour will follow. You can step outside the comfort of doing things the way they have always been done, and into the zone of surviving change, and thriving, when you apply the right mix of creative thinking and critical thinking to drive your business.

If your response to change has always been to use critical thinking alone, and critical thinking is no longer working, then you need creative thinking to manage it. The reverse it also true. If your response to change has always been to use creative thinking alone, and this is no longer working, then you need critical thinking to manage it. Creative development is your answer.

Effective creative development offers both critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills. It helps you to get the right mix. It’s a mix that is unique to you and your business. When you have the right mix, you gain easier access to ideas, inspiration and insights for the purpose of overcoming challenges and solving problems faster. There are many reasons why your business needs you to develop and extend your creative and critical thinking skills. Here are some:

1. To encourage and support business innovation
2. To adapt to market changes
3. To adapt to changes in customer buying behaviour
4. To improve your competitive edge
5. To achieve business goals and objectives
6. To align your personal values with your business goals and objectives
7. To achieve marketing goals and objectives
8. To achieve financial goals and objectives
9. To innovate, plan and improve marketing activities
10. To innovate, plan and improve business operations
11. To play the roles required to run a successful solo or micro business
12. To improve time management skills
13. To improve stress management skills
14. To improve change management skills
15. To improve conflict management skills
16. To improve organisational management skills
17. To improve financial management skills
18. To reduce or eliminate debt
19. To improve debt recovery skills
20. To improve financial position
21. To create a better work/life balance
22. To increase productivity
23. To embody leadership qualities
24. To improve problem solving skills
25. To reduce fear of failure
26. To reduce fear of success
27. To generate new ideas, inspirations and insights
28. To pioneer a new product or service
29. To imagine solutions and improve the solution
30. To support business resilience and longevity

Using critical thinking without creative thinking is like trying to hop around on one leg. Using creative thinking without critical thinking is like trying hop to around on the other leg. When you use both types of thinking, you’re jumping. You hit the ground running with both feet.

It’s pure, creative genius.