Leaders are disciplined dreamers.

Through disciplined dreaming, effective leaders move forward with boldness and thoughtfulness, with urgency and passion and with a renewed sense of purpose and wonder.  ~Josh Linkner

Linkner says that “Businesses have systems and processes for everything, from answering the phone to taking out the trash. Remarkably, most companies have no such system for the one thing that matters most: developing and growing creative capacity.”    

You may be thinking that the idea of disciplined and dreaming is an oxymoron.  But Josh lays out a series of steps and disciplines that really can expand your creative vision.  His suggested Four Most Powerful Techniques to Ignite Sparks of Creativity are especially effective.  Below are two examples:

·         EdgeStorming

o   Toss out an idea and then take it to its furthest extreme.  To make the list ideas must be outrageously big or small, loud or soft, expensive or cheap.  By forcing yourself to the edges you’ll uncover countless fresh and new ideas.

·         The Long List

o   The title explains the idea.  Identify the problem or challenge and then just begin making a list (as long as possible) of any idea that comes to mind.  The key is to not evaluate or assess ideas.  Just let them flow and keep going.  In Linkner’s description of this technique he suggests (as a group) coming up with 200 possibilities.  Two hundred is quite ambitious.  However, you will be surprised what you’ll find if your list includes 25-30 ideas.  There will no doubt be ideas on your list you never would have thought of had you not tried this method for disciplined dreaming.

Last week I was sitting on an airplane and decided to put some of Josh’s suggested techniques to the test.  With nothing other than the ordinary airplane commotion to distract me, I chose the long list technique.  I started with the first couple of ideas, which were probably obvious, but then suddenly, to my surprise, other ideas started to come out of nowhere.  I continued on and one idea simply kept leading to another.  I now have several of these ideas on my to-do list; and they never would have existed had I not tried this technique.

I must admit, I was inspired by a client to pursue this exercise.  I had just come from meeting with a firm in DC that develops strategy for policy change at the Federal and State levels.  They are ridiculously smart and I was encouraged to hear them talk about the need to schedule thinking time.  After all, that’s really what their clients are paying them for – thinking – coming up with innovative and creative strategies for advocacy and policy change.  But it’s so rare to hear anyone talk about prioritizing and scheduling time to just think, to be creative.

We are disciplined about so many things: responding to emails, returning calls, scheduling meetings.  Yet, the things that actually move us forward, like planning and dreaming, get put on the back burner as secondary activities.  Imagine what we could accomplish if we became just as disciplined about dreaming?