In a live audience situation up-to-date techniques can generate several ideas a minute! (Ask me to provide you with a telephone demonstration.) Confronted with that kind of on-demand-evidence, right in front of their eyes, even the skeptics start to believe it’s possible for creativity to be systematic and reliable, IF people are equipped with the right tools.

What could you achieve if you mastered those tools? What could your staff deliver if they could use the modern tools of creativity and innovation with ease?

Back to our question: how can you train creativity? How can you master the innovation mindset?

First, demonstrate to people that they can generate ideas, by example.

There is no better leadership tool than example, and a powerful example is provided when the person achieves real-time results by following simple steps.

Once people have proven to themselves that they can do it, they want to understand what is behind the guidance that enabled their creativity. ‘Show me how’ questions emerge, such as: ‘How did we do that? Show me how to do it myself!’

When that level of motivation is present it takes just a day for staff to learn how to produce commercially useful ideas, on demand, in huge numbers.

More seriously, there are multiple highly effective techniques to manage a huge flow of ideas.

Whichever of the available methods you choose to lead the handling of vast numbers of ideas, there will be an idea filtering process.

Therein lie many dangers: too much filtering and you kill creativity stone-dead; too little filtering and all sorts of unrelated, unfocused and unusable ideas emerge and waste time.

We don’t write-off babies who emerge from the womb unable to read and write and discuss the finer points of the innovation mindset. We nurture, develop, and guide them to the point of full competence.

When do we filter ideas? After the ideas have been substantially developed, improved, refined and shaped: not, absolutely not, when they are born. The great news is that there are many effective techniques available to take raw ideas to the point where you can choose from the best of the best.

Part of a well adjusted innovation mindset in effective leaders is a realistic and grounded awareness that the products, services and processes of today will be obsolete tomorrow, and a liability the day after.

They understand that pushing staff to do more and more work in less and less time, to survive today, can never create the ideas needed to thrive tomorrow.

In fact, it has the opposite effect! People over-pushed today are neither capable of, nor willing to, offer the discretionary creative effort required to transform their company’s future.

Note that phrase: discretionary effort.

Better managers and leaders can get staff to go beyond what is required, physically and emotionally.

The best leaders use a range of techniques to create a culture where the peak of discretionary effort is offered enthusiastically: physically, emotional and intellectually – thus nurturing ideal circumstances for creativity; the optimum innovation mindset.

Great innovation leaders (Edison was one, Jobs another, Gates yet another) inspired their staff to create as part of their normal work culture. They made the innovation mindset part of the culture.