Creative thinking can help generate lots of ideas, find new ways to make money, solve problems, re engage new markets or products, modify ideas or ways of doing things and ensure you are more competitive.

So what is creative thinking in business? Well it’s when you are looking at something that everyone else is looking at but you see something different, or you are looking at opportunities or possibilities others haven’t seen yet. Or you are challenging assumptions in different ways.

In fact, being creative is as much a core competence in small business now as leadership, financial management and marketing is. It may even be more important. Just have a look at the following two examples:

Reverse some of your most basic assumptions about how you do business. Do performance reviews at the beginning of the year not the end. Give the financial budget to front line people. Instead of you deciding what products you are going to develop, let customers develop products/services. Its about looking at the opposite to see if it generates any different thinking. Okay it these may not be the solutions for you but it gets you thinking differently.

Manipulation of existing and new ideas in business. Chose something you want to adapt or change or modify or whatever. Break it down, list what could be changed or variations on the service or product and then look at different combinations of development.

As an example, imagine you want to improve customer service. You break it down into four aspects or use the customer process such as politeness, responsiveness, delivery, referrals, after care, complaints handling. Then ask the following question:

What could be done to improve customer service in these four areas?

List the alternatives you come up with, get five for each and then try and connect them. Find useful improvement combinations. Try and think of different ways of connecting responsiveness with referrals or after care.

Think about it, if you list five alternatives for each of the four areas of customer service you can generate around 3000 combinations of development. If only 10% are useful, that means 300 new ideas for developing customer service. You don’t need me to tell you how useful that is!

I spent quite a bit of time in the car today which got me thinking (to pass the time.) What are some of the key questions we should be asking ourselves on a regular basis. You know the ones we avoid immediately as soon as they enter our head, or, the ones our staff possibly ask themselves each day. Anyway I came up with five:

1. How would your customers recognise you if you got rid of your company logo?

2. What if your best customer was about to go and do business elsewhere?

3. What if your exceptional reputation for customer service was based on just a couple members of your staff or team?

4. What else would you do at work if you had an extra hour a day?

5. Which customers should you be picking the phone up to tomorrow…. urgently?

I’m not saying what you come up with you might do, but hey it may get you thinking!!! What other questions should we be posing?