I love the buzz of the city. It's full of ideas, energy and electricity. Wherever you walk, you can't fail to be inspired by new ideas and initiatives emerging everywhere, in every district.

New York constantly reinvents itself. It continues to grow with the inner belief that anything and everything is possible. 

Cities like New York never die.

Companies die all the time.

What's the difference?

As cities get bigger, people become more productive. They keep having ideas and they keep making them happen.

Cities are fantastic incubators and catalysts of innovation. The closeness of those overlapping imaginations forces people to interact with other people with very different perspectives.

From this blend of cultures and approaches new ideas emerge, and stick, every day.

On the other hand, all too often, even the most innovative organisation soon becomes, what Gordon Mackenzie once called, a "giant hairball". A tangled mass of rules, rituals and systems, all based on what worked in the past.

Companies erect walls. They reinforce barriers.

They tell you who you can talk to, and who you can mix with. They become so wrapped up with best practice that they suppress our natural imagination.

The solution?

Give leaders permission to inspire collaboration to help companies stay innovative and imaginative.

Let them break down all the walls, both symbolic and physical. Encourage them to mix up the subject specialists, or even pay people to have free time and play together more.

Let them start the conversations that matter.

The best way to unleash corporate imagination?

Think of New York.

Sometimes we can all get just a little too wrapped up in the "how" of things that we can forget the "why".

It's important, every now and then, to step back and remind yourself why you are doing something.

Why are we collaboratiing together? Why are we working in this way? Why am I working so hard at working with others and not doing this on my own?

In the world of creative collaboration, the "how" is critical, but the "why" must never be allowed to become the back story.

We call this "why" the shared goal. It is the energy and the magnet that will drive a group forward to achieve something that is remarkable.

I was reminded of this last week on a visit to New York. I visited the High Line which is a living, breathing and inspirational example of the result of a shared goal amongst collaborators.

It's also an extraordinary public space for people to enjoy.

The High Line is a public park built on a historic freight rail elevated above the streets on Manhattan's West Side.

A series of incredible, against all odds, collaborations resulted in the preservation and transformation of the High Line at a time when the historic structure was under threat of demolition. The collaborations included a community based not for profit group, the City of New York, a design team of landscape architects, and experts in horticulture, engineering, security, maintenance, public art and other disciplines.

The High Line is a perfect and very tangible example of what a diverse group of people can create together when they have a shared goal.

When leading others in collaboration, never let anyone lose sight of what you are trying to achieve together.

http://www.thehighline.org/

You can't collaborate on your own. It just doesn't work that well.

You have to work together with other people.

If you want the results of your collaborative efforts to be fresh and exciting, the people you select to work together will need to think very differently to yourself. You'll need some exciting minds.

This means you'll have to positively respond to others' opinions. You'll have to listen and understand ideas and views that will be significantly different to your own.

Having different perspectives is the point, not the problem, with creative collaboration.

This is why creating and thinking together with others isn't everyone's cup of tea. It can require a lot of effort and skill.

As a result, many of us choose to come up with new ideas either on our own, or with a select group of like-minded people.

We know it's easier to create solutions with people who see the world in much the same way as we do. It's comfortable to share and build ideas with people who think in identical ways.

It's easier. But it's also less productive. 

There's more evidence to support this in the book "The Difference" by Scott E. Page. He's a professor at the University of Michigan and he uses empirical evidence to prove that "diversity trumps individual ability". He uses research to show that the power of different perspectives creates better groups, companies, schools and even societies.

The message and the lessons are clear. If a group of collaborators want to be seriously productive, they need to be seriously different in outlook, experience and expertise.

If you're in a group where everyone thinks the same way, everyone will become stuck in the same place.

However, If you force yourself to create with people who truly think differently, even though this might be more challenging, the group will become stuck in different places.

Someone will take the thinking as far as they can, and then someone else, with a very different set of thinking tools, will pick up and take the thinking to a new place.

So, it really is time to start going beyond groups of experts with the similar backgrounds if you want truly radical and productive collaboration.

Forget simply bringing groups of marketers together to solve branding challenges.

Be brave and involve people from outside HR circles if you want breakthrough people strategies.

Avoid groups of financial experts working alone if you want new approaches to commercial obstacles. 

We all get stuck at times, not knowing which way to turn. Collaborating with people from different worlds will not only shift the blockage, but it will drive your thinking and ideas to an even higher level.

The answers lie in diversity. Not what we look like outside, but what we look like within. Our distinctive tools and abilities.

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When setting the scene for creative collaboration, I like to highlight the danger of experience when creating with others.

Experts can be ruthless idea killing machines. Experience tells them how to close down opportunities. They know how to let their knowledge and expertise get in the way of new thinking. Too often an expert mind will limit the options, whereas a beginner's mind will see only endless possibilities.

Here's a great story about the limitations of experts when generating new ideas that was shared with me recently.

JK Rowling sent the first chapter of her first book to publisher after publisher. One by one they all turned it down.

Twelve publishers turned it down because with conventional publishing wisdom, children didn't read long books. Children had short attention spans, so a children's book needed to be a few pages long, and have illustrations. Neither of these was true of Rowling's book.

Fortunately, the eventual publisher didn't read the first chapter himself. He gave it to his 8 year old daughter to read. A few hours later, she came back to her dad and asked for the second chapter. The publisher explained he didn't have it.

His daughter was really upset. She was only 8 years old and wasn't a publishing expert. She just wanted to keep reading. She wanted to find out what happened to all the characters. She made her dad promise to get the rest of the book.

Luckily for the publisher, his daughter was right and conventional publishing was wrong. The rest of the story, as they say, is history.

Fifteen years later the Harry Potter books have sold over 400 million books worldwide. They are the best selling book series in history. The seventh book sold 11 million copies in in 24 hours. The Harry Potter empire is worth $15 billion. JK Rowling is a billionaire and she earns over half a million dollars a day. She donates millions to charities for sick and poor children.

JK Rowling and an 8 year old girl knew nothing about the rules of publishing succesful children's books.They didn't know as much as the experts. They did all the wrong things.

So don't ignore experts, but equally don't let them become blinded by the conventions of their past. Encourage them to build their opinions into a platform to help take things to the next level rather than become their glass ceiling.

Now that's magic.

In every project we run, the strongest ideas and best decisions come from the very qualities that make each of us unique. The best thinking comes from making new, unexpected connections from surprising sources.

However, most of us have a natural tendency to migrate towards people and groups that share the same outlook and approach as us. Circles we feel comfortable with. People who are swimming in the same river as us.

It's a bit like listening to your same favourite CD's or albums all the time. 

Or reading your same favourite books all the time.

There's comfort in knowing exactly what to expect, but there's nothing new. or different or exciting. Eventually, everything seems very predicatable and dull.

Comfort is the enemy of creativity. See Elvis Presley.

So why not force and create connections with people with very different experiences and outlooks to yourself? A small group of individuals that will see the world very differently to how you see it. 

I did this 10 years ago when I was searching for inspiration and energy to take my career in a completely new direction. We started our own Creative Collaboration Group - a group willing to help each other expand their creative potential. To think about and try different things.

Our little group brought together four people from the arts, teaching and the business world.

The conversations and fresh perspectives we shared over one year gave me the inspiration and confidence to set up The Collaboration Company. Looking back, it also gave the other group members a creative springboard to make some very exciting changes in the way they worked.

You can start your own Creative Collaboration Group:

1 Make a list of people you know with exciting and different minds.

2 Check the list again. Be brave. Remove anyone from the list that you know shares the same outlook on life as you.

3 Make the first move. Go and meet them individually and pitch the idea to them. Invite them all to come to the first meeting.

4 Have a list of possible discussion topics ready for when they show interest and want to find out more.

5 Find an interesting meeting place. It could be a cafe, restaurant, art gallery, museum, library.

It's great to be part of something where different views is the point, not the problem.

A group deep in creative conversation and collaboration can sometimes become so immersed in the creative challenge they are exploring, that they lose sight of how to crystalize their thinking into ideas.

An idea has no value if it gets stuck inside your head. It only becomes valuable when it becomes something real and tangible. When something happens as a result of it being created.

The starting place on this journey to making ideas real is to communicate newly created ideas effectively. To move them from inside your imagination into the real world.

When a group tries to grasp the ideas that are floating around the room and their heads, we ask them to start "crystalizing their ideas". To be disciplined in how they decide to craft their ideas and help them to be understood, remembered, and acted upon.

Here are the 4 simple principles of the crystalizing ideas process:

1. Express the idea as simply as possible. if the idea can't be captured in one sentence that encapsulates the essential core of your idea, then it's too complex to be understood. Strip away the layers to reveal the essence of your idea.

2. For the idea to come to life, it must generate interest, curiosity and attention from the very outset. The idea needs to be feel fresh and unexpected, even if it's an old idea dressed up differently. Think carefully about the words you use. Find a new name for it or give an existing idea a new title.

3. Describe the idea in such a concrete way that it will mean the same thing to everyone. Leave no ambiguity in anyone's mind. It can be useful to think about how you would explain the idea to a 10 year old child. Don't forget that, just like children, most of us like to see pictures to help us understand something better, so consider using images to help engage people.

4. Make people care about your idea. Make them feel something. Everyone has an emotional side and a rational one, Your idea has to reach both, but too often we instinctively reach out for data and hard numbers before creating the emotional connection. Don't be afraid to tap into emotions to convey your initial idea.

There's nothing more frustrating than a great group of minds creating new ideas together and those ideas never seeing the light of day. Be creative with your conversations, but also be disciplined in crafting ideas that are crystal clear to everyone.

I'm not a great believer in New Year Resolutions. I've never been able to stick at them and make them work for me. I think this must be because they're nearly always about changing behaviours and, like all of us, I know how difficult change can be. So drafting resolutions is mostly a pointless exercise for me.

I do, however, always set for myself something I call my Big Ambition.This allows me not to simply focus on goals but more on the guiding principles for how I will make the right decisions for myself.

My Big Ambition allows me to create a framework or landscape in which I will make my important decisions. It's not prescriptive but it does provide me with a sense of direction and positive intent for the year ahead.

It's a very simple exercise with far reaching and practical implications.

It's based on accepting that the year ahead is sure to be full of unpredictability but that, nevertheless, I intend to explore new horizons. I like to embrace this unpredicability by not allowing myself to orchestrate or control the results of my Big Ambition.

I write down on strips of paper fifteen words or statements that I feel capture the energy and feel of the way I might like to act or behave over the coming twelve months. I then place these strips into a bag and pull out five.

I don't allow myself to edit or change any of the strips I pull out. I go with the strips selected at random.

I do, however, allow myself the luxury of interpreting the selected words in any way I choose.

This year my Big Ambition is to make decisions and take actions which in some way will include all, or any, of the following principles: Risky, Artistic, Trusting, Generous and Learning.

Let's see what happens.

At the start of the session, I asked everyone what he or she hoped to achieve through collaboration. One person reflected for a while and then said, “I hate collaboration. In the war, you were shot if you collaborated!”

It reminded me that collaboration is a word and a way of working that generates lots of different emotions and can divide opinions. To make it work requires time, freedom and space. It can only start when someone (often the leader) admits they don’t have all the answers; something that isn’t always easy to do in many organisations.

So why bother?

Here’s the first in a series of several ‘why bother?” discoveries that we’ve made over the last 8 years of designing and facilitating collaboration.

Reason To Collaborate Number 1: If you let people work things out for themselves, they’ll commit to turning the best ideas and solutions into reality.

That’s the great thing about collaboration. It’s not just about having ideas. It’s about making them happen.

In our research, we’ve found that when those involved in the collaboration have to explain why decisions were made, even decisions they don’t personally like, they say things like, “I was there. We explored lots of other ideas. This is the best approach and I’m committed to it.”

Collaboration means looking at an issue in such a way that even the most reluctant people believe the decision is correct. They’ve considered the issue in the right context. You’ve allowed them to use their imaginations to explore both the issues and the opportunities. Ideas and solutions have emerged from the group discussions.

Ideas can often come easily. Implementation is the real challenge. Collaboration helps you with the difficult part.

That's why leaders should drive more creative collaboration both inside and outside their organisations - it makes ideas stick.

We've all had this problem.

Whichever way we look at the problem or challenge, sometimes we just get stuck, not knowing which way to turn.

There's no need to be embarrassed when we get stuck. Everyone gets stuck at some point either with a business challenge or even in life. Sometimes we get stuck when thinking together in a group. Sometimes we get stuck when working alone.

Artists call this the creative block.

My friend, Micheal Atavar, has written another wonderful book full of practical tips, techniques and methods designed to help you get unblocked.

His new book is called 12 Rules of Creativity, and it's full of ideas and advice. It's a terrific way to ignite your own imagination and remember that everyone is creative.

One of my favourite moments is when Michael shares his recipe for a fish finger sandwich saying that:

"the joy of a fish finger sandwich is that it takes you beyond the boundaries of good taste into a childhood space where everything is incoherent but essentially alright."

What a priceless reminder to distance yourself from the tensions of being an adult every now and then - to open up the door to your childlike wonder and imagination. 

The twelve rules in this book will help you navigate those moments when you are facing a dead end. If you'd like to find out more about this book please look at this website:

http://www.12-rules-of-creativity.com/