"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science."
- Carl Sagan

A young child was busy in class feverishly drawing away. The teacher approached and asked the girl what she was so busy drawing. The child responded, "I am drawing a picture of God." The teacher, skeptical, asked "And how do you know what God looks like?" The child without looking up continued to draw and said "You will know in a minute."

Some believe that effectively doing things will get you closer to your goals – that you will produce a desired effect. Others believe efficiently performing tasks in the most economical manner will get them to be more innovative and in a shorter time span. I look at effectiveness as right brain activity (the child drawing God) and efficiency as left brain activity (the teacher sceptical that a child knows what God looks like).

Combining right brain activities with left brain activities is proving to be the most successful path to meaningful innovation by fostering critical thinking, creative problem solving and collaboration. (The child effectively answered the teacher. Why? Because there were no limitations put on her imagination).

So, how do you get left brain people to use more of their right brain? How do you translate efficiency into effectiveness? 

Left brain linear thinking drilled home throughout our formal educational process in the U.S. focuses on the most efficient way to problem solve. Decades of learning by "no you can't and here's the answer" sadly develops linear thought processes and the debilitating limiting habit energy that drives much of the thinking in corporate America. Habit energy, the rusty brain cap that shackles too many people into "the only way to do a task," "the way we have always done it," "the way we know it works" - "THE SAFE WAY."
Efficient - Yes. Innovative - No!

Right brain thinking involves risk taking, exploration, seeking alternative methods, adventuring, doing whatever it takes to achieve the desired goal. Failure is a positive attribute in right brain thinking. Visionary leaders encourage right brain thinking. They believe that one learns more from their mistakes than from being sedentary and complacent.
 
You become a more effective right brain thinker through arts-based problem solving techniques. The visual and performing arts are a major way to significantly change limiting habit energy into creative energy. The arts provide highly effective tools and techniques to get people to break free from their mental shackles, to think expansively, envision solutions to problems in ways they never did before.

Executives in my workshops learn more about collaboration through improvisation exercises, and silent group activities like collective sculpting and structure building than they learned from formal classes in collaboration they attended in executive business schools programs.

Rapidly growing numbers of Fortune 500 companies are deploying arts-for-business based training to foster critical thinking, creative problem solving and collaboration across all levels of their organizations.

Collaboration is critical to effectively achieving innovation goals. Are you or your company as effective as possible? Do you get to your goals? Did you achieve the desired effect?