Repurposing

I’ve got a bit of time before I start running an online leadership workshop this morning. (Thanks time zone disparities!) so, I’m trawling through some of my past whiteboard scribblings as potential content inspirations for an online self-directed course on personal effectiveness I’m putting together.

I’m not the greatest artist in the world, or even the room, but as a giver or seller of abstract ideas, it’s helpful to try and give them a variety of tangible forms. I have sometimes been so enamoured with my own etching that I have taken a photo of a whiteboard to ‘save’. A better word might be ‘hoard’ as they were rarely used or stored logically. I’ve had an iPad Pro and iPencil for a year. My whiteboarded models and lists are now saved and stored.

If ‘pivot’ was April’s word of the month, for this month I nominate ‘repurpose’. I am going to repurpose the stuffing out of these images. I’m presenting a couple of sessions this month on applying a number-8 wire mentality to ideas just lying around waiting for new applications. Kiwis have had a culture of and phrase for repurposing for over a century: number-8 wire mentality. Historically, this meant physically fixing things on the farm without buying new resources by using whatever was lying around, such as number-8 fencing wire. I’m taking that metaphor that’s lying around and fixing a non-physical challenge with it.

There may well be new or radical innovations required for cost-reduction, team-building, productivity improvement, and economic recovery. Go for gold and good luck with looking for, and waiting for, those. But, how reliable is inspiration? Meantime, what idea-repurposing can you apply with the ideas you already have?

I’m trialling a self-directed course I’ve developed on personal effectiveness. One of the ten lessons within it is on problem-solving, a critical element of which is practical creativity. You get all five of my books (in eBook format) when you sign up. If that sounds of interest, you can learn more at www.lifesuccesslearning.com .

#onlinelearning #onlinetraining #personaleffectiveness #personalproductivity #productivity #problemsolving

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