WebWise Solutions

Editor's Note: The following information is adapted from the author's book "The Art of Improvisation" ...

In our business and personal lives (and those seem to mix and mingle more and more these days) we need a healthy dose of creativity to solve problems and feel "alive" in what we do.

However, we sometimes stifle our creativity by limiting the way we think. We get into ruts, or we may carry along bad habits with us as we try to create.

Here are five common barriers to creativity that you may experience in your business or community:

By Susan Salgy

This series of articles explores ways to use Creativity Principles to improve your web communities. (Click here to see the entire series.) In this episode we explore five different, but equally important, roles that must be present to produce an innovative, constantly growing web community.

Innovation is one of the hallmarks of a thriving web community. (Nothing is deadlier than a web site that just sits there.) But constant, ongoing innovation/improvement is harder than it sounds. (The natural inclination in most companies is to put a lot of work into the launch of a site, and then leave it to lurch along on its own, using killer phrases like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" to excuse this neglect.)

This series of articles explores ways to use Creativity Principles to improve your web communities. Click here to see the entire series.

People LOVE to participate in places where they feel creative, energized, appreciated, and welcomed. So if you want your visitors to do more than read an article or two and leave, you need to create a climate that invites sharing.

One great way to do that is to recognize the deadly effects of Killer Phrases, and avoid them on your site.

The average American adult will generate about 4 different solutions to a given problem before giving up or moving on; the average child thinks of 60. See why this could be standing between you and a killer website, in this ongoing series.

I have had a long-time fascination with creativity, idea generation, and how to harness it in your business. Over the years I have presented Creativity Training to writers in various companies, and have seen the liberating power of re-claiming your ability to think creatively again.