Hats off to whoever invented the circle. Pure genius.

Link two or three circles together in slightly overlapped fashion, and you’ve got yourself a Venn Diagram. Now we’re cookin’.

The other evening I was at a fancy event with people who work in the Blue industry and others who work in the Red industry. We made a Venn Diagram by drawing two overlapping circles, each encompassing the collective activities of the Bluesters and the Redsters, respectively, and then filling in the overlapping region (the “intersection”) with the Purple Projects they might consider as opportunities for collaboration. Neither team had really gotten to know members of the other prior to the party. The Purple Projects were very exciting to all involved. Much enthusiastic high-fiving and professionally appropriate hugging took place. It was awesome. Venn Diagrams will give you a whole lot more than a spork; they’re fabulous.

Why? Because constraints foster creativity. If you work in the Blue Dot Group and you’ve been given the title “Chief Blue Dot Innovator,” you may be expected to stretch a bit beyond the traditional boundaries of the Blue Dot Group. If Blue is all you know, however, your innovations are, inevitably, going to be blue dots. They might be “smaller dots,” or “larger dots,” or even “tiny square-ish dots;” but odds are, they’re going to be some kind of blue dots. Let’s say instead that your aim is to discover potential intersections of blue dot strategy with that of red or yellow dots.

The value in making Venn Diagrams as an exercise in creativity is at least twofold:

1. It helps you seek out unfamiliarity.

2. It forces constraints which, in turn, foster creativity.

The Venn diagram exercise may be interpreted literally or metaphorically. In the former case, you’re drawing circles. In the latter scenario, you’re looking for professional and social opportunities that are well outside your usual routine. In either case though, rather than waiting for opportunity to knock at the door; you get practice seeing opportunity everywhere. Improvisational comics know this terrain well. Their craft is all about quickly finding relationships among things initially unrelated. Others can be especially good at this, too — for example, many of the world’s greatest inventors, artists, scientists, and leaders (just for example).

Want to practice? Pick any two or three words to create categories for your circles. Or try a random word generator like this one.

If the ideas above were in one circle and inspirational, motivational, poetic genius were in another, their intersection would include Sekou Andrews. I invite you to watch this.

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