Latest / Magic Thread Media / Why Your Brainstorms Fail: The 3 Pre-Meeting Magic Secrets | Michael Brian Lee

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Why Your Brainstorms Fail: The 3 Pre-Meeting Magic Secrets | Michael Brian Lee · Magic Thread Media

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Michael Brian Lee: My definition of creativity is thinking differently from yourself, like thinking this, you know, differently from other people is great, but if you constantly think the same way all the time, even though it's different from other people, you might struggle to, you know, solve problems that you're stuck on. When you're stuck, it's you that's stuck, it's not the problem, right? So, when you have to unstick yourself from the problem, you need to be able to think differently than yourself than you usually think, and that's to me, that's what creativity is. When you're able to think in a different way than usual, then then you're being creative.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Hey, it's Amy. Welcome to Create Magic at work, where we cast visions for a future of work where business decisions ripple outward to our teams, our communities, the planet, and humanity as a whole. If you're ready to edge walk instead of sleepwalk through your leadership, you're in the right place. So, let's start making magic at work.
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Hey everyone, Amy here. Welcome back to another episode of Create Magic at Work. Today I am talking to someone that has some really unique ideas around creativity and innovation, Michael Bryan Lee. Michael Bryan Lee helps businesses understand how creativity delivers results, known as the Creative Breakthrough Catalyst. He is the number one best-selling author and two-time TEDx speaker. He writes for The Mail and Guardian, Forbes, and Business Day, and was named a top 50 thought leader in creativity by Thinkers 360 his TV productions have won five SAFTAs, and he founded the Innotivity Institute. Michael holds an MA from Stanford and is completing his MSc in Creativity and Change Leadership from Buffalo State. His clients include Hernard, Ricard, Multi Choice, Absa, HP, and DHL. We have been talking a lot about creativity on Create Magic at Work lately. It's really showing up in the energy of our community. So, Michael, welcome to Create Magic at Work. Thanks for being here.
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Michael Brian Lee: Thank you for having me here, Amy. Appreciate it.
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Amy Lynn Durham: You've kind of been in the thought leader coaching speaker space for a really long time. Can you start off sharing with us how you got into this work and how you got into the creativity work.
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Michael Brian Lee: Sure, I started my adult career as a writer and literary editor. I was living in Prague in the 1990s and while I was there, I started working in television, started making television content as a director, and ended up moving back to New York for a while. Worked in New York in the TV and film industry for a bit, and then moved to South Africa, where I continued working in television and did quite a bit of interesting stuff around Africa. Along the way I was asked to start a film school, so I said yes, and I started developing this film and television school, and we decided to include a curriculum on creativity, not part of, you know, learning to be an editor or a director of photography or whatever, but as a separate study, creativity itself, which is something that most film schools don't have, and most schools don't have, and so I use the book, The Artist's Way, from Julia Cameron. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a kind of seminal work of
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artistic rediscovery, and the book was not easy to get, necessarily, in South Africa on a short notice, so it took some time. I went to Nigeria for a project, and we had to replace me temporarily with another guy who preferred to use a book he had written about creativity, so when I came back, they wanted me to take over the class again, but there wasn't time to order Julia Cameron's book, and I didn't want to use his book, because it was his book about what his theory was. So I decided to write our own curriculum again without Julia Cameron's book, and so what I did was studied her book and a bunch of other creativity work and came up with my own methodology, my own structure for teaching creativity. After doing that in the, in the film school for a few years, I decided to be good to take it out of the school and bring it into the real world, and so I did that and started working with entrepreneurs and eventually corporates. That's, I guess, the answer to your question. How it all
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came about, this is really was a step-by-step process that wasn't predicted or planned as it was. It kind of took each step as that step became apparent, which is kind of how creativity works, you know. You just kind of know what's happening when it starts happening.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Interesting. Yeah, I was just going to ask you, what was that spark that came about where you took the work that you did into companies and organizations? Give us a little taste of, like, what's the part of the work? What, what is this? You've combined the word innovation and creativity into innotivity. Tell us what's underneath that. Give us some tips or some things that you were seeing that inspired you to bring it to the corporate space.
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Michael Brian Lee: Well, what inspired me to bring to the corporate space was really the demand for creativity is huge, even though they may not know it. Right, LinkedIn said that the best investment you can make in business is to sharpen your creative skills. Forbes calls it the skill of the future. IBM said it's the number one skill for leaders. World Economic Forum has had up to seven out of 10 of its skills of the future be related to creativity, so it's a skill that business needs. It's a skill in business that is needed today more than almost any other skill, and certainly more than ever. You know, there's interesting statistics, like for example, do you know how much of the world's information existed a year ago?
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Amy Lynn Durham: How much of the world's information existed?
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Michael Brian Lee: Yeah, the information that we have access to today, how much of it was there that we have
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Amy Lynn Durham: access to? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. The
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Michael Brian Lee: answer is less than 10% existed a year ago. More than 90% of the information we have today was created in the last year. Another important statistic, the average number of years that a company stayed in business about 40 years ago was 30 years. Today it's five years for a company. The average amount of resources that were physical objects, like a factory or a car, was 80% 40 years ago. Today it's 20% 80% is intellectual property, right. So, the point is things in the business world are changing all the time. The solution that's been put forward by many reliable sources is creativity. So, we really need companies to be creative. People in the companies need to be creative. They need to come up with better solutions to problems faster using less information than they've usually had in the past, because there's less time to gather and basically get everything to change rapidly all the time, even when it's not changing, you actually want to get it to change, force it
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to change, make it change, so that you can actually adapt and improve, like when you have to set a broken arm. Sometimes you have to break the arm again, because it was set badly, right? If a bone is set wrong, you have to re-break it to set it properly. That's kind of where we're at with creativity. It's like, if you're not really thinking properly, you might have to break a few eggs, you know, to get to the point where you can actually be creative. So, that's okay. What matters is creativity is critical. It's critical.
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Amy Lynn Durham: So, what's your definition of creativity? I've heard a few, and then tell us what inativity is. That's what your thought leadership concept.
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Michael Brian Lee: Absolutely, so creativity is normally described. The most common definition is that it's something that is new, valuable, or useful and original, right? Those are the definitions of creativity that are the most common used. I don't think that that's true. When you look at the question of originality, it's certainly not true. Like, there's nothing really original, everything is pretty much a derivative of something that came before it, and many famous artists have great quotes, like Picasso has the great quote that he may not have actually said, but he said that mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal, right, and that was a quote that then Banksy actually took that quote and claimed it as his own, made a rock with that quote on it, scratched off Picasso's name, and put his own name, you know, just to exacerbate the point, right. Steve Jobs ended up quoting Picasso later, and then it turns out he may have made up the fact that Picasso said that, and Picasso
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never said it at all, but the point is that most artists know that there's nothing original, right, and the fact that that definition doesn't work, you have to look for a different definition. My definition of creativity is thinking differently from yourself, like thinking this, you know. Differently from other people is great, but if you constantly think the same way all the time, even though it's different from other people, you might struggle to, you know, solve problems that you're stuck on. When you're stuck, it's you that's stuck, it's not the problem, right? So, when you have to unstick yourself from the problem, you need to be able to think differently than yourself than you usually think, and that's to me, that's what creativity is. When you're able to think in a different way than usual, then then you're being creative. Now, in activity itself, the word, as you said, it's actually adaptability, creativity, and innovation, which is a cycle. Adapting is to be different
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than you usually are, right? Creativity is thinking differently than you usually do, and innovation is acting differently than you usually do. So it's a cycle of adapt, create, and innovate. Once you innovate, you get a result. That result is then reiterated, right? The re words are coming out, that result is then reiterated, and when you reiterate it, you do the same cycle, adapt, create, and innovate. So, the critical step there that people leave out is adapt. You know that when people are learning how to be creative, they go straight to brainstorming, and they try to think of new ideas. There's a lot of mistakes made in brainstorming, but the principle one that I'm talking about right now is that you don't start by actually doing the setup before brainstorming, that's relevant and critical to making things work properly. So, when you're setting up your brainstorm, you want to first be getting a couple of other steps in before that. There's actually three steps in my process, in
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the initivity process. One is creating a safe space for transformation by making sure that people feel safe to fail, people feel safe to take risks, and come up with new ideas, and not feel like they're going to get judged for them. The second step is integrity, which is a step of making sure you're actually asking the right question and making sure the question you're asking is actually going to get you the right answer, because a lot of the time, especially in companies, we end up with people asking the wrong questions, solving the wrong problem, and if you solve the wrong problem, you can get a great solution, right? But it doesn't really help, because you're solving the wrong thing. So, when you adapt yourself first, right, you adapt the self by shifting who you're being, how you see things, what your perspectives are, what your opinions are, and so on, you shift that, then you shift who you're thinking, how you're thinking, you know, only then in the third step of
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identity, shifting how you're being, and only the fourth step of the six step process is when you ideate, only the fourth step,
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Amy Lynn Durham: so you, the first step would be creating a safe space. The second step would be integrity, and I didn't catch the third.
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Michael Brian Lee: The third is identity, shifting who you're being, adapting yourself to the situation that you're dealing with.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, and then you mentioned towards the tail end that there were six, what was this, the the 645 or six that you're talking about.
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Michael Brian Lee: So the fourth step is possibility, it's ideation, that's where you do the brainstorming, and so on. The fifth step is I call vision, which is really the decision making process, where you actually take the ideas you've generated in the fourth step and start to decide which ones to use and to deal with, that will start to look at what the real world is demanding and what you want to achieve. It's really important that those steps are distinct and not the same, because one of the biggest problems we have, and why you know children who are creative start to lose their creativity and become like us. Unfortunately, is that you know one of the big reasons for that, not the only reason, but a big reason is this encouragement to solve the problem before you actually have the ideas to solve the problem, right. So, in order to try to come up with the answer as fast as possible, you come up with an answer, and that one answer you get is the answer you go with, but
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what you want to be doing is actually generating 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 answers, and then only then taking this step of vision, where you select, you know, the answer you're going to actually work with. Separate those two things, really important. Then the final step, step six, is connection, which is getting things to be connected to the real world, you know, to your market to other similar creations like yours to other people that are dealing with creations like yours in the field, so that's the six steps.
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Amy Lynn Durham: So when you hit four in possibility, that's where everyone comes together in in a meeting room or something like that, and starts brainstorming together, but you're saying before you hit, you're saying your six steps are safe space, integrity, identity, possibility, vision, and connection, you're saying before you even, before any of us in the workspace gather our teams together. In a room, we have to check the box on, do we have a psychologically safe space? Are we operating with integrity, and what was identity again?
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Michael Brian Lee: Identity is really shifting who you're being about the problem, because when you're stuck, when you're not really solving the problem, it's you that's stuck, it's your identity, it's who you're being about the problem that you're having, the problem getting, getting new ideas, as they're saying, it's adapt and then create, so you have to first shift who you're being, which involves, you know, your perspectives, your opinions, your points of view, how you're basically seeing the world, right, and then from there, it's generating new ideas, is creating or thinking differently, but first you have to shift who you're being, and that's the identity step
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Amy Lynn Durham: I would imagine. In the identity piece, that's almost a space where we would need to skill build and being a wise and effective change agent, because in the spiritual intelligence and SQ skills, being a wise and effective change agent is someone who can create win-win results and hold space while there's opposing views going on, and then create win-win results from those opposing views, so building that muscle I would imagine really helps your identity in this space. If we're looking for innovation to move from being stuck into that space of possibility, that's those are just my, my musings on your, your framework. What is the feedback that you get from businesses and and corporations coming from working in that space for many decades? I never really heard somebody say, hey, we need to hire a creativity workshop person or a creativity speaker, that that language wasn't there, but I definitely could see innovation. They would, people leaders, myself, we would
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understand innovation, and we would know we needed it. And I, even myself, would call my team into a room and say, "Hey, I need you all to show up with, you know, five ideas on how to solve xyz, or how we're going to hit our numbers this quarter, whatever it is, right? But I never, in the past, connected that it was tied to creativity that would help us shift into innovating. I don't think I ever named it. What's the response you're getting? What kind of companies are doing this type of work right now? Now that we're in 2026
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Michael Brian Lee: I found that marketing departments are really, really good with this kind of work. They really love it. When we did Pernod Ricard, we did their marketing department. They had a large marketing department, and we did that entire group. People helped them come up with better ideas creatively. So that was, that was great. You know, with Absa, it's a bank, they are more, you know, they're less directly related to creating ideas, but the innovation and creativity are essentially the same thing, and that's what's important for companies to understand. When they don't understand that, that's my first job, is to get them to understand that that innovation is really just the action that follows creativity, right, which is a thought, so if you don't have good ideas, you can't innovate, because you don't have ideas to innovate with, right? And likewise, if you have good ideas, but you don't implement them, that's not very useful either. But the other way around is
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worse, I think, when you, when you actually try to do it, but you do it with bad ideas in the first place, then you're not going to get a good solution. You're not going to get a good innovation, no matter how much you know energy and ability you put into the implementation of it. You're not going to get, you're not going to get the result you're looking for.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, so good. If you don't have good ideas, you're not going to have innovation. I just think that speaks to so much of what can help us in our entire lives and not just the workplace. I want to shift gears a little bit to the book that you have out.
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Michael Brian Lee: Oh, yeah.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Tell us, it's super unique. Tell us about it, because we're recording this conversation right now during the World Cup, tell us a little bit about your book.
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Michael Brian Lee: Great, thank you for bringing that up. But my book is called World Innovators Cup, and it is a mashup of great innovators from history playing soccer, and kind of to make the point that we give a lot of. Heroic attributes, and we cheer, and we pay money for, and everything, football stars, and other athletes, but we don't actually give the same kind of level of attention and excitement to the people who shaped our world, the great minds of history that made our world what it is, you know, the artists, the scientists, and the politicians and the, you know, people who shaped how we live today, we kind of take it for granted. We get excited about them when they're alive, but once they're dead, we kind of forget about them, don't really pay attention, and most people don't even know, you know, who was it that split the atom, or who was it that that developed the use of mirror, you know, mirror neutron technology, and stuff like that, you know, we know who Nikola
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Tesla was, but do we know what he did? Actually, we know who Benjamin Franklin was. We know that he did certain things with electricity, but do we know what he actually did? And you know the book has 56 innovators from all over the world, split up into four teams based on region, you know, like Europe and America and Asia and Africa. And then at the end of the book, after we see pictures, lots of pictures of them playing soccer, different innovators, and we see also some text about the innovator, their history, and who they were, and how they played soccer, which they didn't actually do. So it's kind of a fictional, factual book. It's both fiction and nonfiction. And the end of the book, they actually play each other in an actual World Cup, and I won't tell you who wins, but if you get the book, you can find out who wins.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, and the book is called World Innovators Cup, correct?
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Michael Brian Lee: That is correct.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, the book is called World Innovators Cup, and it's the artwork in it is really cool too. Tell us, out of the 56 innovators that you featured, who are who's one person that you would want to actually sit down and have a dinner with, that's in the book.
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Michael Brian Lee: Oh, I want to have, sit down, have a dinner with every one of them, but if I had to pick one, I would really struggle, but I'm going to just go with my instinct and say Genghis Khan, just because, just because I think that would be the weirdest one, you know. It might be interesting with anybody like Tesla or Benjamin Franklin or Frida Kahlo, you know, or Mario Molina, who discovered the ozone hole. I mean, they're, they're all, they're all interesting people to have dinner with,
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Amy Lynn Durham: what would you ask Genghis Khan?
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Michael Brian Lee: I just think it would be a very physically interesting experience to have dinner with Genghis Khan. I wonder what he would do. You know, would he, would he have the waiter's head cut off? I, you know, would what would he, would he kill me and eat me? I really don't know. Hopefully he wouldn't, you know, but, but that's just what came to me when I thought, if I had to pick one, Batter Sun Tzu, because I admire Sun Tzu so greatly, you know, he wrote The Art of War, and I love that book, so
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Amy Lynn Durham: interesting. If there was one thing that you wanted the listeners to take away today about innotivity, what would it be?
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Michael Brian Lee: I think it's mainly that, you know, we're all creative, we're all born that way, we all lose our creativity when we grow up and become adults. So, the most important thing you can do is to embrace your creative child. The beauty of who you are as a human being is that you can create, you created yourself, and you can create anything you know, so embrace your creative side, embrace your creative self, really become the fully fledged creative being you are, and the best way to do that is by really paying attention to who you're being about the problems that you're dealing with, you're trying to solve a problem, whether that's an artistic problem, whether it's a business problem, whether it's a political problem, whatever the problem is. Try to see how you can think about it from a different perspective. Put yourself in a different mindset and see how that might help you to solve the problem that you're not solving right now. Don't keep trying to solve it from
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who you are, try to solve it from imagining yourself as different.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, every episode of Create Magic at Work, I pull a card from either the Create Magic at Work journal prompt deck or Edge Walker card deck. Today I am not pulling a card because I specifically want to share the card. I didn't close my eyes and shuffle. I, I pulled the card I wanted, and the reason why I did is because we have a card in the deck called Innovation. So, this is our message this week, because we're talking to Michael about innotivity. The message for everybody listening. This week is innovation, and before I read your affirmation of the week to soak it in, and then ask Michael a question on the fly for everyone, I want to remind everyone that we are starting this month our ongoing series on creativity called the Spark Sessions on how to resource your creativity with Rachel Ephron, who's a singer, songwriter, and producer, so after listening to this and after getting your World Innovators Cup book settle in for the next few months to go through the
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Spark sessions with us, because I think we've made it pretty clear on the show that this might be something to explore resourcing your creativity to help innovate and live a better life, and I love Michael, how you came in and brought the innovation piece and said, "Hey, this is the action of this. So now that we're going through the Spark sessions each month and resourcing our creativity, you're inspiring us to innovate with it and take action forward with that, so here's our message this week. Innovation. Oh, I love this affirmation. I honor imaginative ideas by writing them down. I honor imaginative ideas by writing them down. This is so good, because I get hit with a ton of ideas, and if I don't write them down or jot them in my notes, I'll go a week later and be like, oh, I had such a good idea, what was that? So I honor imaginative ideas by writing them down. So, Michael, question, advice you can give the listeners, so if somebody needs some ideas for progress that they
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might have been overlooking. What would you say to them if they were stuck? They need some ideas for progress, and they might be overlooking something.
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Michael Brian Lee: This is great. I honor imaginative ideas by writing them down. I love that. It takes me straight to one of the most important exercises that I do in my training, which is to take, for example, take an object on your desk. Let me show you really quickly how this works. Grab any object on your desk that you can see there.
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Amy Lynn Durham: You want me to take an object on my desk?
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Michael Brian Lee: Yeah, take an object on your desk, and whoever's watching the podcast can.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, I'll take one of my crystals. It's a citrine.
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Michael Brian Lee: Okay, so can you think of a use for that crystal, besides what you're obviously using it for?
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Amy Lynn Durham: I can start now.
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Michael Brian Lee: Yeah,
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Amy Lynn Durham: let's see. I use it for an emotional management strategy in the teachings to hold on to it for inspiration. Yeah, let's talk
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Michael Brian Lee: about what you don't use it for that you could use it for.
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Amy Lynn Durham: What don't I use it for? I don't use it as a paper weight. I guess I could use it for that. I don't feel like I'm being very good at this exercise.
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Michael Brian Lee: That's good. Paper weights a good start. So, what's the second thing you could use it for? The
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Amy Lynn Durham: second thing I do use it for..
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Michael Brian Lee: no, no, that you don't use it for..
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Amy Lynn Durham: don't use it for..
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Michael Brian Lee: and it doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be simple and like straightforward. It could be a completely insane idea.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, yeah, I don't use it when I cook meals.
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Michael Brian Lee: Okay, how would you use it to cook meals.
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Amy Lynn Durham: I could set it next to when I'm cooking. I'm getting crazy with you here, and I could set the intention that the energy infuses the food with some sort of positive energy, so when people are ingesting the food I cook, they feel more positive and clearer.
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Michael Brian Lee: Okay,
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Amy Lynn Durham: I can't believe I just came up with that. Yeah.
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Michael Brian Lee: Now, what I would normally ask you to do is to come up with a list of 50 of those.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Wow,
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Michael Brian Lee: right? Write down 50 ideas of what you could do with that crystal, and the more you write down more and more ideas, the crazier and weirder they're going to get right,
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Amy Lynn Durham: yeah,
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Michael Brian Lee: you're going to get to things like, you know, you could, you could use it to replace the eye in a doll that has a broken eye, or something, you know, like you could use it to power a spaceship to go to the moon, you know, you could use it to, you could break it into pieces and use, and use the pieces to make decorations on your dress, you know. The point is, you could come up with 50 reasons, 50 things you could do with it. You'll start to come up with crazier things, and that is a great way to expand your thinking and to get yourself into practice of shifting your thinking. Right,
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Amy Lynn Durham: such a good example, that was so cool. Thanks for illustrating that for us. And with this, that was awesome. Okay, so Michael, if people want to get a hold of you, connect with you, get the World Innovators Cupbook, how can they connect with you? The
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Michael Brian Lee: simplest way to connect with me is to go to my LinkedIn, which is Michael Lee. Creativity or my website, which is Michael Brian lee.com It's Michael M I C H A E L, Brian B R I A N, and Lee L e.com Right, so Michael Brian lee.com also has a link to my ebook and to my book, but if you want to go straight to learn about the book and you don't care about me at all, you can also go to World Innovators cup.com and that will take you to a website just about the book.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Awesome, and we'll put those links in the show notes. Michael, thank you so much for being a guest today on Create Magic at Work. I feel you really got us thinking differently and really illustrated it there with that final exercise, and the other takeaway that I have is that knowledge of that innovation is the action of creativity, and those three steps before we even step into the room to brainstorm, which is having a safe space, integrity, and identity. So, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. We appreciate it.
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Michael Brian Lee: Thank you, Amy. Thanks so much for having me on here. It's been great.