the Box, Brick and Paperclip: Reclaiming creative mind you were born with

You were born able to do this.Watch a five-year-old with a stick. Within a minute it is a sword, a fishing rod and a magic wand, and nobody sat them down and ran a workshop first. The ability comes as standard.Somewhere between then and now, it got harder to reach. It was never taken out of you, though. It was covered over, walled off, blocked. And what has been blocked can be cleared.There are three ordinary things sitting on the table between us: a paperclip, a brick and an empty cardboard box. And with these you and I will reclaim your creative mind. Two of them are probably within reach. You will have to go and find the brick, and that is rather the point.Why do I want you to work through this book? Because I have watched ordinary people in ordinary rooms come out with things nobody expected, least of all them. I have also watched them sit on it and say nothing. That second one is the waste I cannot leave alone.This is not a book you read. It is a workshop you do.Together we take down the four walls of interference, the ones that quietly close in on most of us: - the wall that blocks our curiosity- the wall that blocks our willingness to have a go- the wall that keeps apart the people who ought to be talking- the wall that drains the will to botherYou work the paperclip with me beside you, take the brick on your own, and use the box to put the whole thing together. Every technique is a real move you can run on a real problem on Monday morning.Freeing a roomful of people to say what they are actually thinking, and taking apart the box around your own mind, turn out to be the same act. Permission and technique are not two jobs. They are one.This book will not promise to hand you a genius you do not have. It could not. What it will do is give you back the generous, easy flow of ideas you were born with, and a method that keeps it running. More ideas on the table means a better best one to choose from. That is the honest claim, and it is plenty.The Box, the Brick and the Paperclip is for anyone who has sat in a meeting with something worth saying and said nothing. For anyone who suspects they used to be more inventive than they are now. For leaders who want their people thinking out loud again.You were born able. Let us go and get it back.A Born Agile book.