How Your Songwriting Skills Can Help You Innovate
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
-Abraham Maslow
When it comes to innovation, I’d like to propose a new approach. For the past decade I’ve helped organizations look at innovation through the lens of songwriting. By exploring and practicing the various pieces of the songwriting process, you can develop an entirely new set of tools to improve your innovative skillset. In order to help you add new tools to your innovation toolbox, I’ve described a few songwriting elements - that will no doubt be familiar to you - and their connection to innovation below.
Metaphors
When it comes to innovation, it can help to remember that in order to create something new and different, you need to think differently about your current product, market or process. Another way to describe this is to think laterally. By avoiding a standard, linear approach to problem-solving, you can avoid the same, well-worn and often suboptimal solutions. In his book, Lateral Thinking, Edward de Bono makes this point beautifully when he states “the mind is a cliché making and cliché using system. The purpose of lateral thinking is to overcome these limitations by providing a means for restructuring, for escaping from cliché patterns, for putting information together in new ways to give new ideas.”
Songwriting provides the perfect device to help you “put information together in new ways” and escape from the aforementioned “cliché patterns.” That device is the metaphor. By learning to reexamine any idea from the standpoint of its metaphorical equivalent, you will empower your organization to think in ways that don’t reveal themselves using the standard problem-solving approach.
Verses
Creativity is at the heart of innovation. That being said, there is a common misconception that creativity is the domain of a specialized group of individuals with a “gift” for it. This is simply untrue. In an article for Fast Company magazine, neuroscientist and author Tara Swart summarizes the keys to creativity as “practice” and “intention.” In other words, you have the ability to be creative if you’re willing to develop it.
Writing songs - and specifically the details required in verse writing - will serve as an important reminder that you are - at your core - a creative being. Writing verses is quite simply a concentrated form of storytelling. The more you develop your verse writing/storytelling skills, the easier your access to your own creativity will become.
Choruses
Properly highlighting the uniqueness and value of any innovation comes down to the ability to communicate in a way that is both clear and compelling. This communication works as a way to assure buy-in from your peers as well as externally when it comes to the marketing of your new ideas.
The chorus of a song is the deceptively simple summary and distillation of your message. Choruses are often very short and highly repetitive so if your message isn’t perfectly refined, you run the risk of missing your opportunity to connect with your audience. The better you become at writing choruses, the better your communication skills will be in any situation.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the ways that writing songs can improve not only your ability to innovate but also your perception of innovation in general. In my book, The Reason For The Rhymes: Mastering The Seven Essential Skills Of Innovation By Learning To Write Songs, I go in to much greater depth on the above songwriting elements as well as a host of others. The key is to continually look for new ways to approach innovation so that you don’t find yourself trapped in the same ways of thinking when a new approach could provide a better solution.
Bio
Cliff Goldmacher is a GRAMMY-recognized, #1 hit songwriter, music producer and author with recording studios in Nashville, TN and Middle River, MD. Through his studios, Cliff provides songwriters outside of Nashville with virtual, live access to Nashville’s best session musicians and studio vocalists for their songwriting demos. Find out more. You can also download Cliff’s FREE tip sheet “A Dozen Quick Fixes To Instantly Improve Your Songs.”
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