After reading this page, if you only remember one thing, make it this:
You can’t tell if the idea you have is a good one if you only have a few to compare it to. Having lots of ideas is the best way of getting a good one. Individuals tend to be more productive (idea generation wise) if they work alone, unless the group they are working in is really experienced at idea generation and working with each other.
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice; it is conformity”
Rollo May
Kissing Frogs
To find a good idea, you need to kiss a lot of ugly ones…
Quality or Quantity?
“It is widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality, if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it. But this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality…
Picasso created more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics and more than 12,000 drawings, as well as prints, rugs and tapestries. Only a fraction of which garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies [plus other similar examples relating to Shakespeare, Einstein and Edison to name a few]…
Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.”
“I had lots of ideas, then threw the bad ones away.”
Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize (chemistry) 1954
The only difference between the most ‘creative’ architects and the rest was just two things: they knew how to lose themselves in the problem (to treat it as play) and they put off making decisions as late as possible.
Psychologist Donald MacKinnon
“Brainstorming”
Created by advertisers in the 50s, the goal is idea quantity, only when the obvious is exhausted will fresh ideas start to surface.
The most well-known creative method by far is called brainstorming. So well-known in fact, that it’s become synonymous for any time spent thinking of ideas, whether on your own or in a group. “We should brainstorm that” or “go away and have a brainstorm” are common terms of phrase that rarely ever refer to the true process.
Brainstorming: a technique by which a group attempts to find a solution for a specific problem by amassing all the members’ ideas spontaneously.
Originally a set of rules devised by Alex Osborn, and made popular in his 1953 book Applied Imagination, to improve the creation of new ideas in creative sessions at his advertising company.
It has a few simple rules:
Have a focused problem to tackle.
No criticism of ideas*
Go for large quantities of ideas… ‘Quantity produces quality’
Build on each other’s ideas
Encourage wild and exaggerated ideas
*Criticism is a nuanced issue, Dr Elies Dekoninck and her research team at Bath University have done research to show that constructive criticism can lead to more productive ideas in an engineering design brainstorm. The presence of subject matter experts can help if the criticism is constructive but many are blinded by their experience and can shoot things down just because they don’t fit with the way things have always been done. Also the presence of a Devil’s Advocate can also destroy the flow and vibe of an idea generation session.
“Everyone had an opinion except me, I felt stupid. In the end, I just played Devil’s Advocate. That’s what you do if you don’t have an opinion. It’s clever. For Devil’s Advocate you don’t need an opinion, you just say the opposite to what everyone else is saying. it’s not on you, it’s the Devil. Who let’s not forget is a certified rotter.”
- Comedian James Acaster
“Don’t argue, my dear child, please don’t argue!” cried Mr. Wonka. “It’s such a waste of precious time!”
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
“Brainstorming is like gym membership, you have to do it often to see results.”
Tom Kelly, IDEO
Good ways to Brainstorm:
Since those early days, it’s become the go-to tool for creativity in business and many famous design companies use it many times a day on different projects. One of its largest champions is Tom Kelly, the founder of the hugely successful product design firm, IDEO. He has written several books in order to help companies and executives be more creative and gives several top tips for a successful brainstorm:
Sharpen the Focus
A problem statement that does not presume to know the answer
Playful Rules
Go for quantity and wild ideas
Number your Ideas
100 an hour is a very healthy target
Build and Jump
Develop on other people’s ideas then jump to a new theme, use post-it notes to collate similar themed ideas.
Stretch the Mental Muscles
Use warm up games and activities to help members loosen up and get their ideas flowing. You wouldn’t play a sports match without warming up first, think of every brainstorm as a creative match.
Get Physical
Act out or build prototypes during the session
Have a Facilitator
An often talked about but often overlooked aspect. Brainstorms are more successful if someone is guiding the process.
Practise, Practise, Practise
The more you do, the better you become. (Difficult I think for many people or businesses that are not regularly creative, or lack a creative culture).
Bad ways to Brainstorm:
There are also many ways that might ruin a good brainstorm. This is common when done without a facilitator or the practitioners are unfamiliar with the process.
Boss Speaks First and Everybody Waits Their Turn
Experts Only
Taking Exhaustive Notes
Idea Fixation
Warm Up your Creative Muscle:
Short (5-10min) warm up games and activities for groups. I recommend doing a few, so it takes maybe 10-20 mins. Some suggestions I use in class are:
Word Association - go round the group as quickly as you can thinking of words that relate: Yellow, banana, fruit, apple, red, green, blue, sky…
Word Disassociation - same as before, but the words can not be related: Black, cheese, paper, lava, dog, etc… if anyone can think of a connection, then the team loses and must start again. Be quick, thinking speed is what we’re trying to improve here.
How many uses can you think of for an X - A paperclip, or a toothbrush, something boring and mundane works best. We regularly see 50-60 uses for a paperclip in 5 or 10 minutes of playing this game.
Guess the idea Pictionary - (see picture above) take one of those ideas, write it on a post-it note and place it on the head of someone near you. Your team must as quickly as possible try to communicate that idea to the person guessing through only drawings. No speaking or writing.
“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.”
Edward deBono (author of many books on creativity and inventor of the 6 thinking hats)
Try Brainstorming for Questions, not Answers.
A quick technique for breaking ‘thinker’s block’ and drilling down to the most important questions. From Hal Gregersen Harvard Business Review March 2018
“Great innovators have long known that the secret to unlocking a better answer is to ask a better question. Applying that insight to brainstorming exercises can vastly improve the search for new ideas—especially when a team is feeling stuck. Brainstorming for questions, rather than answers, helps you avoid group dynamics that often stifle voices, and it lets you reframe problems in ways that spur breakthrough thinking.
After testing this approach with hundreds of organizations, MIT’s Hal Gregersen has developed it into a methodology: Start by selecting a problem that matters. Invite a small group to help you consider it, and in just two minutes describe it at a high level so that you don’t constrain the group’s thinking. Make it clear that people can contribute only questions and that no preambles or justifications are allowed. Then, set the clock for four minutes, and generate as many questions as you can in that time, aiming to produce at least 15. Afterward, study the questions generated, looking for those that challenge your assumptions and provide new angles on your problem. If you commit to actively pursuing at least one of these, chances are, you’ll break open a new pathway to unexpected solutions.”
Brainstorming for questions makes it easier to venture into uncharted territory
Some rules:
Groups of 3-6
People can contribute only questions.
No preambles or justifications that frame a question will be allowed, because they’ll guide listeners to see the problem in a certain way, the very thing you’re trying to avoid.
Aim for 4 minutes and 15 questions as a goal
Can be a one-off activity or repeated to help your thinking go more deeply. Even with three rounds, the time investment is minimal. It’s an efficient path to fresh perspectives and creativity.
Getting stuck? Try these…
When you’re trying to think of ideas, sometimes they just don’t flow. Or maybe the output level starts to drop… you go from one a minute to one every 5 minutes and then one every 20 mins… Don’t panic. Just use one of the techniques listed here:
Blank pages are the hardest places to start. So try…
Giving yourself a constraint
But remember it’s artificial, you only added it to help you generate some more ideas, it may not be real.
Quantity is Quality
The more ideas you have, the better the chance one of them is good. Just as a guide, quantity doesn’t mean 5, it means 50+.
Focus without Fixation
Having a narrow focus always improves the effectiveness of idea generation sessions, but don’t get fixated on it. Try moving the focus around to different areas or different aspects.
Zoom Out or Zoom In
Zoom out to the bigger picture, what’s the environment in which the problem exists, maybe thinking about the system of systems may give you some ideas. Or the opposite, go inwards, zoom in to the details and the little things.
Go Back or Go Forward
Can you solve the problem before it becomes a problem? What if you changed the conditions leading up to it? Or changed the impact of the result? Maybe the usual output is no longer a problem and thus we’ve solved it without solving it.
Get Rid of ‘Sacred Cows’
Every situation has Sacred Cows… the unwritten or unsaid rules that everyone follows with or without thinking. They don’t need to be said because they are just obvious. Well maybe they don’t need to be sacred at all? What rules are you following? Line them up and go through them one by one, imagining a solution where you broke it. What if we could do it differently, without this rule?
Evolution Beats Intelligent Design
I’ve written about this a lot here already.
Not too Big, Not too Small
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
John Steinbeck
Blank Pages
Help or hindrance, you can do anything but where do you start?
As the saying goes “the first step is always the hardest.” Given a blank page and told to start wherever you like, design it however you like, or create whatever you want is often a mentally very difficult part of any creative process.
There are hundreds of ways / tools / tricks / methods to help you think of more ideas. Roger von Oech in his book “A Whack to the Side of the Head” discusses many ways to unlock your imagination. Some of my favourite tips from him are:
Soft thinking in the germinal phase, hard thinking in the practical phase
Look for the second right answer
Solicit plural answers
Look for a metaphor (but don’t be imprisoned!)
Play the revolutionary to break up routines
Regularly inspect the validity of baseline assumptions / rules
Avoid falling in love with ideas
You are an artist and a judge
Day dream “what if” questions
Avoid too many specifics in the germinal phase
Take advantage of ambiguity
Differentiate between errors of “commission” and errors of “omission”. The later can be worse than the former. Not enough errors might be missed opportunities through a lack of ambition.
Personally, I have found two to be highly effective:
Discuss and share the problem.
The act of talking about something forces you to describe it and by doing so might conjure up new ways of thinking about the problem. It also triggers half-baked ideas in your sub-conscious and un-conscious minds to come up to the surface. Discussing it to yourself can be effective, but talking about it to someone else gives you the added benefit of also possibly receiving their ideas as well.
Add Forced Constraints
Avoid the blank page altogether, start with something and build off it. It can be mad and unexpected “let’s build a drone out of cheese” or more conventional and logical “we must use this box or this piece of carbon fibre” for example. I find that the more specific the constraint the more ideas are generated as a result. Be careful that you don’t carry the constraint unnecessarily through the design process once inspiration has been found and a mental blockage overcome. Cheese isn’t typically known as a good building material for aircraft.
Just like Roger’s hunting for metaphors, make sure you’re not imprisoned by the constraint after it has served it’s purpose and unblocked a creative blockage.
“What makes you alert is to face situations beyond your control”
Brian Eno on forced constraints and “Oblique Strategies”
Some tools we’ve found to be helpful when overcoming road blocks to your idea generation…
Remember that creativity and idea generation comes from your un-conscious mind. It’s not something that your conscious mind can just power through with grit and hard work alone. So in order to be more creative we need to weaken the parts of your brain that are holding your creativity back. David Jones refers to this as your inner policeman. Stopping you from making a fool out of yourself. As you grow older the policeman becomes stronger and more set in its ways.
So in order to be more creative we need a weaker policeman or to think of ways to get past them.
Over time with a lot of practise we can retrain our policeman to allow more things through. But if you don’t have time we can use logical approaches and methods to sneak past them (policemen like logic) and stimulate creative thinking.
Here are some methods (explained below) that use logic to get new radical ideas past the policeman, and whilst they may sound like the rants of madman, the policeman will allow them because you’re just following a method!
Superheroes (or magic powers)
What’s the worst that can happen?
Metaphors & analogies
The reason we want whacky novel ideas is that in a competitive environment where lots of people are all trying to solve the same problem, we will need to push beyond conventional thinking. If the idea was easy to come across everyone else will also have found it.
Be a Superhero!
What superhero powers can you think of and how might they help?
How would you overcome the problem if you had super powers or magic?
Yes it sounds like a stupid method and how will this possibly be useful since all the ideas will be silly? Well the thinking behind this approach is it stretches your thinking beyond the obvious.
Here’s an example: How to make my bus journey to work better?
Conventional thinking might suggest ideas like:
Give me an app or a digital sign that told me when the bus was arriving so I can time my arrival at the bus stop.
Give the bus have good wifi on board.
Make special bus lanes so the bus doesn’t get stuck in traffic
All very conventional, and chances are in this competitive world in which we live everyone else would also have thought of all these ideas too.
Be a Superhero might suggest ideas like:
Speed of light movement means I can appear at my destination instantly
Power of flight might mean I can fly over all the traffic and obstacles in my way
Invisibility could allow me to get changed out of my pyjamas and into my work clothes whilst travelling to work
Fight Crime could allow me to solve murder mysteries whilst on my journey.
Yes they all sound a bit mad, but step two of the process is to now bring each of these back to reality…
Could I use remote working and video calls to never need to leave my house? Maybe I can use a virtual video avatar of me working so that I can stay in bed.
How do I get the freedom and tranquillity of a bird? Perhaps on my bus is a meditation helmet that allows me to have an out of body experience watching the bus from the air so that I arrive feeling fresh and invigorated.
Onboard breakfast club all centred around a central table so I get to meet everyone else doing the same route as me.
Maybe I could be linked up with people in need who are on the same journey as me, taking milk to an old lady or picking up someone’s laundry on the way home. Doing good might motivate me to enjoy the journey more.
Do you see? We started with stupid ideas, but they can unlock new ways on thinking that you might not have come across, and as we know, the more ideas you have the better!
“Normality is a paved road, it’s comfortable to walk on, but no flowers grow”
Vincent Van Gogh
What’s the Worst that can Happen?
Death, poison, fire, useless, noises… whatever makes your idea useless or dangerous.
Similar to the two step approach of being the superhero, the idea is to come up with something deliberately silly and then use that as a way of having sensible ideas…
But rather than having magical powers, this approach forces you to think of the worst possible way something could work, operate or be.
Let’s take the example of a new type of coffee cup:
When you try to drink from it, the bottom opens and it spills hot coffee all over you!
The cup actually spoils the taste of the coffee so it’s disgusting
The lid tastes disgusting so you don’t want to drink for it
The cup is so small you can’t fit anything in it
You get the idea, stupid ideas that could never be helpful or useful ideas… but lets try and make them good now:
Multiple ways of opening it for different pour speeds. A small hole at the top for sipping or a big one at the bottom for getting rid of old drinks, washing or for filling it quickly.
The material of the cup is impregnated with slow release vitamins so you’re making the drink better for you and an easy way of digesting vitamins. Could be good for kids drinks (not coffee!) or elderly people who can’t swallow pills.
The lid could change colour depending on the temperature of the contents, so if it’s too hot to drink it goes red to warn you not to drink from it. Or maybe the temperature causes the lid to expand and thus closes the drinking hole.
The cup can compress down so small that it squeezes every last drop out of it. This would make cleaning and drying easier.
And just like that we have some interesting new avenues for further ideas, research and development.
Metaphors & Analogies
Finding something that we all understand and applying it to a new situation. This is often done in the start-up world to explain a new concept, “we’re the UBER of X” or we’re hoping to be the “instagram of Y” etc… But it can also be used as a creative tool.
For example, how would the metaphor of a Fireman improve giving lectures via Zoom? Firemen sit in their station waiting for an emergency, once a fire is detected they rush out to fix it. So could we develop a system that detected fires and then fixes them?
How about an AI program that runs in the background through your video camera and analyses the faces of all the people on the video call. If it detects facial expressions representing confusion or disagreement, the screen of the person starts to light up in red, representing the ‘fire’. This informs the speaker that they may have said something the audience doesn’t understand and puts out the fire before it spreads and gets worse!
![Using a fireman analogy to detect and fix confusion ‘fires’ in your video call audience. [Image deliberately blurred for privacy reasons]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f02f6f3ff3ad26698daa428/1612451333674-FCMB66GZGY11YFWNW3HD/FireFighter%2BVideo%2BCall.jpg)
Using a fireman analogy to detect and fix confusion ‘fires’ in your video call audience.
[Image deliberately blurred for privacy reasons]
A useful group idea generation method (from famous creativity thinker Edward De Bono):
Six Thinking Hats®
A role playing thought exercise where you and your team imagine there are six distinct roles, each with a different coloured hat. Taking it in turns to wear each hat and act the role you must constrain your thinking to only perform the function of one hat at a time.
The White Hat wants just the information known or needed. “The facts, just the facts.”
The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and optimism. Under this hat you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.
The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; where things might go wrong. Probably the most powerful and useful of the Hats but a problem if overused.
The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches and intuition. When using this hat you can express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates.
The Green Hat focuses on creativity; the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It’s the control mechanism, the facilitator, the chairperson, that ensures the Six Thinking Hats® guidelines are observed.
Individuals vs Teams
Brainstorming is a group activity by definition. Alex Osborn, its creator, predicted that it would double the number of ideas that a group of people would generate.
Yet despite its enormous popularity the latest research shows that it actually reduces the number of ideas a group produces when compared with the number of ideas that can be generated by those same individuals on their own.
Studies show that individuals working alone, before coming together, are more creative than when solely working in groups.
When alone, there is no one to criticise and shoot you down, there is also no one speaking when you want to speak and no dominant voice to follow. Other common issues with group brainstorming can be coasting on others’ ideas and social anxiety can hinder original thinking and stifle the voices of introverted members. So it makes sense that people can be very creative alone.
If with COVID you’re doing remote creativity sessions via Zoom, try spending the first 15 minutes working alone (or do this before the meeting) and then pasting your ideas into the chat window. Then as a group you can all discuss and develop the best ideas rather than fighting each other to create them in the first place.
“Without great solitude no serious work can be done.”
Picasso
But idea generation is just one part of the product development process that would lead to innovation. Greg Satell, in his 2017 book Mapping Innovation [who frustratingly undermines the rest of his book because he get the definition of Disruptive Innovation wrong], quotes a number of studies to conclude that:
“to innovate in this world of increasing complexity we don’t need the best people but the best teams... Diverse teams outperform homogenous ones even if the more diverse team is less capable individually.”
So if we need teams to ultimately be successful, how do we manage and get the most out of them at the creativity stage? A Harvard Business Review article on the Paradox of Group Creativity gives a few useful tips for getting the best of both worlds...
“One remedy is to make sure that individuals have plenty of space for individual contemplation and input. In a brainstorming situation, this might mean having group members take time to generate ideas on their own (not in the immediate environment of other group members).
Individuals can then come back together to share their ideas and discuss how their individual contributions relate to the task at hand. They may diverge one or more times to generate ideas that build upon the original contributions. In our everyday work environments, this ability to find personal time and space to think is crucial to enabling creative thought.”
People must learn to derive gratification as individual contributors, while balancing it with a collaborative spirit focused on a greater good.
A collaborative environment allows a level playing field where good ideas can be challenged into great ideas. It also fosters the emotional safety needed for creative people to risk sharing their most divergent ideas without fear of judgement.
Work apart as individuals and together as a group. Be willing to share your ideas, any challenges and any success.
The research picture is complex, for many, working individually seems to be the most creative option. However if the group has worked together many times before on creative projects (as you might see in a design or creative office) then the benefits of the group are very strong. Listen to Adam Grant’s experience with the writing team at The Daily Show. Here the team starts the process all together (around 30 people in a room!) but then they break apart into pairs, coming back together and then apart several more times before the show script is finished. Repeating the process every day for the 160 shows they produce a year. That’s a lot of practise as a group.
Brainstorming with Questions is Better in Groups…
From our earlier discussion about Hal Gregersen’s question burst approach to brainstorming, he states that “although in traditional brainstorming individuals perform better than groups, on average… The question burst methodology, by design, reverses many of those destructive dynamics by prompting people to depart from their usual habits of social interaction. For one thing, it creates a safe space for anyone, including a quieter person, to offer a different perspective. Because a question burst doesn’t demand that anyone instantly assert a point of view, people often feel more comfortable speaking up. The sole focus on questions also suspends the automatic rush to provide an answer—and ultimately helps expand the problem space for deeper exploration.”
So in summary manage the group working dynamics so people have time to be alone and together as a group, but make sure to manage and steer which activities are done when and what the focus of each should be.
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
John Maynard Keynes
Share your ideas!
Whether working alone or in a team, always share your ideas with others, you’ll get far more back than it cost you. People will only copy you once you’re worth copying… that’s always a long way off for a new commercial project, and the destination gets further and further away the more you keep it a secret.
“Some people hesitate to share an idea because they're worried it will be stolen. In general, these people are afraid of success, not failure. An idea unspoken is a safe one, which not only can't be stolen, but it can't be tested, criticized, improved or used in the real world.”
Seth Godin
Quick to judge, but slow to dismiss.
For behind every discarded idea is unexplored & untapped potential. Search for the ‘bad’, rejected ideas, the ones no one wants to touch. They hold the potential for untouched new innovation.
Think of all the wannabe entrepreneurs, the hordes of designers and countless creatives at work around the world thinking of problems, solutions and ideas. They are all competing with us to think of and create the next best thing.
We are working in a highly competitive space.
We need an approach that stands us out amongst this competition.
We need to find ideas that no one else is thinking of.
We need to find unexplored potential.
Use the creative tools above, and zoom on the ideas no one wants. The ideas people pick holes in, the ideas with lots of ‘Cons’ rather than ‘Pros’. The ideas dismissed as being obviously rubbish and ask yourself “but what if?”, how could we solve the problem holding this idea back, what would a solution look like, no matter how fanciful?
The ideas that come from this may also not be any good. But keep going because we’ve crossed over into unexplored new territory. Dyson achieved his great breakthrough because he refused to turn back until prototype 5,127 worked. 5,126 later than everyone else who had explored a same idea before him.
This is true idea development.
If you found that useful, there is more related information here:
Choosing Which Ideas to Develop - All idea selection methods are basically an equation between value and effort but make reversible decisions very quickly, make irreversible decisions very slowly, and the selection of an idea is just another step in idea generation, not the end of it.
The Russian Method of TRIZ - Where Russian creative researchers have spent decades not only searching for the bad ideas out there but the impossible idea contradictions! For behind these the real opportunities lie.