"And He subjected to you the night and day and the sun and moon; and the stars are subjected by His command. Surely in that are signs for a people who understand' ( An Nahl. 16:12)
Even if you're among the most uncreative, you have the tools to stifle innovation, invention, and new ideas that constantly threaten your comfort and security.
I'm not talking about mealy-mouthed nitpicking. No, sir. Most creative people are clever enough to deal with that. When a really hot idea is about to upset your apple cart, you need strong ammunition. And I'm going to give it to you.
1. What's wrong with the old way? As soon as you're handed a new idea, toss that hot potato right back in their laps. This technique will those clever creative whippersnappers scurrying. And nothing is more satifying to an uncreative bully than the sound of creatives whimpering like a bunch of ninnies.
2. Has this idea been killed before? There's no such thing as a new idea. Find out how the innovation you've just been presented was shot down in the past, take aim, and fire! The most powerful weapon of the uncreative is an old objection.
3. Appeal to common sense. Especially if you have a sympathetic audience. Your mediocre minions will cheer, vice presidents will applaud, and your fellow uncreatives will kiss your feet.
4. Ask who it will hurt? Don't ever take a creative idea sitting down. Rally the opposition. The change-o-phobic are everywhere! Wake up everyone who stands to lose. Stir up those sticks-in-the-mud. Then watch those creative dogs lick their wounds.
5. Rip their clothes off. Creative people always have something up their sleeves. (That's why they wear baggy clothes.) Find those anticipated award, raises, promotions, and expose their creative need for approval. "You're just out for awards. We want sales!" gets them every time.
Of course, if you can, you want to nip creative initiative in the bud, before it bites you in the butt. So be proactive. Shower creatives with phony promotions. Constant lip service works, too. Don't forget to regulate. Standardize. And above all, measure, measure, measure! What creative person can argue with numbers?
A word of warning. Be careful. You can stifle creativity, but you can't kill it. No matter how hard you try.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.
We have excelled with mathematics but have done nothing with our ordinary thinking for 2,400 years.
Our achievements in science and technology mean that we are proud and complacent about the rectitude of our thinking. So we have made very little progress in human affairs.
The thought model we use most of the time is to analyse a situation, identify a standard element, then come up with a standard answer.
When Greek thinking came into Europe, at the time of the Renaissance (through the Arabs in Spain), the universities and schools were run by the church. They had no use for perceptual thought because the starting points were not matters of human perception but fixed dogmas. There was no use for creative thinking in religion and they did not need design thinking.
You can analyse the past but the future has to be designed
What they did need, however, was thinking that was concerned with truth, logic and argument. They needed this to prove heretics wrong. Therefore this kind of thinking became the standard software for Western thinking.
You can analyse the past but the future has to be designed. While there are people who do provide the 'design' element in society, design has never become as important or as central as analysis. Design is a matter of combining known ingredients to produce value.
In one sense, creativity is always involved in design. There is something new which delivers value. That is the essence of creativity. But the design can be logical at the same time.
For instance, applying current computer technology to home shopping might be a new design, but the combination of the elements may be completely logical. Architecture design is usually perfectly logical despite the overall idea being new. In some ways design is opposed to routine.
Creativity might feature in providing a new objective or overall concept. You might reach the objective in a logical way. Alternatively, the overall concept or objective might be logical, but require some new thinking and creativity to be achieved.
There isn't much point in separating logical and creative approaches. Logic and creativity are both parts of thinking and you need to exercise both. Also, in hindsight, any valuable creative idea will seem logical - that is the nature of asymmetric patterning systems. But because something is logical in hindsight, it doesn't mean that the idea could have been reached by logic to begin with.
There is always some risk with design. If a design is new, you can't be certain that it will work out and deliver the desired value. Judgment and routine behaviour is low risk so it is the preferred method of thought.
That's not a problem so long as the importance of design is acknowledged. It is even more important to recognise the situations where design is demanded because the routine approaches have failed.
The basic difference between judgment and design must be recognised, as must the importance of design. Design skill and creativity need to be developed, then the human race can increase the scope and power of its thinking.
Edward De Bono
Sunday, May 18, 2008
What Not To Do: Six Ways to Ruin a Brainstorming Session
The brainstorm (or "thought shower" as it is sometimes called) is the most popular group creativity exercise in business. It is quick, easy and it works. Many organizations, however, are frustrated with brainstorming sessions and have stopped using them, believing that the tool is old-fashioned and no longer effective. But the real reason for the frustrations is that the brainstorms are not facilitated properly. A well-run brainstorm is fun and energetic; it will generate plenty of good ideas. A poor brainstorm can be frustrating and de-motivational. The following describes what not to do during your next brainstorming session.
1. Have No Clear Objective(s)
A brainstorming session with a vague or unclear purpose will wander and lose its way – set a clear objective. The purpose of brainstorming is to generate many creative ideas to answer a specific goal; it is best to express the goal as a question. A woolly objective is not helpful – for example, "How can we do better?" is not as good as "How can we double sales in the next 12 months?" However, the parameters of the questions should not be too detailed or it will risk closing out lateral possibilities. Using the previous situation, "How can we double sales, through existing channels and with the current product set?" is probably too constrained. Once the question has been agreed upon, it needs to be written clearly, and posted, for all to see.
It is valuable to set objectives for the number of ideas to be generated and the time to be spent on the process. For example, state that "We are looking to generate 60 ideas in the next 20 minutes. Then we will whittle them down to the best four or five."
2. Gather Too Homogeneous a Group
If everyone is from the same department then creativity can be inhibited and the group may get "group think." Choose the group carefully; the best size is somewhere between six and twelve participants. Too few people and there are not enough diverse inputs, but add too many people and the group can be hard to control and retain everyone’s commitment. Sprinkle the group with a few group members from other areas of the business or even from outside the business – people who can bring some different perspectives and wacky ideas. A good mix of people works best – varied ages, men and women, experienced and fresh to the business world, etc.
3. Let the Boss Act As Facilitator
Beware of having an autocratic boss join the brainstorming team. Such leaders can inhibit and/or shape the discussion, rather than letting it flow naturally. If the boss is present, then it is better to have a good independent facilitator – someone who will encourage input from everyone and stop any one person from being a dominant participant. Generally, the worst formula for a brainstorm is having the department manager leading the meeting, while also acting as scribe and censor.
4. Allow Early Criticism
The most important rule of brainstorming is – suspend judgment. In order to encourage a wealth of wacky ideas it is essential that no one is critical, negative or judgmental about an idea. Every idea that is uttered – no matter how "stupid" – must be written down. The rule about suspending judgment during the idea generation phase is so important that it is worth enforcing rigorously. A good technique to stop idea judgers is to issue everyone in the group a water pistol; anyone who is critical gets squirted.
5. Settle For a Few Ideas
Do not generate a handful of ideas and then start analyzing them. Quantity is great – the more ideas the better. Brainstorming is one the few activities in life where quantity improves quality. Think of it as a Darwinian process – the more separate ideas that are generated the greater the chance that some will be fit enough to survive. The brainstorming team should have stacks of energy and buzz driving lots of ideas. Crazy thoughts that first sound completely unworkable are often the springboards for other ideas that can be adapted into great new solutions. Keep the wild ideas coming!
6. Ignore Closure and/or Follow Through
Do not end a brainstorming meeting after generating lots of ideas with a vague promise to follow-up. If people see no tangible outcomes they will become frustrated with the process and lose faith in the process’ potential. The team members should quickly analyze the ideas at the meeting. One of the best ways to analyze the suggestions is to divide the proposals into three categories – promising, interesting or reject. If any of the promising ideas are so good that they should be implemented straight away then assign them to a staff member as an action item immediately.
Categorize and collect the ideas. On new pieces of paper write down all the promising and interesting ideas – consider separating them by which are marketing ideas, which are sales ideas, etc. Rearranging the ideas can help a team see new combinations and possibilities. Some people use Post-it notes at this stage so that the ideas can be moved around easily.
If the group is pressed for time, another option for selecting the best ideas is to give everyone on the team five points, with which they can allocate to their favorite ideas in any way that they want. (They can give one point to five separate ideas or all five to one idea.) Then total the points and select the best idea in the group for further action.
The brainstorming session’s facilitator should close the meeting by thanking everyone for their input. The leader should mention one or two of the best, most inventive or funniest ideas that came out of the session.
Conclusion
People enjoy short, high-energy brainstorms that lead to actions – whether large or small. These meetings can motivate people, improve efficiency and drive innovation.
Projects of all kinds frequently reach a point where all the analysis is done, and the next step is unclear. The project team must be creative, to figure out what to do. Common creativity tools have been limited to brainstorming and related methods, which depend on intuition, fiat and the knowledge of the members of the team. These methods are typically described as psychologically based and having unpredictable and unrepeatable results.
TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team's ability to solve these problems creatively. TRIZ also provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure and algorithmic approach. "TRIZ" is the (Russian) acronym for the "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving." G.S. Altshuller and his colleagues in the former U.S.S.R. developed the method between 1946 and 1985. TRIZ is an international science of creativity that relies on the study of the patterns of problems and solutions, not on the spontaneous and intuitive creativity of individuals or groups. More than three million patents have been analyzed to discover the patterns that predict breakthrough solutions to problems.
TRIZ is spreading into corporate use across several parallel paths – it is increasingly common in Six Sigma processes, in project management and risk management systems, and in organizational innovation initiatives.
TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. The short version of this is:
Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.) Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem.
The research has proceeded in several stages during the last sixty years. The three primary findings of this research are as follows:
Problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences. The classification of the contradictions in each problem predicts the creative solutions to that problem.
Patterns of technical evolution are repeated across industries and sciences.
Creative innovations use scientific effects outside the field where they were developed.
Much of the practice of TRIZ consists of learning these repeating patterns of problems-solutions, patterns of technical evolution and methods of using scientific effects, and then applying the general TRIZ patterns to the specific situation that confronts the developer. Exhibit 1 describes this process graphically.
Exhibit 1: The TRIZ Problem Solving Method
In Exhibit 1, the arrows represent transformation from one formulation of the problem or solution to another. The solid arrows represent analysis of the problems and analytic use of the TRIZ databases. The striped arrow represents thinking by analogy to develop the specific solution. This four-step problem solving approach forces the user to overcome inherent psychological bias that is typically the foundation of psychological ideation techniques.
For example, a powerful demonstration of this method comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Following the flow of Exhibit 1, the specific problem is as follows: Tailored bacteria are used to cultivate human hormones, producing a superior product to those refined from animal sources. To produce the product, very large quantities of tailored bacteria cells are cultured, the cells must be broken open and the cell wall material removed so that the useful hormones can be processed. A mechanical method for breaking the cells had been in use at a moderate scale for some time, but the yield was 80 percent, and was variable. A current crisis was a reduction in yield to 65 percent, and a long-term problem was anticipated in trying to scale production up to high rates, with yield much better than 80 percent.
The TRIZ general problem at the highest level is to find a way to produce the product with no waste, at 100 percent yield, with no added complexity. A TRIZ general solution formula is "The problem should solve itself." One of the patterns of evolution of technology is that energy (fields) replaces objects (mechanical devices). For example, consider using a laser instead of a scalpel for eye surgery. In this case, ultrasound can be used to break the cell walls or using an enzyme to "eat" the cell wall (chemical energy) instead of hitting them. This may seem very general, but it led the pharmaceutical researchers to analyze all the resources available in the problem (the cells, the cell walls, the fluid they are in, the motion of the fluid, the processing facility, etc.) and to conclude that three specific solutions had high potential for their problem:
The cell walls should be broken by sound waves (from the pattern of evolution of replacing mechanical means by fields).
The cell walls should be broken by shearing, as they pass through the processing facility (using the resources of the existing system in a different way).
An enzyme in the fluid should "eat" the cell walls and release the contents at the desired time.
All three methods have been tested successfully. The least expensive, highest yield method was soon put in production.
The "General TRIZ Solutions" referred to in Exhibit 1 have been developed over the course of the 60 years of TRIZ research, and have been organized in many different ways. Some of these are analytic methods such as:
The Ideal Final Result and Ideality,
Functional Modeling, Analysis and Trimming and
Locating the Zones of Conflict. (This is more familiar to Six Sigma problem solvers as "Root Cause Analysis.")
Some are more prescriptive such as:
The 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving,
The Separation Principles,
Laws of Technical Evolution and Technology Forecasting and
76 Standard Solutions.
In the course of solving any one technical problem, one tool or many can be used. The 40 Principles of Problem Solving are the most accessible "tool" of TRIZ. These are the principles that were found to repeat across many fields, as solutions to many general contradictions, which are at the heart of many problems.
A fundamental concept of TRIZ is that contradictions should be eliminated. TRIZ recognizes two categories of contradictions:
Technical contradictions are the classical engineering "trade-offs." The desired state can't be reached because something else in the system prevents it. In other words, when something gets better, something else gets worse. Classical examples include: The product gets stronger (good), but the weight increases (bad).
The bandwidth for a communication system increases (good), but requires more power (bad).
Service is customized to each customer (good), but the service delivery system gets complicated (bad).
Training is comprehensive (good), but keeps employees away from their assignments (bad).
Physical contradictions, also called "inherent" contradictions, are situations in which one object or system has contradictory, opposite requirements. Everyday examples abound:
Surveillance aircraft should fly fast (to get to the destination), but should fly slowly to collect data directly over the target for long time periods.
Software should be complex (to have many features), but should be simple (to be easy to learn).
Coffee should be hot for enjoyable drinking, but cold to prevent burning the customer
Training should take a long time (to be thorough), but not take any time.
Two personal examples offered by recent TRIZ classes:
I want my boss at the meeting, but I don't want my boss at the meeting.
I want to know everything my seventeen year-old child is doing, but I don't want to know everything she is doing.
TRIZ research has identified 40 principles that solve the Technical/tradeoff contradictions and four principles of separation that solve the Physical/inherent contradictions. Additional examples include:
Entertainment: Singapore needs to find a way to manage automobile traffic on the Sentosa, its entertainment island (aquarium, bird sanctuary, dolphin show, restaurants, music, etc.). Applications of TRIZ developed eight families of solutions.
IT Product development: A manufacturing company doubled the value to the customer of their patient interview system for opticians offices by applying the feedback and self-service principles of TRIZ to the overall product development, and applying the principles of segmentation, taking out and composite construction to the training and support.
School administrators: Creativity has been greatly enhanced in situations ranging from allocation of the budget for special education to building five schools with funding only for four, to improving racial harmony in the schools.
Waste processing: Dairy farm operators could no longer dry the cow manure due to increased cost of energy. TRIZ led the operators to a method used for the concentration of fruit juice, which requires no heat.
Warranty cost reduction: Ford used TRIZ to solve a persistent problem with squeaky windshields that was costing several million dollars each year. Previously, they had used TRIZ to reduce idle vibration in a small car by 165 percent, from one of the worst in its class to 30 percent better than the best in class.
A recent case study presented from the Dow Chemical Company showed the combined effect of TRIZ with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) most dramatically.
A Dow Plastics business found itself responding to meet the ever more rigorous needs of a cost-driven marketplace, for a technology tuned over decades. It convened a group of technical experts to redesign its "most effective" standard process technology for manufacturing facilities for this family of products. To stay competitive in costs, they needed to drastically reduce the capital needed to build future plants. Requirements seemed ever-tightening, calling for lower energy use, better ergonomics for operating personnel, and lower monomer residuals in product. The process, being decades old, had technology and equipment systems considered highly optimized – oh, the psychological inertia!
An overall Ideal Final Result helped outline the zones of conflict / pathways to innovation so that sub-groups could divide and attack each opportunity with the most appropriate tools. Substantial use of technical contradictions and inventive principles helped address trade-offs. The group assembled a dozen alternative systems by using a morphological box at the high, conceptual level. A Pugh concept selection matrix helped narrow the candidates to four for which the intermediate level of detail enabled cost estimations. Elements of IFR contributed to the evaluation criteria.
Breakthrough was achieved in control of monomer residuals, handling of raw materials, and reactor design. The reduction amazed even the project team, when the capital cost of a plant built to the new standard dropped by more than 25 percent, from nearly $110 million to < $80 million.
The best way to learn and explore TRIZ is to begin a problem that you haven't solved satisfactorily and try it!
In the current atmosphere of economic tumult, the announcement that Toyota sold a hundred and sixty thousand more cars than General Motors in the first three months of this year might seem like a minor news item. But it may very well signal the end of one of the most remarkable runs in business history. For seventy-seven years, in good times and bad, G.M. has sold more cars annually than any other company in the world. But Toyota has long been the auto industry’s most profitable and innovative firm. And this year it appears likely to become, finally, the industry’s sales leader, too.
Calling Toyota an innovative company may, at first glance, seem a bit odd. Its vehicles are more liked than loved, and it is often attacked for being better at imitation than at invention. Fortune, which typically praises the company effusively, has labelled it “stodgy and bureaucratic.” But if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation—cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries—is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful.
At the core of the company’s success is the Toyota Production System, which took shape in the years after the Second World War, when Japan was literally rebuilding itself, and capital and equipment were hard to come by. A Toyota engineer named Taiichi Ohno turned necessity into virtue, coming up with a system to get as much as possible out of every part, every machine, and every worker. The principles were simple, even obvious—do away with waste, have parts arrive precisely when workers need them, fix problems as soon as they arise. And they weren’t even entirely new—Ohno himself cited Henry Ford and American supermarkets as inspirations. But what Toyota has done, better than any other manufacturing company, is turn principle into practice. In some cases, it has done so with inventions, like the andon cord, which any worker can pull to stop the assembly line if he notices a problem, or kanban, a card system that allows workers to signal when new parts are needed. In other cases, it has done so by reorganizing factory floors and workspaces in order to allow for a freer and easier flow of parts and products. Most innovation focusses on what gets made. Toyota reinvented how things got made, which enabled it to build cars faster and with less labor than American companies.
But there’s an enigma to the Toyota Production System: although the system has been widely copied, Toyota has kept its edge over its competitors. Toyota opens its facilities to tours, and even embarked on a joint venture with G.M. designed, in part, to help G.M. improve its own production system. Over the years, more than three thousand books and articles have analyzed how the company works, and things like andon systems are now common sights on factory floors. The diffusion of Toyota’s concepts has had a real effect; the auto industry as a whole is far more productive than it used to be. So how has Toyota stayed ahead of the pack?
The answer has a lot to do with another distinctive element of Toyota’s approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. (The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen—continuous improvement.) Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small—making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say—and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.
The system doesn’t necessarily preclude missteps—in 2006, Toyota ran into a series of quality problems—and it’s possible that the focus on incremental innovation would be less well suited to businesses driven by large technological leaps. But, on the whole, the results are hard to argue with. They’re also phenomenally difficult to duplicate. In part, this is because most companies are still organized in a very top-down manner, and have a hard time handing responsibility to front-line workers. But it’s also because the fundamental ethos of kaizen—slow and steady improvement—runs counter to the way that most companies think about change. Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you’ll be thin for life. The Toyota approach is more like a regular, sustained diet—less immediately dramatic but, as everyone knows, much harder to sustain. In the nineteen-nineties, a McKinsey study of companies that had put quality-improvement programs in place found that two-thirds abandoned them as failures. Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: SEYMOUR CHWAST
10 Steps for Boosting Creativity
by Jeffrey Baumgartner
Johann Sebastian Bach
1.
Listen to music by Johann Sebastian Bach. If Bach doesn't make you more creative, you should probably see your doctor - or your brain surgeon if you are also troubled by headaches, hallucinations or strange urges in the middle of the night.
2.
Brainstorm. If properly carried out, brainstorming can help you not only come up with sacks full of new ideas, but can help you decide which is best. Click here for more information on brainstorming.
3.
Always carry a small notebook and a pen or pencil around with you. That way, if you are struck by an idea, you can quickly note it down. Upon rereading your notes, you may discover about 90% of your ideas are daft. Don't worry, that's normal. What's important are the 10% that are brilliant.
4.
If you're stuck for an idea, open a dictionary, randomly select a word and then try to formulate ideas incorporating this word. You'd be surprised how well this works. The concept is based on a simple but little known truth: freedom inhibits creativity. There are nothing like restrictions to get you thinking.
5.
Define your problem. Grab a sheet of paper, electronic notebook, computer or whatever you use to make notes, and define your problem in detail. You'll probably find ideas positively spewing out once you've done this.
6.
If you can't think, go for a walk. A change of atmosphere is good for you and gentle exercise helps shake up the brain cells.
7.
Don't watch TV. Experiments performed by the JPB Creative Laboratory show that watching TV causes your brain to slowly trickle out your ears and/or nose. It's not pretty, but it happens.
8.
Don't do drugs. People on drugs think they are creative. To everyone else, they seem like people on drugs.
9.
Read as much as you can about everything possible. Books exercise your brain, provide inspiration and fill you with information that allows you to make creative connections easily.
10.
Exercise your brain. Brains, like bodies, need exercise to keep fit. If you don't exercise your brain, it will get flabby and useless. Exercise your brain by reading a lot (see above), talking to clever people and disagreeing with people - arguing can be a terrific way to give your brain cells a workout. But note, arguing about politics or film directors is good for you; bickering over who should clean the dishes is not.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Unleash your inner genius: Ten great ways to boost your personal creativity
By Paul Sloane
Let’s say you are wrestling with a tough issue – maybe at work, at home, with your children or in your social life. You have been stuck for a while and you can’t seem to make a breakthrough. You want to come up with some really creative ideas. What can you do? Here are ten great practical ways to boost your inventiveness and to crack the problem:
1. Ask why, why? Ask, "why has this issue arisen?” Come up with six different reasons and for each of them ask, “why did this happen?” Keep asking why for each cause. This helps you to better understand the different reasons why this is a problem and so in turn you will see different possible solutions.
2. Sleep on it. Ponder the issue and all its aspects for some time and then put it out of your mind. Get a good night’s sleep. The subconscious mind goes to work and often you come up with great ideas the next day.
3. Talk it over with someone who has nothing to do with the situation. They will often ask basic questions or make seemingly silly suggestions that prompt good ideas. Two heads are better than one but people who are too close to the issue will often come up with the same ideas as you, so try an outsider.
4. Ask how some celebrity would tackle the issue. What would Steve Jobs do? Or Bob Geldof , or Richard Branson, or Salvador Dali or Margaret Thatcher or Madonna or Sherlock Holmes? Take each individual’s approach to its extremes and it will likely give you some radical solutions.
5. Pick up any object at random and say to yourself, “this item contains the key to solving the problem.” Then force some ideas. Try this with several different objects and you will have a selection of radical and inventive ideas.
6. Use similes. Try to think of a different problem in another walk of life that is like your problem. Say you want your staff at work to try new ways of working. You might imagine that this is like getting your children to eat vegetables. List various methods you might use with your children to encourage or persuade them to try vegetables. Then go through the list and then see if any of the ideas can be converted into things you can try at work.
7. Imagine an ideal solution in a world where there are no constraints –e.g., you can use any resource you want. Now work back from that ideal and challenge each of the constraints that is holding you back from achieving it. Many of the obstacles can be overcome when you take this approach.
8. Open a dictionary and take any noun at random. Write down six attributes of that noun – so for tree you might write - root, branch, family, apple, trunk and tall. Then force some links between the word or its attributes and the problem in order to come up with fresh ideas. You will be surprised at how well this works – for individuals or in a group.
9. Ponder the issue and then go for a walk around an art gallery or museum. The range of external stimuli will help you conceive plenty of new ideas.
10. Draw a picture of the situation showing the people and the issues in simple cartoon style. Put it up on the wall and then imagine how the story could develop. Think of it as a cartoon strip. Many people’s brains work better in images than in words or numbers so this can lead to fantastic ideas.
These methods work for individuals and for groups. Try them and see what suits you best. Above all keep reminding yourself – there are some great solutions for my problem – I haven’t found the right one yet but I will!
Paul Sloane runs Creative Leadership and Ideas Workshops to help boost innovation. He is the author of many books. His website is www.destination-innovation.com
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