Jumpstart Your Creativity (3 page)

• Smaller groups working together is better than trying to ideate with a large group of participants—6 to 8 is ideal, 9 to 12 is tough, 13 and more a hot mess.

• To avoid group think, instead of relying solely on open discussion and sharing ideas aloud by group members, you may want to have each person write down their thoughts on a piece of paper and turn them in—the facilitator may or may not post all of the responses at that time, it depends on the goal of that session.

• Make sure you have “the right people” in the room. We mean make sure you have all areas represented, all levels of the organization contributing, or all of the subject matter experts who should be involved—ideation in a vacuum results in less-than-best results.

At the end of this chapter you will see our recommended “Rules for Ideation.” Now let's dig into thirteen of our more than fifty ways to come up with new ideas through ideation.

Reverse Brainstorming is exactly the same as regular brainstorming except there is a unique twist. Remember we asked you not to brainstorm the old way. Let's say we work for the Billings Bowling Ball company. We get together with our team to brainstorm a way to increase sales and revenue. So the objective as stated is to “increase sales and revenue.” Instead of brainstorming the old way, we're going to use Reverse Brainstorming; instead of talking about how to increase sales and revenue, we will brainstorm a list of the opposite or the reverse, which is “how
not
to increase sales and revenue.” This focus frees up everyone to be highly creative to figure out how
not
to meet the objective. We have conducted this exercise with hundreds of groups and they always have a lot of fun figuring out ways to mess up everything. Once several flip chart pages of ideas have been written down, then of course we look at all of the ways not to increase sales and revenue and ask ourselves what the opposite of those would be. This is a highly effective technique for generating a ton of ideas. We
have another name for Reverse Brainstorming—“What is the dumbest thing you could do?” When we remove the restraint of what can be done it tends to encourage people's creativity.

Have you ever been riding a bicycle, working out, or even taking a shower and you came up with a great idea that seemed like it was out of the blue? Sure, all of us have. We, however, do not believe the idea was “out of the blue”—it was stimulated by something. It may have been the image on the shampoo bottle, a graphic on the gym wall, or seeing what you saw when riding your bicycle around the marina. It was that spider web/fish net of a brain of yours firing off connections and ideas.

Unconsciously you saw, touched, heard, or felt something that stimulated that idea. This is the phenomenon known as Random Stimulation. Some outside external stimulus or stimuli randomly triggered your brain to generate an idea. Using this as an ideation technique, we can use one of several approaches to get our brain to randomly generate ideas and then also do this in a meeting room.

Simply go to Google and click on the Google image tab. Once there, choose various words at random. We might put in “squid” and then look at all the pictures the word squid generates. Print out one or two images generated by the word squid. Then pick another word at random such as “architect.” Pick two images under the architect category and print them
out as well. After you go through a series of ten random words and have printed pictures, these are used as a Random Stimulation exercise.

Here's how it would work in a group setting. We would say to the group, “We are currently trying to figure out a way of increasing sales and revenue” (from the bowling ball company example). Now we ask the group to set that problem aside and look at a stack of random images. When looking at the images the group members are only to say what those images remind them of, as a facilitator writes down the phrases and words they mention.

After a large list of words have been generated from the random photos, you ask the group if any of the words on the list remind them of a solution to the problem. You would be amazed how many times we hear people say, “Oh that reminds me of something! What if we did this?” The biggest challenge of the Random Stimulation approach is getting people to believe a tool that seems completely arbitrary, random, and somewhat abstract is useful in generating ideas. We have seen this approach work many times. Have we ever seen this approach not work? Of course, but the main reason it doesn't work, in most cases, is the fact that the group does not believe the approach will work, so they do not open themselves up to the possibilities because they had shut down before they even started.

This technique is exactly the same as mentioned in Approach 1, the only difference is the source material for the
ideas. In this approach each person brings one or two random magazines or catalogs to the meeting. A person selects a catalog, closes his or her eyes, flips through pages, then points to one of the pages. The facilitator asks what is under the finger, either a word or a picture. The facilitator writes the word or the picture on the flip chart and then follows the same process as outlined in Approach 1. The key to this approach is making sure there are a variety of magazines from which to choose.

Random Stimulation is an effective technique. It has been rumored that this technique has been used effectively in Hollywood and New York in both film and television production for years. For example, a creative team could sit around and combine different words in order to come up with an idea for a show that was new or different. Someone could say “playboy and lifeguards,” and of course that would be the television show “Baywatch.” According to sources that's exactly how the show was pitched to the network—“playboy lifeguards.” You could combine two words such as millionaire and hillbillies and come up, of course, with the “Beverly Hillbillies.” You could combine the ventriloquist and automobile and come up with the TV show “Knight Rider” (we refuse at this point to comment on the mentality of American television), so you get the idea.

Often we find organizations have rules in place that have been in place for a long time. These rules served their purposes well during the time they were enacted, but may have outgrown their usefulness and may be holding the organization
back. So the idea behind this technique is to write a list of all of the rules an organization has (they could be about marketing, sales, design, etc.). And then figure out if those rules were to change, how would it change the ideas. For example, we just recently read an article about Applewood Farms, an organic meat producer that has grown successfully over the past twenty-five years. One of the defining moments of the CEO's history is when he realized that the company did not have to be in the meat production business. They re-worked one of their own rules that said they didn't have to have a manufacturing facility—they could contract out that part of the process. That was a defining moment for the company. Think of some of the rules that have dominated industries over the past several decades:

• Radio as local (nope)

• Movies are watched at a movie theater (hello Netflix)

• Books are a physical product (guess again)

• You have to go to college to go to college (wrong)

• Businesses must have a brick and mortar presence (laughable)

• Music has a physical form such as a CD (can you say download)

• Data is stored on your computer (hello cloud)

• Pizza is cooked in an oven (hi microwave)

• To find someone to date, you have to go to a club or a church (can you say e-Harmony)

• You play games on a game system (ha!)

• Yogurt is in a cup (wrong again—GoGurt is in a tube)

Business opportunities are based on rules and assumptions. But if you can make a list of all of your rules and assumptions and then figure out if they are still relevant and have never been questioned, then you may have the basis for the next great idea—or several of them.

The idea behind the Blank Slate technique is to remove all restrictions, limitations, and budgets from the ideation
process. Come up with an objective, and then say to the group, “If we were starting today from scratch and had no limitations on structure, finances, or logistics, in other words if we were starting from a blank piece of paper, how would we handle this problem, challenge, or situation?” When there are no limits, people tend to become a lot more creative and innovative. Once the list is built, then have the group go back and look over the solutions to see if any of them would actually work.

Using this technique, have the group create a list of various celebrities. The celebrities need to be from all areas including sports, entertainment, literature, and art. Also make sure that they picked both current and celebrities from the past including those from history. Once the list is developed, pick a dozen names from the list, which are a mix of both current and past celebrities. Then pose the problem and ask, “How would this situation be handled by…”

• Donald Trump

• Lady Gaga

• Muhammad Ali

• Bette Midler

• Napoleon

• Louis Armstrong

• Gustave Eiffel

• Renoir

• Thomas Edison

• Madam Curie

• Hillary Clinton

• Ronald Reagan

• Big Bird

• Donald Duck

• Plato

The group has a lot of fun coming up with how each celebrity would handle the problem, opportunity, or challenge. The best way to conduct the exercise is to have the team members consider each celebrity one at a time and talk about how that person would handle it. Often groups laugh and snicker during this exercise, which seems to border on being ridiculous. After the list has all been written out as to how each celebrity would handle those situations or problems, the group then reviews to see if some of them would make any sense. This can be a very effective tool for getting out of your own way and thinking about a problem or situation from very different viewpoints.

The idea behind this exercise is to talk about how a problem, opportunity, or challenge would be handled if it was treated as being something else entirely. How does this
exercise work? We simply make a list in advance (feel free to use our list below) and then ask the group how they would handle it if it were as described. For example, let's say we are trying to gain market share from a competitor. If we asked the group, “How would you treat this if it was a war?” The answers are much different from asking, “How would you handle this if it was a social movement?” It always amazes us how the answers change dramatically when people look at the problem in a completely different and unique way. Here is a suggested list of some of the what-ifs:

• What if it was a war?

• What if it was a movement?

• What if there was an exclusive club?

• What if it was a rare collectible?

• What if it was a party?

• What if it was a dance rave?

• What if it was a celebration?

• What if there was a charitable cause?

• What if it was a patriotic event?

• What if it was an unveiling?

• What if there was a space rocket launch?

• What if it was a visit by state dignitaries?

• What if it was a pep rally?

• What if it was a car show?

• What if it was a football game?

• What if it was a chess match?

Obviously the solutions and ideas from each of these would be remarkable and different. That is the idea and the power of this technique.

This technique is an idea using words as a way of generating ideas through the technique of word association. Simply put, one person in the group starts with a word and says that word out loud. The next person in the group then has to say a word that reminds him or her of that word. Each word that has spoken out loud needs to be written on a flip chart by the facilitator. So for example, someone says “frog,” another person says “hop,” another person says “beer,” and then we end up with a word chain consisting of: frog, hop, beer, golden, retriever, collector, taxes, Rome, gladiator, fight, gloves, winter, snow, ice, cream, cone, pine tree, floor cleaner, wood, mop, the Beatles, England, the queen, rock band.

Obviously once that entire list has been written on the chart, the group then reviews the list of words to see if there is something on that list that could be possibly aligned with or would help solve the problem, opportunity, or the challenge.

Buy a large bag of crunchy cheese curls and bring it with you to meet with the group. Break the group into smaller
groups and pour a bowl of crunchy cheese curls for each group. Identify the objective that you are working on. Have members of each group pull out a cheese curl one at a time and write down what the particular shape of that cheese curl reminds them of. It is very important that you purchase crunchy cheese curls and not just the soft kind. The soft kind all have the same shape, the crunchy kind have many unique shapes. It's kind of like looking at the shapes of clouds and imagining what they are. An additional benefit of this exercise is that you now have snacks as well as a way to stimulate your creativity!