Escaping a Creative Rut – Generating New Ideas

A common hindrance to innovation is a drought of new ideas. To fix this problem, I’ve developed a simple list of ways to get the creative flow of thoughts circulating back into your organization.

When generating ideas, the default answer is to host a brainstorming session.  Are there other ways to create new ideas that are not dependent on traditional brainstorming?  Today on Killer Innovations, I will share the five I use with you.

Mind Mapping and Wishing

Mind mapping is a fairly common term nowadays; many types of software provide templates for mind mapping.  Traditionally they are used to organize your data, but it is also a great way to generate new ideas.

• Develop your problem statement.
• Write the problem statement in the center of your idea (whiteboards work great).
• Expand on this problem statement by surrounding it with terms that better describe your needs.
• Now add a second layer to each of your needs describing how you might be able to solve these individual challenges.
• Keep adding to your mind map using the steps above until you have sufficiently broken down your problem into manageable parts.

It is a fantastic ideation technique that encourages creative answers.  Another great way to generate new ideas is by wishing.  Wishing encourages your team to let their imaginations run wild.  Assuming you have a well-researched and understood problem statement, ask each participant to dream up the most unattainable solutions related to the problem statement.  Create a list of a few dozen wishes and go through the wishes by considering and discussing the ideas in detail.  Ask yourself:

• What makes them so impossible?
• How can that idea be scaled down?
• Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach?

You might be surprised to discover practical, real-world solutions among the team’s wildest wishes.

Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats by Dr. Edward de Bono unleashed a new approach to generating ideas by breaking down the ideas into six areas of thought.  It helps participants put themselves into the shoes of another.  The six hats are:

• Logic- the facts.
• Optimism- the value and the benefits.
• Devil’s Advocate- the difficulties and dangers.
• Emotion- Feelings and intuitions.
• Creativity- Possibilities and new ideas.
• Management- Ensuring the observance of the hat rules.

So, how do you use the tool? Have each member put on one of these different “hats” for the discussion. Make sure everyone has their say, and rotate the hats to others for extended sessions. Hence, everyone can see the problem and ideas from various perspectives.

Brain-Writing and Forced Combinations

One challenge for generating ideas is getting everything rattling around in your head out.  In this exercise, each participant takes a piece of paper and writes rough ideas for solving the problem statement.  Each person passes on each piece of paper, reads it silently, and adds their ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had an opportunity to contribute to each piece of paper. Once participants have retrieved their original paper, they read and organize the ideas.  Then each participant shares the notes and ideas on their piece of paper.  The significant advantage of brain-writing is that it ensures everybody has an opportunity to share their ideas and reinforces the idea of “building on the ideas of others.”

Lastly, the final way to generate ideas is one I have used with my product teams.  The premise is to look at non-logical combinations to create entirely new ideas.  This exercise involves combining ideas that serve different needs or interests to form a new concept.  How does this work?

• Bring a bag of random items to your ideation.
• Draw up two lists side-by-side of the items in the bag.
• Request a team member to choose two or more items and explore ways they can combine them.
• On the list, draw a line for each combination shared with a brief description of the ideas that resulted.
• Put the items back in the bag.
• The following person selects two or more items and repeats the process.

This technique can produce some silly results, but it is ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

To learn more about generating new ideas, listen to this week's show: The Best of Killer Innovations: Escaping a Creative Rut – Generating New Ideas.