If you have good stimuli, the ideas will flow!
(Image by Vichaya Kiatyingangsulee for Dreamstime)

The first law of creativity

Welcome to another post in the series that digs further into the Brainstorming Playbook.

The first law of creativity is “stimulus in, quality out”.

This means there has to be something that stimulates thinking differently, in order to get a quality outcome from your brainstorming. The more unique the stimulus, or brainstorming tool, the more likely you are to produce a unique (read “innovative”) solution.

In brainstorming, a stimulus is any approach that is new to you or that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem. Here’s the part that’s hard to get your head around: the stimulus doesn’t give you the answer - it simply provides a different context and perspective from which to think.

If you have good stimuli, the ideas will flow! Hundreds of brainstorming tools have been devised to help people stimulate creative thinking.

A wealth of brainstorming tools to choose from!

There are many exercises that can be used for generating ideas. They typically fall into one of four main categories of brainstorming tools (with thanks to “Sticky Wisdom” by ?What If!):

Re-expression
Related Worlds
Revolution
Random Links

In this post, I’ll explain each of these categories. In the next Brainstorming Playbook post I’ll begin sharing some specific tools you can use within each of these categories.

Re-Expression

Where re-expression is used as the stimulus, you can:

Use alternative words, like using a thesaurus
Make a drawing or act it out instead of relying on words
Speak from someone else’s perspective

Related Worlds

Using related worlds as the stimulus, you see what you can learn from other environments and apply it to your own challenge in a unique way.

Examples of Related Worlds solutions:

The idea for roll-on deodorant came from the ballpoint pen.
Velcro was born after the inventor came back from a walk in the country with burrs clinging to his trousers.

Revolution

The mind tries to make incoming data fit with what it already knows. Revolution is about deliberately breaking the mind’s rules. An easy way to do this by imposing extreme constraints, eliminating constraints altogether, or blowing up constraints.

Examples of constraints:
Reduce the budget by 50% (extreme constraint)
10x the price (extreme constraint)
Everyone wants it! (eliminating constraint)
Technology makes the existing product redundant (extreme constraint)
Turn something slow, like a tortoise, into something fast, like a tortoise on a skateboard (blowing up the constraint)

Need help?

I offer a few options for helping you create a culture of creative problem-solving and innovation. If you want to learn more about these options, let’s hop on a call. We may discover some useful info, for example, that you’re unsure about how to facilitate a brainstorming session. Schedule a time to talk here.

Till next time,

Ellia

I believe that, with the right support anyone can learn creative ways to solve problems. If you’d like to see what tapping into creative potential could look like at your place of work, contact me at Ellia@ThePotentialCenter.com to arrange a call.

Now we brainstorm!