What surprised me when I researched IDEO is how transparent they are about the ‘blueprint’ of their success. Like other modern companies, IDEO lectures, writes and trains in ideation, and in doing so have been a big inspiration for me ever since I first saw founder and chairman David Kelley’s presentation on TED in 2005.

This article is about the things I’ve learned from IDEO as a company, and how to apply their success into your idea development through a process called Design Thinking.

The process of Innovation

As an innovation company, IDEO focuses on new concepts for commercial brands. This wasn’t a new concept when the company started, but the approach of founders David Kelley and Tim Brown was different from others in one, big way.

When we look at the three big ‘push’ factors of innovation they are:

• Technology Driven Innovation
  New technology enables new products and services
• Business Driven Innovation
  Business explores a market and looks for the proverbial gap by analyzing current supply and demand
• People Driven Innovation
  New or changing demands by the consumers themselves

Technology driven innovation is usually done in technology environments, places that explore the current boundaries of technology and seek to cross those borders. They create new technology first, then seek a marketplace to sell their products. Typical technological innovations are broadband internet, flatscreen TV’s and the DVD player.

The second type of innovation is the business innovation. This is, traditionally, the domain of marketers. Marketers research the current market, analyze competition and seek mismatches by what is offered, and what people want, within the context of the existing product or company. Typical business driven innovations are extra chunky peanut butter, the X-box and online banking.

Design Thinking

However, before IDEO the business and technology innovation were perceived to be the only 2 viable options. Marketers employed focus groups to ask consumers what they want – but the problem is these rarely resulted in original ideas. Intercepting problems (resulting in demand) and finding real solutions is a craft, not something random peope in focus groups can do for you. This notion changed with IDEO’s Design Thinking theory. In this third field of innovations it were not the marketers or technicians that got to innovate, but the designers.

This ended up being IDEO’s golden formula and their one-way ticket to success. The Design thinking theory consists of four simple reasons why designers innovate through the people perspective:

1. Designers turn Problems into Projects

Designers think of every ‘problem’ as a project. When they stumble upon something they need, they recognise the problem, and have the urge to fix it. Inherent to turning it into a project is having a clear definition of (A) the current situation, (B)  the goal of solving the problem and the process of getting from A to B.

2. Designers look for insights in the outside world

Because design is rarely an exact science, a good designer is more open to inspiration from outside of their own experiences and ‘truths’. Design Thinking translates this open minded view in dealing with problems such as company innovation. This in contrast with the often predetermined mind of a scientist or economist who regards their solution as a single truth because they’ve been taught it is.

3. Designers make ideas tangible

The third qualification of Design Thinking is to make ideas tangible. This enables you to show and collaborate with others around you more practically.  It is also an important part of being able to experience the idea before it goes into development, instead of the idea being just a conceptual thought or written plan somewhere.

Designers want to look at their ideas, feel them, see how people react to them, instead of looking at solutions like math, where 1 + 1 is always 2 no matter how many times you look at it.

4. Designers are able to tell stories about ideas

Last is the creative ability to imagine a scenario – a story – about your idea and communicate this effectively. To motivate people and get them to stand behind your idea is not always a matter of cold facts, it is a process of persuasion. The lion share of ideas gets tackled before they even reach the market because of the failure to convey an idea properly to a client or other decision makers.

The method of Design Thinking

The mindset as Tim Brown describes it is the way you look at a problem. The method is how Design Thinking is actually employed by companies such as Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and Motorola to innovate their companies. Design Thinking at its core can be summarized in seven steps from problem to solution:

1. Define the problem (scoping)
2. Research the problem (get inspired)
3. Generate ideas (divergent thinking)
4. Prototype ideas (collaborate and share ideas)
5. Choose amongst the solutions (convergent thinking)
6. Implement the solution (convince and execute)
7. Learn from your solution (feedback)

The essence of Design Thinking is a process of creating value by combining the human perspective and creativity. The method of idea creation, evaluation and development Design Thinking teaches is in my experience a universal formula for developing Great Ideas within any context. IDEO uses the context of product innovation, but it could just as well be software development, brand building or writing.

I leave you with the presentation I mentioned earlier. A presentation at the TED conference that got me interested in product development and using creative thinking as a source of value:

Personally I think it is a shame such a great opportunity to receive great ideas from the people dealing with your every day to day business is so often undervalued. The following seven steps ensure your employees will generate ideas, feel motivated to share them, and provide real opportunities to your company with the least amount of effort.

1. Formulate ambitions

Step one is to formulate your ambitions or mission statement and chop it up into goals. It should be obvious what your vision is, what you want to achieve.

2. Be open about ambitions

Step two is to communicate the ambitions of your company across the lines. Don’t just keep your management informed but make sure every single employee understands the goal. Include them in the welcome package of new employees, put them into slides at company presentations and ask about them in evaluation interviews. You are now planting the seeds of a prepared mind.

3. Encourage participation

Step three is to encourage participation. You could specifically ask for ideas at evaluation moments, be clear about having an open office policy to anyone with an idea, do brainstorm meetings focused on processing input from employers from all levels of your company and inform management to communicate your intention to listen to ideas.

4. Be transparent about your rewards

With the prepared mindset of your employees there are bound to be great ideas, but your employers might still be hesitant to share them. The most common reason is they see sharing an idea more as a risk rather then an opportunity. By being clear about the rewards to those with initiative you emphasize the opportunity rather than the perceived risk.

Obviously not every idea can be rewarded, and the levels of rewards will vary – but it’s important to show you appreciate input.

5. Manage the ideas

One of the reasons the ‘idea box’ never really works is because it shows a complete disrespect for the ideas and initiative offered by your employees. Make sure everyone knows ideas get processed, reviewed and taken into consideration. Being open to ideas is not just a way for your employers to vent their disgruntle – chances are if you create the right prepared mind there will be very valuable input from your employers who deal with clients, or their colleagues on a day to day basis. Give that input the respect it deserves.

6. Show the results of ideas

Continuing from step 5, make sure you show the results of ideas. Provide feedback to both the person offering you the idea, and everyone benefitting from it. If an idea doesn’t make it, be transparent about why. This will also amplify your efforts to be transparent about rewards(step 4) and promote participation (step 3).

7. Learn from ideas

Above all, whether it is a good idea or a bad idea – the ideas tell you something about the situation. Every idea symbolizes a perceived problem or opportunity. Even if the solution can’t be executed, or is simply not good enough, look at the two other elements of the idea – the problem, and the information and inspiration. Chances are it will be worth your time.

With the help of design and animation the typography itself tells the story. It amplifies the emotions often hidden behind words (especially the written ones) and creates this compelling way of conveying meaning behind words. Most if not all are done using the Adobe program After Effects which requires experience and skill, but the way fonts (fontsize) and proximity are used could be of great inspiration to anyone trying to supercharge their ideas with emotion and immersion.

I’ve listed a dozen of the most impressive examples below. See for yourself how they reveal, amplify and convey emotion through typography (turn of your sound if you really want to grasp the concept instead of just the creative idea).

The perfect girl

Blink 182: Online Songs

Braveheart: The William Wallace speech

Capsule: Welcome to my world

Court TV: Red

Dane Cook: From the ‘Harmful if Swallowed’ album

Fight Club: Chemical Burn

Full Metal Jacket

Her Majesty

Look at what you’ve done

Montefiori Cocktail: Gipsy Woman

Oceans Eleven: The Planl

A Poem by Taylor Mali

The Machine is us/ing us

The Restaurant at the end of the Universe

Typography in Motion

Piggy Trouble

I want you to Want me

Bob Dylan

The Economy

Bank of Amerka 3D Data visualisation Mirrors

Who’s coming to America?

Kill Bill Infographic

Consoles and Videogames

Herman Miller Thoughtpiles

The Phantom of the Opera

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Bicycles of the World

Shakespeare Tube Map

On Driving – The automobile history in the USA

Poverty by Age in the US

Permutations of Coffee Chart

Google News visualization

The Indian Economy

Cost of Ownership

What’s in the mail?

Digg Labs

Fairytale Little Red Riding Hood

Leisure and Poverty

Blocking Intersections

Bird flu Virus

The Hulk

The Endowment Flowchart

Eclectic Method is a trio of video remix artists who rearrange the sights and sounds of music videos, motion pictures, and video games to the thrill of live audiences around the globe. Their cutting edge remixes have served as promotional tools for global brands and artists. You can view their work online, on television, or at the club by live performances. The Tarantino remix below is definitely one of my favourite examples of their work, but you can see all their work over on Vimeo.

The challenge here was to tell a story which would, in a fun kind of way, show the audience38 logo’s wrapped in this years’ theme “Failing Gracefully”. Our main focus was to let the logo’s star in this film and not to let them act as “secondary cast”. The logo’s are what the film is about, they are the main ingredient.

But in the end Zlad manages to “create” something that satisfies him by accident, but still needs a little tweak. Zlad Klitschko; “Good enough, just a little tweak and I am done…”

Watch the full video here: Experimenting on Logos by Onesize.

The beautiful compositions are often inspired by pure imagination – there are no limits in the completely virtual worlds inside the 3D programs. Every visible detail is carefully planned by the artist and this turns the images into great scenarios, often depicting surreal and visionary scenes.

“We need ideas and we need them now”, everyone nods in agreement, they know it’s business time. And so the fellowship sets on its journey to this mythical Valhalla of ideas…

“Thank you all for coming, I know you’re busy with your own projects but I invited you to brainstorm with our team today. I expect creativity, and I really want you to think outside the box on this one.”

And so it begins, a journey to The Outside Of The Box: a place of infinite creativity.

Out of the box

As you might have derived from the introduction, I really, really, dislike the expression ‘outside the box’. Just a minor irritation is caused by how it’s often mistakenly referred to as ‘out of the box‘. Out of the box means, as Wikipedia cleverly informs us, ‘something ready made’ or ‘off the shelf’:

Items, functionalities, or features provided out of the box are those that do not require any additional installations, plug-ins, expansion packs, or products. In addition to being used for tangible products, the phrase is often used in a less literal sense for software, which may not be distributed in an actual box but offer certain functions “out of the box,” e.g. without modification.

Just plug it in and ‘go’. It’s already been completely designed, tested and is ready to use. Needless to say that is not what people intend to say – they mean ‘creative thinking’, ‘divergent thinking’ or ideation, the process of generating many, unconventional ideas. Clearly the plug and play reference really undermines that intent.

But more significantly is my problem with how the expression undermines your brainstorm from the word go. The ‘fellowship’ as described in the introduction face a major problem for effective ideation from just those three words…

Outside ‘the box’

In order to understand the expression and the problem within, first we need to know where this mysterious box even comes from.

It is said ‘the box’ is derived from a simple puzzles that is used in training unconventional thinking. The subject is presented with a three by three grid of dots, and is asked to connect all dots with four straight lines, without the pen leaving the paper.

The puzzle is solved however, by going ‘outside the box’, moving the pen to points not part of the grid (or ‘box’) and connecting all nine dots.The box is the mental model that is formed by the grid, a container which causes the subject to make assumptions and obey the conventions of the square space.

More commonly though, ‘the box’ is simply seen as a clearly defined ‘space’, a metaphor for the office or the teams ‘comfort zone’ where one has to get out of in order to generate original and relevant ideas.

Burning the box

The effect of instructing people to ‘think outside this box’ is deadly for your process of ideation. A brainstorm facilitator should stimulate divergent thinking, and ‘the boundary of the box’ is doing exactly the opposite. This abstract of a box, where ideas either go in our out (and out being good) encourages people to evaluate and judge their ideas. Worst case openly whether an idea is in or out, but also quietly, not sure if your box has the same boundaries as the other participants boxes.

Bottomline result: less ideas and the quality of ideation diminishes, and with that the true power of brainstorming: Connecting a variety of ideas – of which some could possibly come from ‘within the box’, or someones personal ‘box’ – his own comfort zone.

The ideas that come from within these ‘boxes’ are not bad or uncreative per definition, they are simply unfinished. As will any other idea generated in the process of brainstorming. They get polished and evaluated outside the brainstorm, or at least outside the process of creating the sheer volume of ideas to work with. Become a concept where other ideas could spring from, or get discarded with the original but irrelevant ‘outside the box’ ideas.

‘The box’ effectively discourages the free flow of ideas – the essential part of a brainstorm and the most determining factor of its success.

And new work at that, as I’ve switched jobs over the past two months. I’m now part of a great, creative team at Talmon B_Connected, responsible for creative concepts involving one my big passions: Storytelling.

I do apologize for the complete lack of updates over the past 2 months. It’s said that after 21 days one learns a habit, and just as easily as I’d had learned to (re)search interesting material, and more importantly for this blog – write about – it it had become undone during my vacation.

Fortunately I did not shed all good habits during this vacation and my ‘idea log‘ and email box are brimming with links, thoughts, ideas and concepts. I’m currently processing these and plan to return to our regular schedule of updates as of this moment.

I hope you had a wonderful, inspirational vacation as well and keep an eye on our feed for our upcoming updates!

It’s time like this I often remind myself of the following list. These are six simple techniques that will allow you to unleash your creative potential, and once more set inspiration free inside your mind.

A comfortable place to work

Research shows time and time again our workplace is of great influence of our creative output. An uncomfortable chair, not enough desk space, not enough (sun)light, people calling all the time, these things really disrupt our ability to think and act creatively. Consider cleaning your desk or moving someplace else (outside/kitchen) to think, or if the problem is more structural, designate a space where you can think, sit, write and read comfortably and in peace.

Visualize your goal

Sometimes it’s easy to get stuck on the problem, and it helps to just remind our self why we want this fixed. Why am I doing what I do, what is the big picture? It’s all to easy to lose motivation and therefore our ability to be creative halfway through a project, and the trick is to get through this visualizing your objective again. Think of the finished product that got you motivated at the start of the project when it was still fresh.

Collaborate with someone

Creativity thrives as a social activity. The best results are created by being part of a team where you have a chance to get instant feedback. The magic of having someone to bounce ideas off is not just that two minds work better as one. Someone less involved in the creative process as you are can more easily provide rational and objective feedback, and provide motivation by pointing out the things that he or she agrees with you.

Variety of Scenery

Sometimes I get so caught up with a creative problem it shuts down the creative process. It’s just as important to relax the mind as it is to strain the mind. Music, a game, a walk in the park or a shower often leads to sudden bursts of inspiration because the mind has a chance to relax, process information and let all the previous inspiration settle down inside your head (and pass the checkpoints in our prepared mind).

Write your thoughts down

Writing is a great exercise in analytical thinking. By writing our thoughts down we force ourself to give the idea some time and become tangible enough to create a coherent phrase out of it. Not only does this help by saving all ideas instead of discarding them instantly because we think they are just bad or ‘half’ ideas, we also have a chance to tell our self why we think it is a bad idea. This will point us in the right direction of the solution, instead of relying on the patterns in our mind (gut feeling/instinct) to make that decision for us without the opportunity to learn from it.

Night Owl or Early Bird?

No one can always be focused, always ‘on top of their game’. Some get inspired by sleep and feel a productivity boost when they just get started with work in the morning. I’m more of a night owl, I can work ‘till 4:00 AM and usually feel productivity rising after 22:00. Knowing when you are at your best might help you plan better and make optimal use of your brains biorhythm.

No matter what ‘they’ tell you, experience marketing, pull marketing and all other buzzwords that pass for new marketing’ today all started in the 15th century.

In medieval Brittan the monarchs and landlords often found themselves in a position where they needed to pass their (unpopular) new rulings along the commoners they ruled. Like announcing tax increases when they had given a grand party or fought a neighboring lord and found their treasure chest drained.

At first this was done by the military, but as the military was often recruited from the town itself, threatening the farmers often proved to be counterproductive, more than once caused uprisings. But it was around 1450 when these lords and monarch started recruiting special individuals to pass along their message for them, people that seem to have a way with words and other people – the bards.

Bards are generally thought of as merry man, traveling from town to town, telling tall tales to townsfolk. The truth is this type of bard has only come around since the 17th century. Before this the bard was simply a messenger in service of a court, who’s mission it was to praise new rulings convincingly, and pass along the messages of the powers that be to their subordinates.

The very word ‘bard’ is derived from ‘bardos‘ – which mean as much as ‘to raise your voice’ and ‘to praise’.

Given the current social situation of most of the lords subordinates at that time – poor, uneducated strong farmhands and blacksmiths – being a bard required great skill. Telling the fine folk they need to pay more or send their sons to war wasn’t always received with the happy enthusiasm you’d expect from bringing such ‘good’ news.

So in order to survive – literally – the bards found ways to embed themselves well within the community by providing entertainment in song or strong tales they’d write about their lord. Instead of demanding more taxes outright, the bard found clever stories about heroics of the lords that would make the villagers less likely to resist. Instead of fearing the messages of their lord, people would literally hoard around to listen to the tall tales (and latest rulings of their sovereign).

The evolution of bards

The bad bards made a living traveling around, spreading the word until they had made themselves too unpopular for comfort and moved on to the next town. The good bards however, got promoted to do the one thing the lords and monarchs thought was more important than keeping the peace – War.

As shown in numerous movies, in medieval warfare, morale meant life or death. When a horde of 10.000 angry men carrying swords come running at you, inspiration and a reason to not run and hide matters, and the warlords recognized this soon enough. The bards where told to inspire courage, survival and a will to fight for king & country. They often used battle songs, which carried far over the fields, or theater, enacting drama and comedy to take the soldiers mind of the battle ahead or tall tales of legendary heroes and the rewards of victory.

Eventually this evolved the bard into the artistic being – a communicator and a ‘people person’ who informed, inspired and motivated the masses through song, music and poetry – the finer arts that made life worth living. The most famous examples is of course The Bard of bards – William Shakespeare, around 150 years after the first records of bards being hired by the lords and monarchs. The role of the bard had evolved, a bard was no longer simply a messenger, but now often a thinker, posing questions and sharing world views with their audiences. Shakespeare famously posed many questions on sexuality, society, elitism and even politics. Large social issues meant to question and inspire through play and arts.

Another 150 years later the bard has reached its peak of social involvement. The famous Scottish bard Robert Burns starts to describe the foundations of liberalism and socialism in his poetry and folksongs, eventually inspiring both movements. The artistic minds are well embedded in society as thinkers, questioners and entertainers and mass-communicators.

A new monarch

But things change when we fast forward another 200 years. The profession of the bard starts to evolve again with the arrival of a new type of monarch: The industrialist. Entrepreneurs who see production is no longer an individual undertaking (a smith, a baker, a butcher etc.), but something that can be institutionalized through modern machinery. This marks the rise of the new kind of empire – the corporation.

At first the new monarch has no problems recruiting workforce or selling their products, but with the arrival of competition and broadcasting the monarch seeks to hire the help of the bard again – praising their product and telling their audiences about their business. The bards adapt to the demand for mass production and create micro and mass produced performances: The advertisements.

But the bard is facing problems – originality is rarely understood by the masses and with the increased demand for barding, the audience is flooded with ‘performances’. This means their messages have to be shorter, there’s no time or demand for depth – it’s no longer the occasional ruling of the sovereign, barding has become a full-time job. No more time for poetry or other fine arts. The bards had become marketers, and the craft of praising has been industrialized.

Like a child growing up – the art of inspiring and performing  to praise seems to have lost a lot of its necessary creativity. Inspiring had become efficiency, communicating had become publishing, and motives are not longer morale or communicating rulings. Modern bards are on a mission to create new desires for their audience and maintain the industrial complex.

The goal of these manufacture needs is to create new wants for consumers, and new consumers means expansion of the industry which means wealth for the new monarch. The easiest way to create these ‘needs’ is to simply make you dissatisfied with your current situation. In other words: companies benefit from making you feel bad and dissatisfied. “You’re getting old/fat/ugly, here is a way to fix it.” Or “What you have might have been good last year, now we have something better”.

But the manufactured needs are often not real ‘needs’. A new ‘flavor’ of water is not going to really make a positive impact on your life. Neither are 5% less fat, 10% longer taste or the addition of some fancy herb to your latest anti-wrinkle cream. These where just tricks the bards had thought themselves to make you want the product of the monarch. There was no real progress, just imaginary dissatisfaction.

Imagine the bard at the battlefield, 15.000 angry soldiers just a mile away. It was the bards responsibility to raise morale, to get everybody pumped and feel the very best they could be before striding off into battle, inspiring real need for survival. Somehow I don’t think telling them shaving with 5 blades instead of 4 will reduce skin irritation was going to cut it.

The point is – where bards used to inspire and where a positive, constructive note in society I think the multi-billion dollar industry marketing is today, is no longer positively contributing as a whole.

Do not despair, we live in hopeful times

I think the main problem is we as a society have trouble seeing the current marketing and advertising business as ‘broken’. It brings in money so it functions. But when I look back at the bards, I can’t help but think how these billions and billions of dollars of demoralizing to get us to consume, could be spend better to inspire and contribute. Opposition is still rare but these are hopeful times for bards:

• Malcolm Gladwell is my favorite storyteller of this time, using tales from far and wide to convey his sometimes visionary, sometimes observatory ideas about society.
• Seth Godin recently wrote Tribes, on leading communities through leadership and inspiration, a manifesto for the modern day bard on communicating to their audience meaningfully.
• The United States have elected a ‘Bard in Chief’ – Obama. His speeches would not have been misplaced in theaters, seeking to inspire by being a prophet of change.
• Ken Robinson recognizes the need for creativity and inspiration in modern societies, seeking to improve our educational systems to train a new generation in exploring the arts
• Kevin Roberts (Saatchi & Saatchi) makes a passionate pitch for returning to the crafts of storytelling and emotional theater in the 30 second commercial in his book Sisomo.
• Innovative ad agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky find new ways to use the modern arena (the internet) to move and entertain the audience of their ‘praisings’.

But is it enough to break the dominance of mediocre, demoralizing advertisements? As long as we as a consumer society don’t feel the machine broken it’s not likely to get fixed. But as the options increase to ignore advertising, and new generations become more crafty at blocking advertising, I think – I hope – there will be a place for the bards of old again. The ones relying on their creative minds to inspire and attract. The bards that motivated and entertained through the arts, and generally contributed to a life worth living. The potential of this billion dollar communication machine is just to big to let go to waste.

His physical presentation (the old and wise man, grey haired, suit wearing business exec.) is in sharp contrast with his passionate, creative and provocative presentations and arguments. This controversy rapidly wrote the story of ‘the brand Tom Peters’ and created a loyal fan base, amongst which many other Big Thinkers in the marketing and innovation industry.

Now one of the all-time guru’s of ‘new business’ Tom Peters uses his distinctive, trademark flashing powerpoint slides and a seemingly never calming anger (passion) about the (big) mistakes and opportunities in modern business to convert multi-million dollar corporations and decisionmakers to the path of innovation, creativity and diversity.

Reason enough to take a closer look at Tom’s perspective on innovation.

Fortunately Tom Peters sees ‘hoarding’ information as one of the cardinal sins in business, and shares his experience and insights generously through his website (only building the brand even further). Out of many gems of information I distilled 10 of my favorite insights and quotes on innovation.

Innovation Tactic #1: Trying

“Darwin rules. More stuff goin’ on, more interesting-good stuff happenin’. Innovation is to a large extent a “numbers game”: He-she who tries the most stuff wins. (Astonishingly true.)”

Innovation Tactic #2: Prototyping

“Prototyping skills-attitude are more central than almost anyone can imagine. Entire organization as “playpen” with “playmates” gathering spontaneously to try stuff. Quickly. Quickly. “

Innovation Tactic #3: The stuff of legends

“Tries and screw-ups and sagas of bold champions become the “stories” that animate the organization—and induce everyone to climb aboard, play with vigor, or lose out.”

Innovation Tactic #4: Design

“Design, writ large, is increasingly the route to product or service differentiation. Many companies are now beyond lip service, but a long way from fully incorporating design and experience creation into the heart of the company culture. One effective approach is a center of excellence with the avowed goal of nothing less than becoming a “hotbed” of global excellence—for example, Samsung followed this path and is giving Sony a run for its money.”

Innovation Tactic #5: The Dreamers with Deadlines

“Warren Bennis called hot groups of innovators “dreamers with deadlines.” Innovation is not pie-in-the-sky, “let’s all have a blast, yo my man, cool, eh?” in nature. There is a compelling and disciplined “execution” thread that is central to the innovating organization. The innovating organization is focused on “new stuff,” “cool stuff”—but is pragmatic to a fault. The project “budget and milestones guru” is as honored as the true believer-dreamer-champion. “

Innovation Tactic #6: Accountability

“There is as much accountability around screwing up as there is around inventory management in a traditional outfit; that is, the innovator takes responsibility for the screw-up and for insuring rapid learning and dissemination of lessons learned and for mounting the follow-up experiment posthaste.”

Innovation Tactic #7: Lunch

“Never waste a lunch!!!! Lunch is 5 opportunities per week, 220 opportunities per year to get to know interesting outsiders, folks from other functions, customers, vendors, frontline staffers. This is remarkably important. “Lunch management,” a “lunch culture” is not an amusing aside. “

Innovation Tactic #8: Diversity

“Diversity with a lower-case “d.” Black, white, brown, purple … tall, short … North American, Asian … public school, private school, no school … etc … etc. (Etc.) Decisionmaking of every sort is far, far better with diverse views of any flavor. Period. I have come to view this is as a gamechanger—for a 6-person project team, a 20-person company, a huge enterprise. “

Innovation Tactic #9: What do you think?

““What do you think?” Innovation-an innovation culture engages one and all. (All = All.) Getting everyone to think about improvements small and large comes from, de facto, constantly asking “What do you think?”—perhaps the 4 most important words in the innovator’s vocabulary. Treating every voice as valued yields more value from every voice.“

Innovation Tactic #10: Celebrate

“Celebrate! Innovative organizations are places where people enjoy their peers’ work, good tries, good screw-ups, milestones reached, etc. Celebrating these events, large and small and very small, is a fullscale part of the “innovation culture.” “

You can find the other 111 insights on innovation in the ’ Tom Peters: Innovation Tactics 121‘.

I apologize in advance for this post reads a little bit like a ‘rant on ‘the internet’. It’s also a little more ‘tech-talk’ than usual on Crinid. Proceed with caution, you’ve been warned

The internet is a place of niches. Millions of ‘me’ niches exist on blogs, social networks. Personalized search, personalized ads, personalized content, all becoming part of our ‘digital DNA’. And it’s great, right? We get more of what we want now that our profile is slowly becoming our niche?

No more annoying spam and other advertisements, just ‘infomercials’ – advertisements I’d want to see because they are relevant to my interests. And of course, therefor is more likely to make me click/buy/tell someone else about it. It’s this ‘noble’ thought that ignited the need for our data to be collected, stored and used to build our profile, and I’m not just talking about our Facebook account.

For example, last week I spend some time listening to Jose Gonzalez on YouTube. I made a playlist and added a number of songs to my favorites. The day after I noticed nearly every ad on my screen all day was related to guitars, Spanish artists and some other stuff I could easily trace back to the smooth sounds of Mr. Gonzalez.

Of course, targeted ads for guitars are kind of lost on me at the moment, but some day it will figure it out.

Getting it right

And we know the Google’s, Microsofts and Facebooks of the future will figure it out. ‘They’ just need a little more data, and be a little more semantic (human) in order to get right. Personal profiles get stronger, and more persistent throughout the internet (my Google account gathers information from every website with Google Ads now).

On the other hand websites and applications get smarter using this information (FaceBook Connect links my profile to numerous websites simply by logging in to comment or use the service). Portals like Netvibes, iGoogle and MyAlltop lets you create pages that lists just the news you want, but how long will it take until we don’t have to tell them what we need? The web knows what we want now, what our interests are, and will feed us the information that fits our profile, our pattern, and in doing so we start to create ‘cocoons of me’.

But wait, the web was meant to connect was it not? Reach out, talk to people, share thoughts, have discussions…

The problem is the way social networks work right now. They facilitate me to find people ‘like me’. To a vast majority this is what social networking is all about. Everyone openly lists their interests, in order to find or get found by others who share these interests. Websites like LinkedIn specifically search for people like ‘me’ and recommends them as my friends. We rarely look for things that are ‘not-like-me’. The result is our networks become more and more ‘like me’.

This in turn affects the information and domains we have access to again. Even though the amount of information is growing, it becomes more necessary and more easy to filter this information.

In our effort to counter this infamous ‘information overload’ we employ ‘social filters’ in mass. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, del.icio.us, personal blogs and even plain old email – our new sources of information are heavily dependent on our networks. And as internet is undoubtedly the most dominant source of information in the 21st century, this will have an impact on us as ‘information processing organisms’ or ‘thinkers’.

In fact, I think this is where we might eventually be crossing the line between getting what we want, and losing what we need. Things like diversity, new domains, different interests, foreign patterns and opposed perspectives. Creativity thrives from the inspiration we get from domains that are ‘not like me’, finding things that don’t fit our patterns and expectations, people that are ‘not like me’. And the internet is getting increasingly poor at providing me with information that’s ‘not like me‘.

What are your thoughts? Will the increasing control we have over information we’re exposed to limit our ability to be creative, or will the new connectivity on the web give us access to more domains, and improve Creative Thinking?

More on that later though, I don’t want to give away too much before the presentation itself. What I can tell you the presentation (and the next blogpost) is largely inspired by my favorite quote of all time, by one of the greatest storytellers and Creative Thinkers that will ever walked the face of this earth:

“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~ Roald Dahl

More to come soon! Why not sign up to our RSS if you haven’t done so already and get notified of our blogposts?

Pecha-Kucha (pronounced ‘peh-chak-cha’ as far as I was able to trace) is the Japanese sound of an ‘informal conversation’ or chatter, something like the English ‘chit-chat’. It was originally invented by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, two architects in Tokyo who opened up a performance space for young designers to meet, network and present their work.

In order to keep the presentations interesting and control the architects and designers tendency to talk endlessly about their own work, they imposed a set of rules on the presentations.

The format is easy enough. Each presentation could only have 20 slides, and you could only spend 20 seconds (exactly 20) per slide to explain the story of the picture. That’s it.

The ‘rapid-fire’ presentation style, the Pecha-Kucha, has spread virally amongst creatives and is renowned for its ability to capture an audience throughout a large number of consecutive presentations. Part of the trick is the anticipation created by the knowing the next slide is only 20 seconds away, as well as forcing the speaker to make their points quickly.

Image credits: Pecha Kucha Manila

See for yourself if you find them more easy to watch than regular presentations:

• Small Things doing Big things
• Product Innovation Presentation by Thinksketch’s
• A personal presentation by Jake Smith

For more information about Pecha-Kucha and presentation events near you visit pecha-kucha.org.

What surprised me was how seemingly innocent questions like “What is your favorite food‘ suddenly become quite complicated.

Simple question, hard to answer

First of all, there is not one ‘dish’ I’d that is my favorite all time. I know a few I like best right now, but is that really ‘favorite food’, or would that be the kind of food I’d rate the highest over a longer period of time. I quickly listed a few types of food I enjoy (sushi, spaghetti bolognese, quiche loirainne), arranged them in order of ‘favoriteness’ just between them (1. spaghetti bolognese, 2. quiche Lorraine, 3. sushi) and picked the the one at the top of my list.

However, It gets more ‘complex’ when you realize even adjectives are banned in the one word answer. I couldn’t even pick my favorite kind of spaghetti, it would just be spaghetti. I then realized how much I needed adjectives to express myself. Constantly creating minor nuances or perhaps trying to be too specific where simplicity is required.

Listing, prioritizing, picking

I had my mind set on completing the form (after I had been drawn in by the apparent simplicity of the initial question) so I did. In the end I actually enjoyed the results because it allowed me to quickly put some order to my thoughts, with no chance of being vague about my answers.

The simple, open-ended questions generate a number of answers quite quickly. But with the one word rule, you have to filter, prioritize and pick just one of them. Whether this is the actual answer is actually a lot less relevant than the process of quickly organizing your thoughts and comparing your options. Which in turn, is exactly what convergent thinking is all about (Wikipedia: convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value). This is the kind of thinking you need when creating some order in the results of a successful brainstorm (a type of divergent thinking) for instance.

To experience some quick convergent thinking, try the 5 questions below – they could help get a little more focus on your ambitions as well:

1. What are you passionate about?
2. What do you like about your current job ?
3. What do you value most in life?
4. Where do you want to be in 5 years?
5. What is the stuff dreams are made of?

(And remember, just one word per answer )

• It took the 40 years in the age of radio
• It took 15 years in the age of television
• It took 5 years in the age of Dial-up internet (Netscape)
• It took less than one year on the age of broadband (Gmail)
• It takes hours in the age of instant messaging and a networked world? (Facebook, Twitter) [My addition]

“The time it takes for an idea to circulate is approaching zero” ~Seth Godin

Ideas spread faster, easier, and become more crucial to success. Feedback is often made publicly, in comments, reviews and social recognition (joining or following someone’s blog or social networks). Scary? Opportunity? I haven’t made up my mind yet but it sure is interesting!

Image credits: Tonivc

• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
• Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
• Don’t poll your friends. It’s your art, not an election.
• Be prepared for the Dip.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.

Most of these ‘rules’ are about finishing an idea – seeing it through to the end (or in case of the ‘the Dip‘, knowing when to quit).

Read the rest of the list over on Seth’s blog, there’s more than a few left worth reading! (and yes this was a little bit of a Seth Godin fanpost but I really feel he’s on a role lately with the ‘shipping’ thing!)

After 45 minutes, the performer has gathered 32 dollars. Most of which donated by people who didn’t stop to listen but made a contribution none the less as they walked passed the violinist.

After an hour the man by the name of Joshua Bell – one of the greatest musicians in the world – picks up his coat and hat after playing one of the most complicated and beautiful pieces ever written. He carefully packs up his instrument, an in 1713 hand crafted violin valued at $3.5 million dollars. A masterpiece by legendary violin maker Antonio Stradivari at the peak of his ability. The same violin which enthralled a crowd willing to pay $100 for a glimpse of this performance just two days before at the Boston Theatre.

This performer, this artist didn’t capture the attention of but a handful when playing unannounced, and posing as any street artist.

Perceived Value

The story above is entirely true, and part of an experiment as conducted by the Washington Post back in 2007 called ‘Pearls Before Breakfast‘. The original experiment explored our perception of value. The perceived value of the artists performance, despite its brilliance (or actual value) was 0 to well over 95% of its audience. There were no cheers, standing ovations or even an encouraging applauses.

The awkward times,” he calls them. It’s what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn’t noticed him playing don’t notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord — the embarrassed musician’s equivalent of, “Er, okay, moving right along . . .” — and begins the next piece.

This of course in sharp contrast with his grand performance two days earlier. In the Boston Theatre, amongst the spotlights and centre stage every ‘fiddle’ was greeted with a warm wave of enthusiasm, clapping of hands and people rising from their soft seats for every finale.

The difference? Did the violinist just have an off-day? Did the acoustics of the subway didn’t translate his music well or was he playing for an audience less interested in classical pieces of music?

Of course none of the above was the deciding factor. His performance failed to ‘catch on’ because of one thing only: Context. It was the stage of the experiment that determined the perceived value of the virtuoso’s performance, and whether we choose to give it attention or not. Absorb the beauty and applaud, or ignore and rush past it.

How context builds value

Dan Ariely, Author of Predictably Irrational has scientifically explored how context impacts perceived value. In this book he explains how the same eight dollars is perceived as being worthy of a substantial investment (in time) to being worth nothing at all. When these 8 dollars are saved on a 18 dollar pen, we’re happy to drive that extra 20 minutes to the store to get it, but when we can save the same 8 dollars on a $448 suit, most of us won’t drive that extra mile.

He explains this behaviour by the way our mind works. It quite lazily follows a pattern and navigates by context. 8 dollars in the context of 18 is quite a substantial amount. 8 dollars in the context of 448 dollar isn’t, hence we are not stimulated to take action. An artist in a subway follows the path of the mediocre street performances and tells our mind to keep on walking. To prioritize getting somewhere above witnessing ‘America’s best violinist’ for free, or simply appreciating the beautiful music. (And vice versa, could a mediocre violinist also reap a standing ovation for his fiddling when performing at the Boston Theatre?).

Ariely argues context is to provide a stage. A platform to stage your idea instead of letting it float into nothingness. Nothingness doesn’t guide us, it makes decision making harder or leaves it wide open to the observers own interpretations. Context is a way to determine perspective and perception, and follow it through to the benefits of implementation.

So with every idea you need to ‘sell’ for adoption or implementation consider its context. Context can be found in any of the following elements:

• The Story: Describe the sequential events preceding and following your idea
• The Framework: Describe the processes that are being affected by your idea
• The Individual: Describe the lives of the persons who are being influenced by your idea
• The Heart: Describe the emotions involved with your idea
• The Proximity: Where is your idea in relation to other, alternative ideas

The better you illustrate the context in these paths, the better you do at building your stage: A metro Subway at rush hour or the Boston Theatre at Saturday night.

Context, context, context

The video below starts out with a guy dancing somewhat extravagantly and alone. At the beginning he is a loner, a nutter even maybe, but as soon as someone joins him (0:30) in his extravagant dance they become an act. When a the third person joins the dance (0:53) it makes them a movement. The perception changes with the context, and the crowd that follows makes him a leader and main topic of a world wide viral video:

The person or his dance never changed, but in perception he goes from loner to leader.

So the the next time you have your brilliant insight, your Great Idea, remember it is the context that provides its value. It’s truly remarkable to see the time people spend on getting the idea versus the time to present it within the right context. How do you build your stage? Do you play at the Washington DC Subway station, or perform at the Boston Theatre?

In order to stimulate creative and constructive behavior that will get some real results, I often use a 10 to 15 minutes warming-up to break the ice and get the creative juices flowing. These creative warming-ups have several purposes:

First of all we do warm-ups to settle everyone into a mindset where they leave the realm of logical, linear thinking and can freely offer ideas that might seem unlogical. We have to learn that thinking unconventional thoughts is not only allowed in a brainstorm, it is actually encouraged. Warm-ups can do so by specifically rewarding unconventional thinking.

The second reason is to give everyone a chance to spot and correct early violations of the ’10 commandments of Brainstorming’. Most essentially people who criticize the ideas of other people. The warm up also allows the facilitator to slip into the role of discussion leader (which is especially good if he or she is not usually the one in charge within the group of participants) and feel confidant about pointing out to people they should be constructive and postpone feedback and criticism untill after the brainstorm.

Third and last reason we use the warming ups is to learn to build on each-others ideas. We have a tendency to think others ‘own’ the idea the offered in a brainstorm and it would be ‘cheap’ or ‘uncreative’ to build on those ideas, while in fact, this is the very nature of a brainstorm.

On to the Icebreaking!

The following 12 techniques are akin to play, and may seem a little childish at times. But it’s part of the warm-up function to get over that restricting self-censoring feeling that tell you you shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy the creative process of problem solving.

1. Bring a random object into the brainstorm and ask for alternative products that could be made with it if it was bigger/smaller.
2. Lateral Puzzles such as: A man walks into a bar, and asks for a glass of water. The bartender pulls a gun on him at which the man replies with ‘thank you’ and walks outside. The participants can ask questions that can only be answered with yes or no, until the situation can be explained logically: The man had the hick-ups. (look here for a nearly endless archive of Lateral Puzzles)
3. Word association game. Name a word, the person sitting next to you says the first word he or she associates with the word. Repeat untill the ‘word’ comes back to you. List the first and the last word associated and try to think of a logical scenario connecting the two.
4. Randomization: Every participant has to write down an activity and an object, then passes the activity to the right, and the object to the left. Then have each participants explain how their new combination would still make sense.
5. Roleplay: In-act a scenario related to the topic of the brainstorm – appoint different roles for each participant and take them through the scenario.
6. Electro Powered Something. Take an every day object and ask how it could be improved using batteries. (i.e. a book, a bottle, a cup).
7. Round table story: Start off with a small story introduction, then aks the participants to continue the story, one sentence at a time.
8. Ask the participants ‘What if our company/brand is an object, what kind of object would it be and why?’
9. A word game of opposites. Name a word, then all participants have to think of opposites until at least 3 opposites have been listed, before moving on to the next word.
10. Try solving a huge topic (such as world hunger) using a random object within the room.
11. Play Pictionary. One person uses the whiteboard to start drawing something abstract such as a movie, a play, a song or a brand.
12. Pick a small number of famous people, and an equal amount of different colors, then ask the participants to match a color to a person.

Of course there’s lots of variations possible – in general there’s 3 rules for a good warm-up excersize:

• Keep the warm-up unrelated to the main brainstorm. Part of the goal of the warm up is to teach the participants every idea has equal value. With the warm=up being to involved in the main brainstorm, there is a chance people feel reluctant to express themselves.
• There should be no right or wrong ideas. For instance solving puzzles should not be about the result but about the process of solving them. Different thinking should be encouraged, and ‘one solution challenges’ tend to force simular thinking.
• Use randomization and play. Dice, a deck of cards, random objects or rotating ideas such as warm-up number 4 challenge the participants to think outside of traditional, predictable patterns, and force them to think creatively. This will be of great help when you want to facilitate lateral leaps in the real brainstorm.

And most important of all – don’t forget you’re allowed to enjoy this part. Large Innovation firms have recognised the relation between play and creative productivity, and my experiences have been no different. So have fun and happy brainstorming!

Eventually there will be ideas that are neither original nor relevant (relevant meaning the idea is an effective solution to the problem), relevant and original, or just one of either. In general this divides the pile of ideas into good, bad and Great Ideas.

The Bad

You might have heard of the expression “there are no bad ideas” – just as the ‘there are no dumb questions’ cliche. This notion however, is not so much about the quality of the idea being offered itself, but more about postponing judgment during the phase of divergence (generation lots of ideas) in a brainstorm session for example. When evaluating ideas the ‘no bad idea’ rule no longer applies, and is in fact a necessary part of convergence, in working towards a set of solutions we think are valuable, effective solutions to the problem at hand. The mistake is however, to see bad ideas as ‘worthless’ or ‘failures’.

When evaluating ideas, I see a bad idea as an idea with obvious, relevant flaws in providing a solution at hand.

As said, this does not mean the idea is therefor worthless, and should not be investigated. As proven by the famous story of Edison, who needed 999 ‘bad ideas’ to get to his one great idea. If her had discarded these ideas instantly as failures, he’d never have gotten to the one light bulb that did work. Or in his own words: I didn’t fail 999 times, I just found 999 ways that didn’t work.

Bad Ideas can be a great source of inspiration especially because they are so ‘off- base’. They missed the target, are unlogical or took a ‘wrong turn’ in addressing or interpreting the problem. But these ‘wrong turns’ can easily inspire good ideas by going into the opposite direction, or help re-evaluate the problem itself.

The good and the Great Idea

But most of your ideas will be actually be ‘good ideas’. Ideas that at first glance connect with the problem in a meaningful way (thus have relevance). But relevance is not all that is needed for a Great Idea. ‘Good’ is what you get when you deliver what was expected. Good won’t get you talked about, good won’t get you noticed, and creates a satisfied customer, not an enthusiastic customer.

In the evaluation phase there’s a new opportunity for ideas to connect. The flaws of bad ideas expose opportunities for new good ideas. Good ideas can be found complimentary to each other, and by combining good ideas from different fields, one creates originality. A combination of both relevance and originality creates the creative solutions that go beyond expectations: The Great Ideas.

The perfect idea

There is just one more ‘label’ in the idea evaluation phase of ideation that deserves some special attention. This is the perfect idea. A label of ‘perfection’ is rarely a good thing in ideation. Perfection specifically implies the idea can not be improved.

But perfection is rarely, if not never, objective. ‘Your perfect’ does not have to be ‘my’ perfect. And by ‘my’ I mean your client, your boss, your end-user, your audience.  Is perfect the highest amount of profit your idea generates at all cost, or the highest amount of people that like your design, the amount of exposure it generates, a combination of factors?

Perfect is a state of mind. It’s an attitude towards alternative views that doesn’t belong in the ideation process of the Creative Thinker. Even the mere hint of a ‘perfect solution’ can seriously harm your creative thinking – when ideation turns into a linear search for the ‘holy grail’, ruthlessly excluding opposing views that are a necessary component of any truly Great Idea.

So when evaluating ideas – treat the ‘bad ideas’ with special care, explore their trains of thought and define their shortcomings. Be wary of accepting good ideas too quickly. Good might seem satisfactory, but satisfactory is a long way from that feeling every creative wants to inspire. Let the concepts of your good ideas connect, and see where Great Ideas start to form – going beyond expectation, and having a healthy mix of relevance and originality. Last, be wary of ‘perfect ideas’ – the kind of idea that makes you blind or deaf to other ideas and different opinions. Any idea can be improved, any idea is open to interpretation – don’t close your eyes and ears for valuable feedback and be open to re-evaluation of your ideas.

But people aren’t perfect, and therefore perfect hypothetical scenario’s aren’t perfect. Most of the time, ideas don’t start flowing freely through this creative space. Brainstorm magic doesn’t automatically happen, and even the best sources of inspiration can find fierce opposition making it difficult to create those Great Ideas.

The problem is most of these creative spaces don’t start out empty. People don’t come to a brainstorm session without presumptions or pre-made solutions they’ve already made up their minds about. You don’t start without presumptions about a problem and its solution.

These assumptions and ideas are the elephants. The elephants can be identified by 4 factors:

1. They’re big and heavy crowding up the room, blocking the flow of ideas
2. They trample any new ideas that do slip past
3. They remember everything, clinging to the ways of yesterday
4. They’re not easy to get rid of

Getting rid of the elephants

When addressing a problem, it’s important to get rid of the elephants first. These heavy weight ideas that linger in the back of your mind, or your brainstorm attendees will become the lens through which one will see the ideas of others: Compatible or not compatible, instead of being able to look at ideas objectively, and see them as individual sources of inspiration.

The elephants won’t leave easy however, in fact, it’s safe to say they will never completely leave at all. We all look at things a certain way, and have assumptions about things, which is in fact our contribution, not a handicap in ideation. But in order to avoid the elephants wandering around and trampling new ideas, just line them up nicely and park them outside for a moment.

In practice, I find one of the most successful ways to get rid of the elephants is to just ask for these heavy weight ideas up front. Present the problem, then ask yourself or the participants what you/they think is the ‘big issue’ – the one thing that needs to get solved in order to create an effective solution. These ‘big issues’ represent perception. Then ask for their solution to the ‘big issue’ – these are the elephants based on individual assumptions.

List the elephant(s) and acknowledge them as valid suggestions. This will stop the elephants trying to trample new ideas that endanger them, because they’ve already been acknowledged. Furthermore, identifying the assumptions at this early stage could be a way to fuel the brainstorm or ideation process later on. The assumptions often represent fundamentals that follow ‘the way it’s always been done’, and therefore would be ‘foolish to question’. But part of a brainstorm is to question the way things have been done. It’s essential in order to create room for new ideas.

In summary:

1. Realize your ideation process is always hampered by your own or others assumptions
2. Assumptions kill or hinder new, creative ideas
3. Locate these assumptions
4. Use the assumptions to ask questions about the way things have been done

A creative suggestion is found in ancient Greece, where they believed separate entities such as the Muses or Genius’ are responsible for our ability to be creative. Invisible to the eye, but always helping out by whispering new and original thoughts into the ears of their protégé’s. This romantic interpretation of creativity is presented beautifully in this presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert.

But inspiring as the notion of mythical creatures helping us with our ideas might be, the goal of Crinid is to make creativity more tangible, so we can learn and grow in our ability to create Great Ideas. And as creativity is such an important factor of a Great Idea, we should take a look at some of the alternative and more tangible theories on creativity.

We start our exploration inside the machine that I think is still responsible for our own ideas – the human mind.

The human mind

At its most basic level, our brain is responsible for processing impulses from outside (input), evaluate the observations, then create a reaction (a thought or physical action – the output). Our brain is very effective at processing the input and is able to make these decisions in split seconds. This is because rather than looking at each occurrence of an event as an individual event, we have the ability to recognize this event, and respond in a way we did to the previous occurrences of a comparable event by following a set of global rules rather than instructions for the individual occurrence of the event.

In other words, our brain recognizes patterns. For example. when we see a car speeding towards us, we quickly make a prediction of what is likely to happen if the situation remains unaltered. We do this by lining up things we’ve been taught, such as the theory of collision (fast moving object meets another object). Then our brain recognizes the undesirable but probably outcome of the unaltered event, so it tells our limbs to change the situation by moving out of the way. A solution we think is most likely to work based on those same patterns.

A pattern following a set of rules

A pattern can be defined as a set of rules that can be used repeatedly. The pattern above this text has the following rules:
1. Every red square should be followed by a green triangle.
2. Every green triangle should be followed by a blue star
3. Every blue star should be followed by a red square

Other patterns our brain uses very frequently are language, grammar, mathematics, instinct and probably even our well-being (happiness) is largely based on patterns. Our ability to process information to predict a probable outcome and create output (ideas and actions) all based on a set of rules somewhere in our brain (a pattern).

The reason we use these patterns is because they are time-efficient. When I would ask you to tell me the color of the 300th symbol in the pattern above, you wouldn’t need to draw out 300 symbols in order to find out. You use the pattern, and will quickly be able to tell me that it’s likely to be a blue star (because 300 is just 100 repeats of the pattern, and at the end of every pattern there is a blue star.)
The alternative to patterns, is having to learn every single word combination possible in order for form a sentence. Or every number conceivable in order to use it. No one ever taught you 19.915 follows 19.914, but when asked you know this using a pattern called counting.

As we get older, our brain gets more efficient in using these patterns. As humans we even start to prefer one pattern over another. These are the patterns that shape our personality after a loop of feeling safe with a certain pattern because you’ve used it before, and using a pattern because you feel safe with it. Some patterns are widely adopted and become known as ‘common sense’. Patterns shapes us into who we are and what we do in certain situations. This is the self-regulating system of our brain.

The above is a rough sketch of how the mind works: processing information and shaping our observations into ideas and actions by predictions through patterns. But there’s a real paradox here when we look at how this self regulating system affects our ability to be creative.

Creativity and the Lateral Leap

As we’ve seen, the sole purpose of patterns is to predict highly probable outcomes. These predictions determine our actions accordingly. If a probable prediction is likely to have a negative effect on us, our brain starts to correct this process. If the probable prediction is likely to be positive, we work towards obtaining it. The result of ‘processing by pattern’ is per definition a predictable outcome. But the problem in the context of creativity with this is: predictable is exactly the opposite of creative.

Creativity is about new, original ideas and thoughts that somehow have relevance to a problem, but this is not obvious. Obvious solutions are never creative solutions. Or as Sir Ken Robinson put it:

One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense. ~Sir Ken Robinson, author of ‘The element, How finding your passion changes everything’

This is why creativity seems so intangible. Why we have trouble defining and repeating the success of creative ideas. It doesn’t obey the rules of our pattern oriented thinking. The process of creativity requires a radically different approach than our regular, common sense thinking.

Most of the above has been researched and analyzed by far greater specialists on the mind than me. One of which is Edward de Bono, one of the modern guru’s on creativity and ideation. He saw the pattern-based, self regulating system of the mind and wondered how we could use this to start making sense of creativity. Where does it hide if not in the patterns of our mind. In his best-selling book ‘Lateral Thinking’ de Bono introduces his thinking framework, called Lateral Thinking, that introduces the first steps into understanding the process of creative idea generation.

Out of this book the following is my take on altering our way of usual idea generation in order to break our patterns: The Lateral Leap.
The Lateral Leap is the process of consciously working on creative solutions, by effectively being aware of patterns, avoiding the use of our regular, pattern oriented thinking and re-arranging information differently to create truly new, relevant and original ideas.

The Lateral Leap in 3 steps

The following three steps illustrate a path of creating Lateral Leaps by trying to break and re-structure existing patterns, and with that provide an opportunity to create new, creative ideas.

1. Recognize and identify assumptions

The first and most essential thing to realize when dealing with a problem is the assumptions you have about the situation. Lateral Leaping is not so much about whether these assumptions are right or wrong, but more with our tendency to treat these assumptions as objective truths. Things that cannot, or should not be changed. Before we can make the Lateral Leap, we must first rid ourselves of such assumptions.

Assumptions are usually non-existing rules that handicap our ability to generate new ideas, and help us slide along pre-existing patterns in our mind. So the first step towards the Lateral Leap is exposing these assumptions and turning them into questions.

To illustrate these patterns I always do one test that requires the students/participants to draw as many objects possible in a short amount of time, and give them a few examples. After the time has passed, I ask how many of the participants used the given examples. Usually 9 out of 10 didn’t, even though those where 4 ‘free’ ones, and I never stated you could not use them. It was presumed – handicapping their ability to get the most objects done within the given amount of time.

2. Explore alternatives

Once we’ve dealt with our assumptions we are ready to start generating ideas. Traditional ideation is mostly concerned about finding that one Great Idea, and move on from there. The generation of ideas in Lateral Leaping is not as much about creating individual solutions, but more about generating a number of different approaches, insights and ideas with as much variation as possible.

Just as in regular Ideation through brainstorming for instance, it’s important to postpone judgment. Don’t evaluate the alternative solutions, in this phase of Lateral Leaping we’re only concerned with finding as many different ‘angles’ as possible. It’s perfectly possible (in fact, very probable) these individual solutions/alternatives are the result of pattern-oriented thinking, but the collective of ideas is the foundation of our Lateral Leap into creative ideas.

To generate these ‘solutions from different angles’ we need to look beyond the obvious. Lateral Leaping relies on exploring for the sake of exploring, and not necessarily for the sake of finding. Some paths may lead nowhere, some paths may offer flawed or partial solutions. In this phase all findings are relevant however.

To go beyond the obvious, we need to first consider the obvious, then think of alternatives. The problem of building a bridge might at first seem a building problem dealing with architecture, landscaping and safety. Going beyond the obvious is exploring the fields of biology, astronomy or 20th century expressionists and look for solutions to the same problem.

In this phase, quantity and variation are preferred over quality.

3. Create connections between different fields

The convergent phase of the Lateral Leap is the leap itself. Jumping from one field into an apparently unrelated field. Start to connect the generated alternatives and look as their individual parts, rather than to see them as complete solutions. This way we start breaking down the existing patterns that might have created the pool of solutuins, and start rearranging the individual information into new, original solutions.

One of the most effective ways to visualize these Lateral Leaps between fields is to use a mindmap. A mindmap naturally connects and illustrates pattern oriented thinking, constantly drawing relations between pieces of information. But a mindmap tends to go in different directions, indicating clear separations in their context even though they all relate back to the problem at the center.

By seeking connections between two fields that seem the furthest away from eachother (left lower corner to upper right corner) you force yourself to explore new fields for relevant solutions, that go beyond our usual, predictable, pattern based solutions.

The 6 principles of Great Ideas show the key qualities of ideas made to survive. Ideas that get adopted and cared for by your consumers, clients and/or key decision makers.

Simple

Simplicity is finding the core of your idea. The ‘what does it do and what’s in it for me’ of an idea. Design thinking is particularly effective in this part because designers know they made a great design when there’s nothing left to add, or remove from it. This is the required ‘simplicity’ of a great idea.

Unexpected

When people expect your idea, or ‘see it coming’ it loses its ability to stick. It should make sense the moment they hear it, but not before. There should be an element of surprise, mystery or teasing to grab the attention and interest. This is the biggest chunk of the creativity factor’ of an idea.

Concrete

Being concrete is about being understood and remembered. Being vague will lead to confusion, resilience and eventually the idea won’t make much sense without you there to explain it. A great way to make people understand is to make them experience it – prototyping or visualizing are the obvious tools to be more concrete about your idea.

Credible

Helping people believe, and take away suspicion is essential to the adoption of an idea. When you are an authority in your field you will be believed, when you are not – make sure you generate credibility by good research, facts, other authorities and anti-authorities. Building trust is essential, otherwise your Great Idea could just become one of those ‘too good to be true’ ideas.

Emotional

In order to find support for your Great Idea, you need to make people care. Find out what they care about, play on the irrational needs of people such as status, recognition, a need to connect, share or experience emotions.

Stories

Stories summarize all of the above in an effective pitch. Stories are case studies and often exciting events that allows the listener to become part of the experience (and more importantly: the benefits) of your idea. A story is the fastest route into someone’s memory, and the easiest way to convey a lot of extra detail without having spell them out.

Ideas that Stick

In short, first you need to find a way to communicate the ‘what does it do’ (1. simplicity), secondly is the level of creativeness – has it been done before, is it obvious, is it relevant (2. Unexpected)? Thirdly you need to make people understand, and remember your idea by making them experience the idea through prototyping or visualization for instance (3. Concrete).

Next up us the credibility. You need to be trusted as much as the quality of the idea (4. Credible). Then you need to connect to the things they care about – the ‘why should I care?’ (5. Emotional) and last is the pitch, gather the previous factors in a consistent and authentic story that will sell your idea (6. Story).

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

If you want to know more about the 6 Principles of great ideas, I highly recommend reading the book ‘Made to Stick – why some ideas survive and others die’ by Chip & Dan Heath, or follow their blog.

Sometimes this is a smooth process. If one of the ideas is already a combination of ideas from various people on your team it usually doesn’t take long to get everyone enthusiastic about it. It becomes more difficult when individuals won’t accept an alternative to their own solution. This can become a real problem when the reasons why the idea doesn’t get accepted remain unclear.

The following video is bound to look familiar to most of you working in the creative industry. Though situated in the creative team VS client relation, it just as easily applies to a creative team working on a project and deciding which idea to develop:

The video above illustrates various hidden obstacles towards accepting an idea perfectly. The presumptions of a person and their ideas get in the way of getting an idea accepted, or even getting the revisions to get the idea accepted:

• The older ‘man with the money’ questions the experience of the young presenters. Their enthusiasm is seen as childish and unrealistic (over-optimistic).
• The art director is seen as somewhat pretentious and unpractical, only pushing his own artistic ideas instead of those of the company.
• The reviewing committee is seen as hopelessly conservative, fearful or more concerned with their personal agenda.

Rational arguments and irrational assumptions

In the situation above the idea is no longer reviewed on rational arguments. The acceptance of the offered marketing concepts depends almost entirely on the unspoken presumptions about the individuals in the team, and the consequences that would have for the quality of their ideas.

This becomes a problem when no one expresses their real concerns, and instead both parties try to please each other and make up fallacies. Or at the very least produce arguments that are not at the heart of their issue with the ideas offered. The result is both parties have no chance of getting closer to each other, and the next series of concepts is likely to be rejected for the same hidden reasons.

To avoid these situations whenever your team has trouble getting behind a single idea, it’s essential to remove the irrational part from the discussion by exposing these hidden obstacles towards accepting an idea.

The Negative Braindump

When to use the Negative Braindump: Use this technique when it’s unclear why an idea doesn’t get accepted by the team. Without full understanding by the participants the concept will lack consistency and clarity in its execution.

Participants, Duration & Preparation: The number of participants can be any number of team members. The brainstorm itself is fast, no more than 3 minutes per idea. In preparation the brief objectives have to be clear, and each idea has to be presented briefly.

The method

1. The idea becomes the topic of your brainstorm. If there is more than one idea being considered, make separate brainstorms for each idea.
2. All participants are asked to write down a list 25 reasons why this idea could fail to meet the briefing objective within 3 minutes.
3. Gather up the lists and review them with the team.

How it works

By asking for such a high number of reasons, and such a limited amount of time, the participants will start writing down the first ideas that come to mind. Even if he starts to write down the fallacies, with the high amount of demanded reasons the participant will feel compelled to start writing down the hidden grievances as time passes.

Furthermore, when asking the participants to write down the arguments we remove the element of spoken conversation. And with that the risk of having your opinions rejected right away, nuanced by words, working relations or peer pressure. This makes this brainstorm an open invitation to really express your thoughts.

Last, the lists with possible issues create a clear and un-nuanced view interpretation of the brief by the participant. This is an opportunity to see if there are misunderstandings in the original brief that didn’t get expressed before.

In summary, the Negative Brainstorm attempts to expose hidden objections to a problem, turn them into rational arguments and evaluate them openly. Remember that just because the objections can be hidden, it doesn’t make them any less valid than the expressed opinions.

One of the pillars of the insights and methods Crinid will present is ‘the anatomy of the idea’. Its my take on the concept of ‘an idea’. What makes a ‘good’ idea and how can we be more in control of creating these great ideas? How can we make the process of ideation more tangible, train it and generally become better creative thinkers?

I captured an introduction to the concept of ‘the idea’ in a short presentation called the ‘Anatomy of the idea’. This presentation looks into each individual part of an idea, and tries to capture the process of inspiration: Our creative ability to perceive and generate ideas based on sensory ‘input’. Though the presentation has been up in our about page for a while now, I wanted to repost it here to mark the ’300 views within 24 hours on slideshare.com‘ and being a ‘featured presentation‘ on their homepage.

Oh, and should you feel inspired by this presentation, feel free to use the concept for your own presentations or share the entire thing on your website

The goal of this article is to explore & explain the actual how and why of ‘the brainstorm’. How does it work and why is it such an effective method? For the conditions and rules of conducting a brainstorm see one of the previous articles: ‘The 10 commandments of brainstorming’.

Waves of inspiration

The goal of every brainstorm is to generate creative, new solutions to a problem. Ideally you have gathered a team of 4 to 10 people to participate in the brainstorm. You’ve appointed a reporter, a leader and the participants and are ready to go.

But where do you start, wand what exactly constitutes as a good brainstorm?How do you generate those truly remarkable ideas?

A common mistake is to dive right into the brainstorm. Everyone says what they think of first until all ideas are dried up, then call it a day. The brainstorms conducted this way are not likely to generate any truly original and constructive ideas.

It’s essential to know ideas come to you in waves. Especially within a brainstorm where the real advantage is the ability to get inspired by each other’s ideas. Mix up concepts and contexts and take ideas to new levels. Everyone generates ideas, and everyone can mix and match or add their own interpretations to those ideas to create new concepts. Below is a visual representation of these waves, and incremental creativeness of its 3 participants during a brainstorm session.

The warm-up

In the warming up you do a ‘mini-brainstorm’ to get ready for ‘the real deal’. A simple question like ‘give me ideas to use a paperclip on a deserted island’ will help spark the process if idea generation and give the participants enough time to get used to sharing their ideas.

It’s also an opportunity to spot participants that give feedback on the ideas of others, and remind them this is not a discussion but about quantity.

After the warming up, present the topic of the brainstorm as clear as possible, and start the timer.

Wave 1: The Braindump

The first ‘wave’ of idea generation within the brainstorm is ‘the braindump’. All participants speak their mind freely, usually offering ideas from within their own experiences based on similar challenges as that of the topic of the brainstorm. These are often obvious ideas but essential to the progress of the brainstorm.

After a while usually the frequency of ideas offered starts to slow down. The participants have put their ideas out there. This marks the end of the first wave. Give the reporter time to catch up with the notes, and list the ideas so far.

Wave 2: Divergent Thinking

When the ideas get read back to the participants, this will serve as inspiration for the second wave. This is where the real process of divergent thinking starts. Opening up to the ideas of others, and making variations and combinations with their own. Creating mixed concepts and a new level of originality.

Ideas in the second wave are the result of a combination of experiences instead of a single context. In this phase most ideas focus on concepts, the links between ideas.

Wave 3: Creative Ideation

The final phase is the true Creative Ideation: The new creative ideas and concepts generated in the second wave become inspiration for actual solutions. Even though there should be no process of conscious filtering, the more inspiring ideas will naturally generate more new branches of ideas – resulting in relevant and original answers to the problem.

In summary:

• 1st wave: List of individual ideas
• 2nd wave: The connections between 1st wave ideas generate new concepts
• 3rd wave: The 2nd wave ideas and concepts get converted into original, new solutions

What’s next?

After a while even the third phase will lose its momentum – either resulting in less relevant, off-topic ideas, repetition or no more new ideas. Several brainstorming techniques can be employed to stretch out these waves and generate more accurate ideas. But at some point, you run out of potentially valuable ideas and are just wasting time.

When this happens, it is time to evaluate, pick out the really good ideas and push the project ahead.

Creating a real, solid solution from the large pile of ideas generated by the brainstorm is called ‘convergent thinking’. You evaluate each idea not just on its level of creativity, but also apply other factors such as budget, time, previous experiences with the client et cetera.

There are several pitfalls when it comes to this process of idea evaluation so I decided to dedicate an entire article to convergent thinking (to be published later this month). If you don’t want to miss it – why not sign up to our updates per email or RSS?