Disciplined Dreaming

Write a letter from the chairman of your company, dated one year in the future, explaining why your idea was such an enormous success.

“NAF”—novel, attractive, and feasible

Cranium created their own word: CHIFF (clever, high quality, innovative, friendly, and fun)

To avoid the influence of hierarchy or dominant team members in the idea selection process, try using the Poker Chip Method. In this case, every team member in the room receives ten poker chips (you can use pennies if no poker chips are handy). Write your top few ideas on separate sheets of paper and spread them out across the table. From there, each person gets to “vote” with his ten poker chips. A person could spread his chips over his favorite three ideas, for example. Or someone could “bet the farm” and put all her chips on her single favorite idea.

University of Texas at Arlington has developed a Group Creativity Lab under the direction of Professor Paul Paulus.5 In a fourteen-year study, Paulus staged and studied more than one thousand brainstorming sessions. What he discovered is that “Group brainstorm sessions often produce less and worse ideas than individual sessions because being in a group can be distracting.” He discovered that Brain Writing can generate as much as 40 percent more ideas than individual sessions alone.

The SCAMPER technique can take you right back to the limitless creativity you had in kindergarten.

The Eight Commandments of Ideation
I call these the Eight Commandments of Ideation,

He developed a technique—known as the Hemingway Bridge—to avoid this start-and-stop challenge.
Rather than ending a chapter and then beginning the next day with a blank page, Hemingway would write the first paragraph of the next chapter before ending his day's work. The next day, he had a head start. Having the initial thoughts already started on the page allowed him to pick up midstream rather than from a dead stop. In the evening, he would think about where the newly formed idea would evolve so that when he began work the next day, it was much easier for him to dive in and create great work without needing to push himself off from square one again.

The Wrong Answer
You are working to solve a challenge and find the right answer. So what better way to find that right answer than to begin by finding the wrong one?

The creative process need not be linear for either art or business. Try approaching creativity from different points in the work, and you may just uncover some hot new sparks, not to mention overcoming the fear of the blank page