Let’s begin with a small exercise.
Please invent a new product.
Yes, really, go ahead and invent a new product…
.
.
Stuck ha….?
.
.
I’ll tell you why.
Paradoxically, when a problem statement is too broad, our mind finds it quite difficult to recruit all its creative powers.
Scientific studies have proved time and again that we tend to become more creative in a constrained thinking environment.
I’ll let you see it for yourself.
Let’s see if we can come up with some cool ideas for novel shirts (it’s a pity I’m not a seamstress!).
Here are some first thoughts:
Have you ever seen a policeman giving a ticket to someone honking their car horn in a no-honking zone or at 2 am? In all of my 37 years I have seen (and gotten) speeding, parking, j-walking (etc.) tickets switching hands from the policeman’s to the felon’s. Not once have I seen a driver getting a ticket for miss-honking.
Now, this is, my friends - a problem. Not a “challenge”, not an “issue” and certainly not an “opportunity” but one big, annoying problem.
Continue reading ‘…and everything is honky dory’
So, how exactly are we killing ideas? Relax - We all carry the bug, and each of us has heard the voice of the naughty kid inside that pops up every time we hear a new idea and gets us to say: “What?! We’ve tried that idea already and it didn’t work!”
Even if we’re creative types, we sometimes can’t stop ourselves from uttering: “Yes, but it’ll never work.”
Even if we’re patient and open-minded managers, at some point we’re likely to find the following sentence escape from our mouths: “It doesn’t fit into our current set of priorities.”
We’re all murderers; okay, that’s not a nice word. We’re all idea-killers. Perhaps it’s better that way. Otherwise, we’d be drowning in a swamp of new ideas that don’t provide a sound basis from which we can progress .
Several years ago a friend of mine, who runs an Internet site selling wedding gifts, asked for some ideas to help him differentiate his site from the rest, and thus improve sales.
To find ideas, I decided to apply SIT’s Breaking Symmetry technique with the “wedding day” as the starting point.
One simple symmetry that came to my mind is the obvious fact that the husband and wife celebrate their wedding day at the same time.
This helped me come up with the virtual idea or pre-idea (something that is not an idea in itself, but triggers a thinking process that leads to an idea) of having some kind of wedding day that the husband and wife don’t celebrate on the same day.
Here is more or less my line of thought from there: Continue reading ‘“Happy Equality Day, darling”’
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