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[Impact Roadmap] Creative-Thinking Tools
This post is intended to outline useful Creative-Thinking Tools you'll likely refer to many times throughout the Roadmap.
There is a separate post on Decision-Making Tools.
The following ideas are taken from The Thinking Shop and are available under a Creative Commons license.
Write a Clear Brief - Failing to provide a clear and compelling brief does not, contrary to popular opinion, ‘open up’ creativity. Use this briefing template or at least provide a clear objective in the form of a single simple sentence.
Force your internal critic to shut up by generating as many ideas as possible. Quantity over quality will help your mind to expand rather than contract. Set a stopwatch for 10 minutes to write down 10 ideas. Importantly, they don’t have to be good ideas.
Instead of writing ideas, simply start sketching relevant concepts. By activating your visual cortex you’ll open up new ways to think about things. Don’t try to solve the problem right away, just start moving the pencil.
The reason we have great ideas in the shower is that we’re not doing anything else. Use your time in the shower, on the train, during your run, or meditating in a sensory deprivation chamber to consider the brief.
Give yourself or your team a deadline to compile 101 ideas in a list. By having so many ideas you give yourself permission to have more bad ideas, which in turn opens you up to more good ideas.
Immerse yourself in research and visual references, then let your subconscious go to work. Sleep on it and give your mind time to synthesise. Try this before you start and/or between sessions.
Use random stimuli like reading out words from the dictionary to provoke a response, or try using the last letter of one word as the starting letter for another word. Free-associate words and concepts to spark connections.
Write your objective in a bubble in the middle of the page and branch out nested and associated ideas to discover new perspectives as stimuli. Try putting your mind map on the wall while brainstorming.
By flipping the perspective you can open up new insights. What’s the opposite of the problem or solution? What would be the worst idea? Who isn’t the target audience?
How would you solve the problem in the future or past? What about a different cultural context? How would aliens see things? Try 5 ideas in 5 minutes to generate different perspectives then pick 2 or 3 to ideate from.
Removing limitations means removing assumptions, which can result in novel perspectives and solutions. Imagine you have unlimited superpowers, budget, time, or technological capability to solve the problem. What would a god do?
Looking at extremes can bring insights into sharp relief. What would happen if you amplified the problem or solution? What if it was minuscule or all-consuming; what would a global response look like?
Creative breakthroughs often arise from challenging conventions. What assumptions have already been made? Could they be wrong, or shifted? What if the brief is too narrow? Too wide? Pretend to be your competitor.
Meta-brainstorm different perspectives and archetypes that might be relevant for your particular situation. For example, if you have a marketing problem you might suggest different kinds of customers and business stakeholders. Then generate ideas from their perspectives.
About 80% of the output tends to come from 20% of the input. How might we optimise by focussing on the most relevant factors? How can we design for the primary audience or most valuable outcome?
Define the base principles to reason more clearly. Question what’s actually fundamental to bring the problem (and solution) into sharper relief. What unnecessary assumptions are being made? What if we had to make everything from scratch?
As tribal creatures, we want validation before we act. How can we create and communicate social buy-in? Could the crowd itself contribute in some way? Is there a way to provide a social feedback loop, testimonials, or other social validation?
A critical mass is a self-sustaining chain reaction. What could we do to create a viral effect whereby the idea spreads itself? How might we make it remarkable or useful enough to become its own amplifier?
We value things that are in short supply. Is there a way to create demand or at least the perception of it? How might limitations be beneficial? If there isn’t a ready-made market or audience can we create one?
Consider the impartial perspective. We’re often blind to our own assumptions, and our perceptions are coloured by our insider understanding. What might someone with no knowledge or bias think?
Consider the flow-on effects: what might the consequences of the problem or solution entail? What are the variables at play? How might the family of your target audience react? How could time, complications, or feedback loops have influence?
Pretend you’ve already achieved success. What would the newspaper headline or article say? This will spur you to think of big, newsworthy ideas. Explaining how and why it worked so well forces you to consider the steps to success.
The creative process is iterative, and by getting to the minimum it can open us up to pivot in relevant and interesting ways. What’s the minimum needed to achieve the objective? What’s the most efficient, quickest, and cheapest option you can think of?
This technique is often used to get to the root of a problem, but it can also discover insights that lead to innovative thinking. Start with a problem or solution, then keep asking ‘why?’ to see where it leads you.
Write your problem or starting point at one end and the ideal outcome at the other. Now fill in the gaps to map out what needs to happen to bring your objective into reality. What steps will need to occur? How might they influence each other?
Simply start the thinking process with ‘What if?’ can elicit a creative response. Try saying it out loud or writing it down several times in a list to hack your brain to think differently. Build upon other ideas by challenging them with ‘what if’ scenarios.
Create four quadrants and list Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. S&W relate to internal factors while O&T tend to relate to external aspects. SWOT analyses are usually used for strategic evaluation, but they can also be used to provoke new ideas.
Go outside, to a bar for a few drinks, or to the top of a mountain and see how the change of environment changes your perspective. Many people find walking helpful for ideation and stimulus.
How could you combine two or more ideas, techniques, aspects, solutions, or problems? Try writing relevant keywords or ideas down on bits of paper then mashing them up randomly.
Use the room you’re in as a visual inspiration canvas by finding references to print and put up on the walls, along with your rough concepts, sketches, headlines, and so on. Try some image searches for related ideas and save the ones you like as stimuli.
Instead of solutions, brainstorm to generate problems. What other issues might need solving? Will there be flow-on effects that require different solutions? What’s a different way of thinking about the problem space?
Create a mind map star with six points for each of the classic analysis questions: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Note that the ‘why’ is the most likely to provide relevant insight, and that the ‘how’ can sometimes be a distraction.
Group brainstorming is often affected by social factors and confident voices thwarting more considered thinking. Familiarise yourself with common cognitive biases that can affect decision making, evaluation, and group dynamics at yourbias.is
Everyone writes an idea on a piece of paper. Pass your piece of paper clockwise, the next person builds on the idea. Repeat until everyone has contributed to each other’s ideas.
Our judgments are invariably shaped by our personal biases. So, it’s best to have discerning independent third parties evaluate anonymised ideas rather than a group vote.
Creative insights often arise from novel perspectives, so try to facilitate diverse group dynamics e.g. put engineers with designers, management with front-line staff, and so on.
Everyone brainstorms individually. The first two people present ideas to each other. A third person is invited into the room to present their ideas. Repeat until everyone has presented unaffected by others’ ideas. Finally, recap all ideas for the group.
Rather than verbal collaboration, use a cloud-based service like Google Docs with open sharing permissions so everyone can anonymously collaborate, comment, and build on each other’s ideas.
Each person writes or draws a single idea per sticky note and puts it up on the wall in a separate room. Take turns nominating your favourite idea that wasn’t your own (and hasn’t yet been nominated) and explain why.
Give each person in the group a role to play such as the customer, the rebel, the narrator, the joker, the sage, the CEO, the shareholder, the lunatic, etc. Then give a scenario involving the product, problem, or situation to role play
To start your collaborative brainstorming session, everyone writes or draws a few key concepts relating to the subject matter on sticky notes. Then put them up on the wall as a stimulus for further brainstorming.
I actually like a lot of these. I wish the forum had collapsible sections or bullet points so that curious readers could expand sections we wish to learn more about.