Three Incredibly Effective Techniques for Creative Thinking

In my last blog post, “The Hannibal Barca Approach to Reaching Your Goals”, I promised you that in my next post I would list and explain some techniques for creative thinking you can start applying right away to generate alternative solutions when faced with a situation in which you need to respond creatively.  So, here they are: 3 incredibly effective creative thinking techniques that will help you to solve problems and generate ideas.

The first of these creative techniques is derived from the work of the world-acclaimed creativity expert, Michael Michalko, author of “Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques” and “Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius”, as well as the creator of Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck.

As an officer in the United States Army, Michael organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics to collect and categorize all known creative-thinking methods. His team applied those methods to many different situations and produced a variety of breakthrough ideas, as well as creative solutions to problems.  After leaving the military, Michael facilitated CIA think tanks using his creative thinking techniques.   Out of Michael’s many creativite thinking techniques, I’m going to share with you “Leonardo da Vinci’s Idea Box”.

First Creative Thinking Technique: Leonardo da Vinci’s Idea Box

I’m a big fan of Leonardo da Vinci (read about my “Leonardo da Vinci Notebook” here) and the Idea Box Technique is a fantastic way to generate ideas. Leonardo’s notebooks were filled with observations, sketches of inventions he was working on, as well as incredible drawings.

In order to create unique, captivating faces, he would list all of the different variations he had observed of facial characteristics–including eyes, noses, lips, the shape of the face, the chin, the ears–as well as facial expressions, and he would then combine them to create thousands of different faces. Leonardo would create a matrix of elements, such as the one below:

There are literally thousands of possible combinations of the listed features, and each combination is a brand new creation. You can create a matrix like the one above for any situation. Simply analyze the structure of your subject and then separate the major parameters–that is, its characteristics, elements, variables, and so on–list variations for each parameter, and combine them. By coming up with many different variations you generate many different ideas which you can then analyze in order to determine which one will work for you.

Choose as many parameters as you want, and then come up with as many variations for each parameter as you can think of. To give you an estimate of the amount of ideas you can come up with, a box with ten parameters, each of which has ten variations, produces 10 billion combinations of the parameters and the variations.

Michael provides the following example to illustrate how the Leonardo da Vinci Idea Box can be used in a business setting: A car-wash owner wanted to find an idea for a new market or new market extension. He analyzed the activity of “product washing” and decided to work with four parameters: washing method, products washed, equipment used, and other products sold. He came up with the following matrix:

Once he had created the matrix he randomly chose one or more variables from each parameter, and connected them to form a new business. Here’s the one he thought would be the most viable for a new business: Self + Dogs + Brushes + Dryers + Stalls + Sprayers + Related Products.

The new business he created was a self-service dog wash. The dog wash he set up has waist-high tubs in which the dogs are placed and then the owners proceed to spray them, scrub them with brushes provided by the wash, shampoo them and blow dry them. In addition to the wash, he also sells products such as dog shampoos and conditioners. Pet owners now wash their dogs while their car is being washed in the full-service car wash.

This matrix can be applied to anything. For those of you writing a novel, here’s a “Novel Emergency Matrix “ to help you when you’re facing writer’s block (it’s the very last item on the list). If you’re not sure how to take your blog to the next level, list all the different parameters for a blog–marketing, subject-matter, freebies, theme, length of posts, images, posting frequency, monetization strategies, and so on–come up with as many variables as you can for each one, and then combine them to create a new and innovative business model for your blog.  The Leonardo da Vinci idea box is one of the most useful and practical creative thinking techniques there is.

Second Technique for Creative Thinking: Connect Random Ideas

There are many different variations of the “Connect Random Ideas” Technique.   One alternative is to take a piece of paper and create two columns, Column A and Column B. Now list 10 random words in column A, and 10 random words in column B. You can find random words by looking around you and choosing objects at random, or you can use a random word generator by clicking here. Here’s an example of words chosen at random:

So, for example, you could combine “sunscreen lotion” from Column A with “insect repellent” from Column B and come up with a sunscreen lotion that also acts as an insect repellent.  As an aside, someone came up with a gourmet hot sauce that you spray on your meat while grilling or barbecuing, and which can also be used as a garden spray to protect your roses, garden vegetables, and so on from animals. Don’t believe me? Here it is.

Other variations of these technique are the following:

• Taking Pictures is a technique suggested in the book “Instant Creativity: Simple Techniques to Ignite Innovation & Problem Solving” written by Brian Clegg and Paul Birch. Go outside and take pictures of anything that catches your interest without stopping to analyze why you’re taking the picture.  Now relate each picture to the problem that you’re trying to solve and come up with any association that occurs to you. Use that association for idea generation.
• In my blog post, “Four Outstanding Thoughts on Innovation”, I wrote about the company that constantly had to send out repair crews to fix telephone wires broken by ice on the lines. They chose a random word, “bear”, and from there were able to generate a very practical solution: by using helicopters they could get the propellers to blow off the ice (for more details about this go read my post).

Third Technique for Creative Thinking: RoleStorming and Superhero Technique

RoleStorming is a variation of the brainstorming technique we all know and love. Basically, you take on a different identity, whether an invented persona or use someone you know. Assume that identity or refer to the fictitious person as “this person would suggest . . . ” This will allow you to come up with ideas that you normally would not feel comfortable suggesting, but which you can freely express by attributing them to someone else.

Superheroes is a technique in which participants pretend to be a fictional superheroe–such as Superman, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Batman, James Bond, Wonder Woman, Sherlock Holmes, and so on–and use their ‘super’ characteristics to trigger ideas. This will help you to think outside of the norm and, like the rolestorming technique, will allow you to express ideas that you would not normally express.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of creative thinking techniques you can use to help you generate ideas and come up with alternatives for solving problems. Basically, there are techniques for creative thinking that are expansive and “open” your mind, such as brainstorming, and there are creative thinking techniques that force your mind to focus, such as generating ideas by choosing a random word. I hope that the three  techniques for creative thinking I’ve described here are useful for you to create a long list of ideas to help you along the path toward achieving your goals and dreams.

(”I’d Love to Start Again and Get it Right”; courtesy of Thomas Hawk)

Related Posts:

• “Four Outstanding Thoughts on Innovation”
• “Thoughts to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing”
• “Thirty Ways to Increase Your Creativity”

Books I Recommend:

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition):  This book presents dozens of tools you can start using right away to generate ideas and stimulate creativity.  You will also gain an understanding of over 100 creativity techniques you can apply to resolve problems and come up with different alternatives to deal with diverse types of situations.
• Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius:  This book will show you how to use the thinking secrets of hundreds of history’s greatest thinkers, from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. Develop an “opportunity mindset”.
• Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck: This pack of brainstorming cards was developed to assist people in stimulating their creativity and fostering ideas.

Recommended Product:

Learn to meditate, increase your focus and concentration, boost your creativity, and augment your brain power with the Silva Life System.

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Tagged as: alternatives, creative techniques, Creativity, Generating ideas, Innovation, Michael Michalko