A Technique for Producing Ideas

I came across this book, it's full title is A Technique for Producing Ideas: The simple, five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!, by James Webb Young thanks to a reference on Twitter.

I ordered it last summer and have read it several times now.  It's a slender book and can easily be read in an hour.

What I like about it is that it reinforces much of what I've been reading (and watching) about creativity and passion by the likes of Steven Johnson, Sir Ken Robinson, Steve Jobs, Thomas Friedman, Jonah Lehrer, Seth Godin, and Don Tapscott.

The basic point of the book is the importance of training one's mind to see relationships.

I recall Dr. Drake telling us during my freshman year at NCTC that knowledge is really just the ability to form connections.  Knowledge, she said, is like a spider-web.  The more you know, the more you can connect and make sense of.

For some reason I never forgot.  And now it seems so true to me.

Webb, a former advertising man and teacher, refers to this same idea again and again.

"A fact is a chain, a link of knowledge."

"An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements."

To be more creative, Webb argues that one simply has to develop a speculative state of mind.  Be open to soaking everything up.  The more you soak up, the larger the supply of new ideas and concepts that you can then recombine to form a new idea.

What one wants to avoid is routine.  That leads to an unimaginative life.  When you're just a cob in the machine (to borrow from Godin), no thinking in necessary.  Thus, there's no soaking up of ideas and no supply to draw from.  You just show up and punch the clock and do your job.

That worked brilliantly for this country for about 60 years (1940-2000), but that's not the nature of the world we live in anymore.

I'm reminded of an example Thomas Friedman gave about this - if you owned a bar, you had your steady stream of customers who were always loyal to you simply because of the luck of location (the bar down the street for example or it was on the way home from work).  That worked well for a long time.

But it doesn't work well anymore.

Now, if you own a bar, and have the ability to not just get DirecTV to show NFL games (have you ever gone to a Buffalo Wild Wings on a Sunday afternoon?) well, you have a new creative way to bring in customers.

But that only works so well for one day a week for a specific stretch of the year.

To be more creative, you might not only show NFL games but you might also show rugby matches and sumo wrestling.  No longer will a bar owner just be able to survive because of the luck of location.

Webb has five steps to follow to generate creative ideas --

1.  Gather raw material - Webb states that this first stage is vital, and it's so simple we often totally neglect it, which is why many find it so hard to generate creative ideas.

2.  Mental digestion - Webb says here you are looking for a mental synthesis.  You're waiting for the ideas to be congested and recombined.

3.  Put it out of your mind - Drop the whole thinking process.  Put it out of your mind.  Give your mind a break.  If you just struggle over the process, it will just be counter productive.

4.  Out of nowhere - if you have followed the first three steps, the idea will come to you as if from nowhere.  This is why so many people talk about having ideas come to them while in the shower or while on a walk or while driving.  There is just enough going on to distract your conscious mind from the planning and thinking process.  Then - wham - the idea hits you.  This is personally true for me.  I usually have my best lesson ideas pop into my mind when I'm showering in the morning.

5.  The morning after - now it's time to take your new idea out into the real world.  Here I'm reminded of Sir Ken Robinson's definition of creativity, "An original idea that has value."  What value does a great idea have if it never gets put into place?

Think about it.  Review some of the good ideas you've had in the past year.  I bet they follow this five step process pretty closely.