The magic words are : "In what ways might I ...?"
 |
| Michael Michalko, born in 1939, is one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world. As an officer in the U.S. Army, he organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods. His team applied these methods to various NATO military, political, and economic problems and produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems. After leaving military service, he was contracted by the CIA to facilitate think tanks using his creative—thinking techniques. |
Not in the book! You’re lucky you visited this post!
A catch-22 – you can’t get an agent because all “agents” only want to represent authors who have already been published and all publishers will only talk to agents. The answer: monitor the publishing trade magazines (keep your eyes open) and then write to a house that has just lost a publisher to a rival, telling them that the manuscript that Joe (who you’re not able to reach anymore) was very keen on is finally ready. The person in Joe’s place will give in to curiosity and demand to see it. And you get a deal!
Creative geniuses produce a rich variety of original ideas and solutions because in addition to their conventional way of thinking, they’ll look for different ways to think about problems. They deliberately change the way they think by provoking different patterns which incorporate random, chance and unrelated factors into their thinking process. These different thinking patterns enable them to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different.
Thomas Edison’s lab was a big barn with many worktables holding separate projects in progress. He would work on one project and then another. His workshop was designed to allow one project to infect a neighboring one, so that moves made in one could also be tried in an adjacent project. This method of working allowed him to consistently rethink the way he saw his projects.
In the same way, you can tackle multiple problems using a notebook. Work on two or more unrelated problems in parallel. When you’re stonewalled on one problem, move to the next. When you come up with ideas or moves that work for one problem, try the ideas or related ideas with the other problem as well.
Combining ideas to create more—and better—ideas will help your mind work to the peak of its creative efficiency. Try this strategy for combining ideas:
First, collect all your ideas and put them into two columns, column A and column B. Either list them on paper or write them on cards and put the cards into two piles or tape them onto the wall in two columns. Randomly connect one idea from column A and one idea from column B. Then try to combine the two into one idea. See how many viable combinations you can make.
Walt Disney came up with the idea of having his artists pin their drawings on the walls of the studio in sequence so he could see in a glance how far along the project was. Each scene was then used as a point around which a complete story could be told. The story was told on a wall covered with a special kind of board, hence the term “storyboard.”
Storyboarding quickly became a routine part of Disney’s planning procedure for both animated and live—action films. He could walk in at any time of the day or night and see progress on any given project at a glance.
Brainwriting. Horst Geschka and his associates at the Batelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, developed a variety of group creative-thinking techniques called “brainwriting.” In traditional brainstorming groups, people suggest ideas one at a time.
- First, discuss the problem to clarify it. Write the problem in a location visible to all group members
- Distribute three—by—five—inch index cards to each participant and instruct them to write their ideas on the cards, one idea per card. Where group brainstorming involves participants shouting ideas out loud, brainwriting has people generate ideas by silently writing them down. As participants complete a card, they pass it silently to the person on the right.
- Tell the group members to read the cards they are passed and to regard them as “stimulation cards.” Tell them to write down any new ideas inspired by the stimulation cards on blank cards and then pass them to the person on their right. Within a few minutes, several idea cards will be rotating around the table.
- After twenty to thirty minutes, collect all cards and have the group members tape them to a wall. The cards should be arranged into columns according to different categories of ideas, with a title card above each column. Eliminate the duplicates.
- Evaluate the ideas by giving each participant a packet of adhesive dots and have them place the dots on the ideas they like. They can allocate the dots in any manner desired, placing them all on one idea, one each on five different ideas, or any other combination.
Brainwriting ensures that the loudest voices don’t prevail, participants feel less pressure from managers and bosses, and ideas can’t be shot down as soon as they are offered.
Automobile designers at Mercedes-Benz had a large image board where interesting shapes and images were tacked on. One designer was enthralled with the shapes, textures, and colors of exotic fish. The designers became enthralled with the boxfish. Despite its boxy cube—shaped body, the designers discovered the boxfish is in fact a perfect example of an aerodynamic streamlined shape. The structural shape of the boxfish was adapted by the designers to create the efficiently designed DCX, which gets seventy to eighty-four miles per gallon.
There's got to be a bit of BS. Fact-checking with Google:
No, a Mercedes-Benz DCX does not typically get 70 mpg in real-world driving conditions. While the Mercedes-Benz Bionic Car concept was shown achieving 70 mpg in testing, this was a highly engineered concept car and not a production model. The most fuel-efficient Mercedes-Benz models today, like the CLA and C-Class, achieve around 36 highway mpg, according to Mercedes-Benz of Omaha.
(Let's give MM a break. He's pushing 90 :) (are they learning from the wrong people? VW's diesel emissions cheating?)
You might ask each participant to draw a sketch of their idea on how to solve the problem. Sketching ideas provides visual stimuli to spark your imagination.
During a rehearsal of Debussy’s La Mer, Arturo Toscanini found himself unable to describe the effect he wished from a particular passage. After a moment’s thought, he took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it high into the air. The orchestra, mesmerized, watched the slow, graceful descent of the silken square. Toscanini smiled with satisfaction as it finally settled on the floor. “There,” he said, “play it like that.”
Alex Osborne, an advertising executive in Buffalo, New York, formalized brainstorming in 1941 as a systematic effort and disciplined practice to produce ideas in a group. Osborne’s idea was to create an uninhibiting environment that would encourage imaginative ideas and thoughts. The usual method is to have a small group discuss a problem. Ideas are offered by participants one at a time. One member records ideas and suggestions on a flip chart or chalkboard. All withhold judgment. After the brainstorming session, the various ideas and suggestions are reviewed and evaluated and the group agrees on a final resolution.
Crossbreeding
Encourage the group to experiment by crossbreeding plants, objects, animals, and people.
1. Provide four boxes containing slips of paper with random names of plants, objects, animals, and job descriptors. Try to use objects that are business-related, such as a copy machine, product, phone, paperwork, desk, meeting room, and so on.
2. Ask each participant to take one slip each, then make hybrids out of them. Examples:
bird x supervisor
pony x salesperson
customer x door
watermelon x receptionist
paperwork x key
customer service x ballet dancer
3. Ask the group, what does each hybrid look like? Draw a picture. Label and post them on a wall.
4. Ask the group to think about what each hybrid does. What sound does it make? What are the unique strengths of each (at least three)? What are the unique weaknesses of each (at least three)?
One middle school principal told me of an idea she and the school caretaker came up with to solve the problem of lipstick on mirrors. She invited a group of them to join her in the bathroom so they could see how difficult it was for the caretaker to clean the lipstick off the mirrors. She introduced the janitor, who stepped up with a sponge squeegee, which he took into a toilet cubicle, dipped it into the toilet bowl, and then used it to clean the lipstick from the mirrors. After that demonstration, there was no more lipstick on the mirrors.
Symbols also help you develop a deeper insight into any situation. One major advertising agency in New York tests pattern language abilities in job applicants with the following exercise: A delegation of Martians has just landed in Central Park. They do not understand any Earth languages—only graphic symbols. Prepare a short speech composed of graphic symbols to welcome them and tell them just what kind of a place Central Park is. Take a few minutes to compose such a graphic speech for the fun of it. How did you do?
WARMING-UP ACTIVITIES
- “You’re fired.” Sometimes, it takes a five-alarm wake-up call to jolt people out of their complacency. At the beginning of the meeting, ask the participants to imagine that they are fired. Now, ask them to reapply for their jobs. This should shock them and force them to think about their knowledge and competencies and, most importantly, what they need to do to improve. Or, print an imaginary newspaper of the future that annormces your company’s bankruptcy. Then ask the participants to imagine why the company went bankrupt. The element of shock wakes us up to see, hear, and experience our world anew.
- Everyone’s a consultant. Ask each person to write a current job-related problem or concern on a blank sheet of paper. For example, “How can I get better cooperation from our warehouse employees in fulfilling orders on time?” or “How can we overcome the low price and discount program of our competition?” After allowing a few minutes to write out the problems, ask each person to pass his or her problem to the right. That person reads the problem just received and jots down their responses. They are given sixty seconds to respond to the individual sheet. Keep the process going imtil each person gets his or her sheet back. Then share and discuss the ideas.
 |
| Prof. Albert Einstein: The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined. |
Leonardo da Vinci’s technique for getting ideas was to close his eyes, relax totally, and cover a sheet of paper with random lines and scribbles. He would then open his eyes and look for images and patterns, objects, faces, or events in the scribble. Many of his inventions came forth unbeckoned from this random scribbling.
Scribbling allows you to put your abstract ideas into a tangible form. Imagine yourself flying over your challenge in an airplane to get a clear overview. While in the air, sketch what you see below you. Sketch as many alternative concepts as you think you see. You are your own audience; therefore, you can draw or sketch freely without worrying about what anyone will think. Sketching is a way of talking to yourself. Thomas Edison made htmdreds of sketches and doodles before beginning to formulate an idea.
E. L. Doctorow told of having a writing block that lasted for three months. He was frantic for ideas. One day, he gazed absentmindedly at the wallpaper and wondered about the age of the paper, and then about the age of the house. He pursued this thought and discovered his house was built in the early 1900s. “Just suppose,” he thought, “I could be transported back in time to the date my house was built.”
He imagined it. His imagination took him back to the early 19003 and he began the astonishing novel, Ragtime, which re—creates with stunning authenticity all the sights, sormds, aromas, and emotions of the time when his house was built. “Just supposing,” created a best seller.
The Luckiesh-Moss figure and was first introduced in 1933. You see the colors. Yes, no matter how hard or long you study it, you just can’t explain how it works. No one has been able to explain why the colors appear in this figure.
In the same way that the mysterious colors are contained within the black lines, the answers to all our challenges are within our unconsciousness. We need only to know how to see them.
A person is sitting around minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. As Einstein put it:
The supreme task is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding.
My friend Clever Trevor once said: “When a distinguished and successful expert states something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Some famous experts and their opinions:
Charles Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office, in 1899: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Grover Cleveland in 1905: “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”
Robert Millikan, Nobel prizewinner in physics, in 1923: “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.”
Lord Kelvin, president of Royal Society, in 1895: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
The King of Prussia who predicted the failure of railroads because: “No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse in one day for free.”
A dead coal can be rekindled when a live coal is placed next to it. When your creative fire has gone out, place a quotation or great thought in your mind to rekindle it. For variety, you may wish to try another way of consulting advisors: Create your own personal, imaginary Board of Directors.
In order to get original ideas, you will always need a way to create new sets of patterns in your mind. One way to do this is to force yourself to see relationships between dissimilar things. When you can do this, you will see ideas where none existed before.
One breakthrough idea reached by this method is distortion—free glass.
Alastair Pilkington, production chief of the glassmaking firm of Pilkington Brothers, Ltd., had been working for years on developing a way to rid glass of distortion. At the time, the best technique was to pass molten glass through rollers and then polish away the imperfections, which was costly and not very effective. Glass experts thought the solution lay in developing superior grinders and polishers.
One foggy October evening, Pilkington was washing dishes in his home in northwest England. His mind clear and free, he daydreamed as he watched a bar of Ivory soap float in the greasy water. He visualized glass floating like a bar of soap, and suddenly conceived of an idea that revolutionized the five-thousand-year—old glass industry.
He made a connection between two dissimilar concepts—floating soap and distortions in glass—and invented float glass. In this process, the glass is made in an oven floating in a tub of molten tin. The glass cools and hardens before the tin; it is then rolled into a special annealing chamber without any damage to its finish. No grinding or polishing is needed. Distortion-free glass is now produced cheaply and efficiently, because one individual washing dishes saw a connection between a bar of soap and a whole industry.
https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/the-phoenix-checklist
The original CIA Phoenix Checklist list of questions was challenging to absorb let alone use — so we’ve taken some liberties with the version below. We’ve still included all of the questions, but we’ve tweaked their order and ‘chunked’ them under key themes to make them more intuitive and actionable.
We need to get an oceanic view of our problems. We need to know the goals, themes, and sub-themes in order to generate meaningful ideas. Yasuo Matsumura of Clover Management Research in Chiba City, Japan, developed Lotus Blossom, a creative-thinking technique that diagrammatically helps us do this.
LOTUS BLOSSOM
You start with a problem or idea and expand that theme into themes until you’ve created several different entry points. In the Lotus Blossom, the petals, or themes, arormd the core of the blossom are figuratively peeled back one at a time, revealing a key component or sub-theme. This approach is pursued in ever—widening circles until the theme is comprehensively explored.
To find opportunities, you need to look at the separate events that make up the universe of business and understand their relationships. An Idea Grid is designed to let you do just that.
The basic grid is the FCB Grid, a powerful tool that enables one to compress large amormts of complex information. It was first developed in 1978 by Richard Vaughn, a research director of the worldwide advertising corporation Foote, Cone & Belding.
This Thinkertoy is modeled after force field analysis, a technique first developed by social psychologist Kurt Lewin. It allows you to see how positive and negative forces push and pull you toward a best case or worst case scenario.
It can help you:
1. Better define your challenge.2. Identify strengths you can maximize. 3. Identify weaknesses you can minimize.
How:
1. Write the challenge you are trying to solve.
2. Describe the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario; the best that can happen and the worst.
3. List the conditions of the situation. Conditions are anything that modifies or restricts the nature or existence of your subject. They are whatever requirements you perceive to be essential to solving a particular challenge.
4. Note the “tug—of—war. ” As you list the conditions, you will find the forces pushing you to the best case and those pulling you toward catastrophe. Pit each condition against its opposite on the continuum by specifying its push and pull powers.
Then Tamon Iwasa took another look at the traditional highway reflector and realized that one could rearrange the little glass beads that serve as mirrors so that they could be made to reflect oncoming headlight from any direction to any direction. The Japanese government installed the Iwasa reflector by the hundreds of thousands, and the accident rate plummeted. (after the "drive safe" campaign had failed utterly)
Medical waste has become a major problem for America. Currently, about 13,000 tons are generated each day by the nation’s 6,800 hospitals. Most of it is incinerated, which involves high handling costs and the risk of releasing airborne pollutants. The high cost of handling and transporting waste has led some hospitals to dimip it illegally, causing health scares when it washes up on beaches. Fortunately, Combustion Engineering of Stamford, Connecticut, has developed a way of disinfecting medical waste using modified microwaves that can be moved from site to site. The disinfected waste can then be compressed and deposited safely in landfills or burned without danger. The process takes only twenty minutes.
To use Cherry Split as a group exercise, present a challenge to a group and ask them to split it into as many attributes as possible. List the attributes as they are suggested, and keep going as long as anyone has ideas for further splitting. It doesn’t matter if some of the suggestions overlap, but do ask anyone who volunteers a seemingly similar attribute to explain how it’s different. If they believe it offers something new, go ahead and list it.
Ask each member of the group to reassemble the attributes into a new way of looking at the challenge. Start with one person’s idea and ask the rest of the group to build on it, until you’ve exhausted all possibilities. Then go on to the next person and repeat the process again and again, until you’re satisfied that you have drawn out as many creative ideas as possible.
Which figure is the widest of the above?
They are the same size. However, as the munber of subdivisions increases, the squares appear to become progressively wider. (This is known as the Opel-Kundt illusion and was first demonstrated in 1895.)
In the same way, when you subdivide a challenge into many separate parts, the nature of the challenge does not change. However, your perception of it does. It is this expansion of consciousness that leads to new ideas.
A frozen—fish processor was concerned that his product tasted bland. He tried everything to keep the fish fresh-tasting, including keeping them in fish tanks right up to processing. Nothing worked; the fish remained listless. To find a solution, he listed the attributes of a fish, including:
He looked at each attribute separately, trying to find ideas to solve his problem. Finally, he hit upon the solution: He put a small shark in the tank with the fish. The fish kept moving to escape being eaten and retained their vitality and thus their fresh flavor.
Reversing your assumptions broadens your thinking. You may often find yourself looking at the same thing as everybody else, yet seeing something different. Many creative thinkers get their most original ideas when they challenge and reverse the obvious.
Alfred Sloan took over General Motors when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it arormd. His genius was to take an assrmiption and reverse it into a “breakthrough idea.” For instance, it had always been assumed that you had to buy a car before you drove it. Sloan reversed this to mean you could buy it while driving it, pioneering the concept of installment buying for car dealers.
Whenever Thomas Edison was about to hire a new employee, he would invite the applicant over for a bowl of soup. If the person salted his soup before tasting it, Edison would not offer him the job. He did not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. Edison wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions.
FALSE FACES
Technique: Reversal.
Profile: How to find ideas by reversing conventional assrunptions.
SLICE AND DICE
Technique: Attribute listing.
Profile: How to get new ideas from a challenge’s attributes.
CHERRY SPLIT
Technique: Fractionation.
Profile: How to get ideas by dividing a challenge into two or more components and then reassembling them in new and different ways.
THINK BUBBLES
Technique: Mind mapping.
Profile: How to map your thoughts so as to spark new ideas.
SCAMPER
Technique: Questions.
Profile: How to manipulate what exists into something different.
To center a challenge:
1. Write it as a definite question, beginning “In what ways mightI ...?”
2. Vary the wording of the challenge by substituting synonyms for key words.
3. Stretch the challenge to see the broader perspective.
4. Squeeze the challenge to see the narrow perspective.
(a) Divide it into subproblems.
(b) Solve the subproblems.
(c) Keep asking “how else?” and “why else?”
Listen to a different radio station each day.
Take a different route to work
Change your reading habits - fiction instead of non-fiction, etc.
Make new friends.
Select carefully. Before you read a book ask: “How good an exercise for my creative mind will this provide?” Make the most of your reading time by sampling broadly and reading selectively.
Take notes. In Albert Paine’s biography of Mark Twain, Paine wrote: “On the table by him, and on his bed, and on the billiard-room shelves, he kept the books he read most. All, or nearly all, had annotations —spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or conmlents. They were the books he read again and again, and it was seldom that he had nothing to say with each fresh reading.”
Outline. Outline a book before you read it, or read the first half, stop and write an outline of the latter half. Imagine what you will find before you read the table of contents or the book. This was George Bernard Shaw’s favorite exercise; it will provide good, strenuous exercise for your imagination.
Read biographies. Biographies are treasure—houses of ideas.
Read how-to books on any subject. Exercise your mind by manipulating the ideas of others into new ideas.
John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends and chairman of the Washington, D.C.—based Naisbitt Group, has been very successful in employing a method of trend spotting called “content analysis.” He adapted this notion from methods used in a book he read about the Civil War. The historian who wrote the book, in turn, adapted content analysis from an article he had read about the CIA’s intelligence—gathering methods. The CIA patterned it after methods used by the Allies in World War II. Allied forces discovered the strategic value of reading newspapers smuggled out of small German towns. These papers sometimes carried useful stories on fuel, food, and other items. Similarly, a small group of Swiss intelligence officers were able to figure out German troop movements by reading social pages to see where famous German officers were mentioned.
Prescott Lecky found that there were two powerful levers for changing beliefs and overcoming fears, convictions that are strongly felt by nearly everyone. These are:
1. The belief that one is capable of doing one’s share, holding up one’s end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence.
2. The belief that there is something inside one that makes one equal in talent and ability to the rest of the world, and that one should not belittle oneself or allow oneself to suffer indignities.
Tick tock - based on Lecky's work:
1. Zero in on and write down those negative thoughts that are preventing you from realizing your goal. Write them imder “Tick.”
2. Sit quietly and examine the negatives. Learn how you are irrationally twisting things and blowing them out of proportion.
3. Substitute an objective, positive thought for each subjective, negative one. Write these under “Tock.”
You put your subconscious to work on the challenge. As a simple experiment, write the alphabet vertically on a piece of paper. Now write a sentence vertically next to the alphabet, stopping with whatever letter parallels 2. Now you have a row of initials. Think of as many famous people as you can (real or fictional) for each set of initials in ten minutes. If you couldn’t come up with some names but then suddenly thought of them while you were working on other initials, you experienced your subconscious mind at work.
Wait, wasn't this Edison?
Salvador Dali used this technique to conjure up the extraordinary images in his paintings. He would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate. He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep. The moment that he began to doze the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images.
,
Andy Shih
,
Burak Uzkent
,
Charlie Marx
,
Chris Cundy
,
Chris Yeh
,
Jiaming Song
,
Jonathan Kuck
,
Kristy Choi
,
Kuno Kim
,
Lantao Yu
,
Neal Jean
,
Ria Kalluri
,
Rui Shu
,
Tri Dao
,
Volodymyr Kuleshov
,
Willie Neiswanger
,
Yang Song
. They have been amazing colleagues as
well as friends, and make my PhD life both more productive and more fun.
