Help Yourself to More Ideas

Articles In This Section:

· Help Yourself to More Ideas

· 1 • Make Notes

· 2 • Pick Your Time

· 3 • Give Yourself a Deadline

· 4 • Set a Quota for Yourself

· 5 • Use Checklists - Part 1

· 5 • Use Checklists - Part 2

· 6 • Use Creative Questioning - Part 1

· 6 • Use Creative Questioning - Part 2

· 6 • Use Creative Questioning - Part 3

· 7 • Other Aids - Part 1

· 7 • Other Aids - Part 2

Of all the traits that are helpful to a creative person, one of the most valuable is undoubtedly idea fluency—the ability to generate sheer quantities of ideas against a given problem. If enough ideas can be thought of, the law of averages says that some of them are apt to have potential. And if a person will persist long enough, chances are he will try to approach his problem from different directions in the attempt to build up a quantity of possible solutions, and benefits will also accrue from this self-driven flexibility.

In attempting to build your fluency of ideas, there are artificial "spurs'* you can use. These are not magic formulas or sorcerer's secrets that will automatically make you a "big idea man." They are, rather, an organization and codification of techniques and methods found to be common among people known to be creative—"tricks of the trade," if you want to call them that, but with enough general usage and acceptance in enough different fields to make them seem worth learning.

Furthermore, experiments have demonstrated that people who learn these methods and practice them to the point that they become habitual, do show an increase in their idea production. The basic aim of the different methods is to stimulate your mind in one way or another. Some help encourage your memory-recall; others build or activate your powers of association. And some, like checklists and questions, merely stimulate your mind into a more exhaustive analysis of either the problem or the possible ways to solve it that you might normally make without some "formal" type of discipline. As you get into these, don't be surprised if you find one or two which you already use, possibly without ever realizing that you do. Most executives unconsciously do use such techniques from time to time. The value of having them "formalized" lies in the confidence it gives you to know that these tools exist; that they have a purpose; and that you can use them whenever you feel the need of them.