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5 • Use Checklists - Part 2

One of the most basic of all question checklists was formalized by Alex Osborn and presented in his textbook, Applied Imagina­tion. He lists more than seventy types of questions to ask yourself when you are searching for new ideas. It is interesting to note that most of these questions require the "commonplace" as a starting point. In going through this sampling, it will be helpful if you pick some common object, such as a pencil, ash tray, paper clip, or other familiar item, and try to answer each of these questions in terms of that object:

Can It Be Put to Other Uses?

Is there a new way to use it as is? Other uses if modified? Can It Be Adapted?

What else is like this? What other ideas does this suggest? What

could I copy? Whom could I emulate? Can It Be Modified?

Give it a new twist? Change the meaning, color, motion, sound,

odor, form, shape? Any other changes possible? Can It Be Magnified?

What to add? More time? Greater frequency? Stronger? Higher?

Longer? Thicker? Multiply? Exaggerate? Can It Be Minified?

What to subtract? Smaller? Condense? Lower? Shorter? Lighter?

Omit something? Streamline? Split up? What Can We Substitute?

Who else instead? What else instead? Other ingredients? Other

process? Other power?

Rearrange It?

Interchange components? Other patterns? Other layout? Trans­pose cause and effect? Change the pace? Change the schedule?

Reverse It?

Transpose positive and negative? Turn it backward? Upside down? Reverse roles?

Combine It?

How about a blend? An alloy? An assortment? An ensemble? Combine units? Purposes?

You will note that not all of these questions are directly ap­plicable to any specific product or situation. But if you made a conscientious effort to answer each of them, you will also note that they do stimulate your mind into thinking channels it might not normally follow.

The best type of checklist is, certainly, one you make up yourself to fit your own recurring problems. Using such check­lists takes a certain amount of initiative, however. It takes initiative and application to analyze your problems thoroughly and compile the question-list that will make you think around the problem. It takes effort to really ask the questions and find the answers; and it certainly takes initiative to review your checklist from time to time to make sure it hasn't become outdated. Using an outdated checklist can be a major pitfall: we get lulled into a sense of false security through feeling that everything is under control just because we religiously ask questions about what we are doing as we go along doing it. But situations change, and we may end up predicating our thinking on outmoded or no longer pertinent questions.

What's more, just a mechanical use of a checklist does not produce originality. The purpose of such questions is to provide challenges to obvious ways of doing things. Therefore, the answers to these questions must be well thought out—even if the answer results in a "No—this is the best we can do right now."

Checklists can often be improvised, also. An open-minded sales manager looking for new customers might get real benefit out of just leafing through the yellow pages of a telephone directory. An office manager, trying to develop a more efficient utilization of space, might get some ideas by paging through a trade publication devoted to hotel or kitchen planning. Since you are simply trying to find new or different ways of solving a particular problem, you can never tell when or where you will find an idea to borrow. The originality may consist of the fact that this has never been used in your particular field before—and if that will solve your problem, settle for that!

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