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Step 3 • Get Ideas

Once you have suitably oriented your problem, and after you have collected a sufficient body of facts so that you have some­thing to work with, then you are ready to begin your systematic search for ideas—but lots of ideas—all you or anyone you can get to help you can think up.

Remember, it is a basic characteristic of any problem that can be solved with imagination that there are many feasible solutions. The only guarantee you have that you will eventually pick the best solution to a problem is to be sure you have thought of every possible solution. (One prominent and successful design engineer claims that there are at least eight ways of doing any­thing, including diapering a baby!)

Somerset Maugham, the novelist, once wrote, "To conceive ideas is exhilarating, but it is safe only when you conceive so many that you ascribe no undue consequence to them and can take them for what they are worth. People who conceive few find it very difficult not to regard them with inordinate respect!"

A biographer of the famous artist, Toulouse-Lautrec, records that "always he was sketching—everything, everywhere, with any kind of pencil. When his drawing pad ran out, he used a menu,

the back of an envelope, any scrap at hand He tore up

thousands of these drawings, but thousands still exist."

Even in higher mathematics, where there can be only one possible exact answer to a problem, there is always more than one way to arrive at that answer. Furthermore, even though you may be searching for only one idea at the moment, one idea is hardly enough to be self-sustaining. You will need supplementary ideas to bolster up the weaknesses you are bound to find in your original "big" idea. And if you make an intensive enough search at the beginning, you will probably find that many of your "secondary" ideas will serve to supplement your prime idea.

To draw an analogy on this all-out search for ideas, we might consider the techniques used by a pearl diver in his search for pearls: the pearl diver puts on his swimming gear, dives down to the oyster bed, cleans the bed of every oyster that is there, and brings them all up to the surface with him. Only after he has completely cleaned the bed does he remove his swimming gear, put on his street clothes, and begin to open oysters to see if he has a pearl. He does not stop to change into street clothes after each individual oyster, open it to see if there is a pearl inside, then get back into water gear, go down and bring up another single oyster, and repeat the whole time-consuming process. And yet that is the way some people try to work with ideas:

They get one idea; expend time and effort and money to prove or disprove it; go through the whole process of "warming up" their minds all over again; get another single idea; again expend time and effort to prove or disprove it, and on and on. It is wasteful of time, effort, and the company's money. When you are after ideas, stick to getting ideas.

And this brings up a key point—one that is vital if you want to improve your production of ideas: dotit let your judgment interfere when you are on the hunt for ideas. It is like trying to drive a car with the brakes on!

Imagination and judgment are diametrically opposed mental functions. Either can cancel the other out; either has the power to weaken the other. Yet both functions are present, or at least available, in any individual's mind. It is possible to separate them in use. This is not, as some people suspect, a new concept being promoted by the new group of "deliberate problem-solvers." The distinct character of these two functions was recognized and stated quite clearly by the eighteenth-century German poet-philosopher Johann von Schiller. In a letter to a friend, who had complained of a lack of creative power, he wrote:

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination___ Apparently, it is not good—and, indeed, it hinders the creative work of the mind —if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in, as it were, at the gates. Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it; perhaps, in a certain col­location with other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link. The intellect cannot judge all those ideas unless it can retain them until it has considered them in connection with these other ideas. In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon, and discriminate too severely.

In the next chapter, we shall examine some of the devices that can aid you in developing quantities of ideas. One final word about what makes an idea for now, however: Don't kid yourself with vague suggestions that you think might be ideas. Discipline your mind to think in terms of specific propositions—make your ideas as concrete, as "real," and as solid as the problems you are going to be hurling them against.

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