3 Techniques to Help You and Your Team to Create New Solutions & Imagine Smarter, More Cutting-Edge Ideas  

We have all been here: staring mindlessly at the flashing cursor on a blank computer screen, trying to think up a solution to a problem, create a new streamlined process, build a power point presentation on a new Go-to-Market Strategy, or even write a business case for a revolutionary new product. Occasionally, there’s a spark or some twinkle of an idea that finds its way out of your head into the world, but more often than not, we simply continue staring at the blank page. Where do great ideas come from? How can you arrive at the next new thing and tap into your creative energy? How can you find a way to generate new ideas and disrupt current ways of thinking ON DEMAND?

You can stimulate creative thinking — whether you are on your own, or working with a whole team — by trying these ideation techniques.

Get the Ideas Flowing with Brainwriting
Brainwriting turns the classic ideation technique of brainstorming inside-out. In the classic approach to brainstorming, teams get together to solve a problem by shouting out their ideas and input. The brainstorming session continues until the group runs out of steam and all the ideas have been documented. Then the facilitator works with the team to evaluate and prioritize the ideas, narrowing the list down to a few top ideas that can be attempted or tested further. Typically, the alphas or strongest (or loudest) personalities in the room drive the discussion, gaining support for their ideas or the ideas they like the most using their stature or volume to influence others. Often, introverts get run over and the contributions of quieter folks may get ignored or side-lined, even if they are truly better ideas.

Brainwriting solves that issue. It’s a silent, time-limited exercise where all contributions are collected and evaluated. Here’s how it works (in the context of a team of contributors):

• • • A facilitator and the team sit around a table with pens and Post-It® notes. The facilitator highlights the problem that the team wants to address.
    • For the first round, the facilitator sets a timer to two minutes and asks the team to write three ideas (one idea per note) to address the problem at hand.
    • When the round ends, the facilitator asks everyone to pass their ideas to the right.
    • Team members choose to either review the ideas they receive to use them as triggers to additional ideas or to ignore them, as they write three more ideas on separate notes.
    • These rounds continue until a fixed number of rounds are completed (such as when the ideas come to a full turn around the table).
    • The facilitator collects all the notes. Then, as a team, they work to consolidate, classify and prioritize the ideas.

You can exercise brainwriting by yourself, though you will not have the benefit of others’ ideas to use as inspiration. Just as with the team version, you will need to focus on a problem area or question to answer. Then proceed to write down three ideas to address it. In between rounds of writing ideas, take a brief 2-3 minute mental break by reading a short article or doing some deep knee bends or listening to a favorite song.

Then revisit or ignore your previous ideas, and continue to write additional ideas. Do not evaluate or critique any of your ideas until you have completed a set number of rounds. Try doing three rounds and work your way up to five rounds, and see what a 10-20 minute investment in creativity can yield!

Activate Visual Help via Picture Prompt
The Picture Prompt technique is a great method for generating ideas at an emotional level, and it can easily be done alone. By using random images as a way to trigger deep thoughts, intuitions, and feelings, individuals can find solutions to creative challenges or problems that have a more emotional or psychological angle. This is a great approach to ideation if you don’t have a team to collaborate with at hand, but it can be fun to approach as a group too.

To get started, all you need is a problem to solve and set of graphics or photographs. These images can be completely random: try a Google search on “natural images” to get your juices flowing or look through the photographs in a magazine or calendar. If you can, it is often helpful to find images that support the kind of problem you are trying to address. For example, you might include more pictures of people interacting if you are focused on solving staff or organizational or cultural challenges. If you are working with a group, ask each person to bring ten random images or photos or graphics to share or else provide a set of images to each person.

Set a time limit of five minutes and ask each person to write down ideas that are inspired by what they see. At the end of the time limit, ask people to pair up and identify the best ideas to present to the group. Once all the best ideas are captured, work to evaluate and prioritize the optimal solution.

So Bad its Good: The Worst Idea Technique
This technique is a perennial favorite (and actually a very respected ideation technique) as it always sparks groups that are running low on inspiration and creativity and gets people laughing out loud. You can facilitate this technique just like brainwriting (silent writing exercise), or you can use the traditional verbal brainstorming approach.

With Worst Idea, the facilitator asks the team to create a list of really outrageous, ridiculous, callous, illegal and completely off-color ideas to address the issue presented. The key to making this technique work is having a leader who keeps encouraging worse and worse ideas! Once all the ideas are captured, the team evaluates those horrible ideas and tries to determine how they can be turned upside-down into great solutions by either considering the opposite, or by finding some aspect that can be used to inspire a good idea. It can be really entertaining to do this in a group setting, though you can do this by yourself, too!

Simply set aside ten minutes to focus on your problem and go to the dark side. Think of the worst scenarios and challenge yourself to come up with really terrible and awkward solutions. Then when your list is ready, evaluate each idea. Ask yourself if there is a nugget of goodness in that bad idea, and try to build upon that to develop a workable solution. If you don’t find inspiration that way, investigate the exact opposite approach and consider if that would work to address your problem. Before you know it, you’ll have a list of great ideas that you may never have discovered with a more traditional approach.

Try adding these disruptive thinking techniques into your daily life and see how you can turn on your creativity whenever you need it. One way to be sure you set aside time for innovation and disruptive thinking is to build time into your day by adding a task to your calendar. Create a daily reminder to spend as little as ten minutes each day using one of these techniques to come up with some original, leading-edge ideas.