Continuing from my earlier post on SIMPLE STEPS TO GET THE IDEAS FOLLOWING:

INCUBATION:

For complex problems or more difficult issues you may need to sleep on it, or "dreamwork", The terms comes from Michael Ray of Stanford Uniervsity's Graduate School of Business. Dr Ray runs a university course called Creativity in Business, and is the author of a book bearing the same title.

Just before sleeping, he says: Ask a clear question about the problem or key issue. Remember you are attempting to maintain a spirit of enquiry. State the question in a way that will give further insight into the problem."

INSIGHT:

On waking up the next mprning, just jot down - on the flipside of your idea map - the ideas or insights that pop into your brain. Or the ideas could come while you are in the toilet or during the morning shower, or while you are having your breakfast or when you are in the car or the MRT train. It would, therefore, be a good idea always to carry a micro-cassette recorder as well as a pocket notebook.

Several ideas or solutions would have emerged. How would one decide on the right one?

Take a leaf from management consultant Westin H Agor. He reports that psychological tests on more than 2,000 managers in the United States showed that effective managers rely on their feelings and intuition when they make their most important decidions. So use both your analytical and untuitive mind, and simple feeling, to help you sift through  the many options based on waht is important to you.

Once you have figured out what to do, take action. And be persistent!

[To be continued in the Next Post]  

Continuing from my earlier post on SIMPLE  STEPS TO GET THE IDEAS FLOWING:

Generate Options through Creative Visualisation:

Business Month, a United States based business magazine reported that the Harper Group, a large freight forwarding company, has won every major contract it vied for over the past ten years, from shipping building supplies for a new airport in Saudi Arabia to moving military equipment ito Bahrain.

The company's CEO John H Robinson said he achieved this through visualising success until it became ingrained in his subconscious mind and in everything he did.

The visualisation process is familair to thousands of high-performance athletes and sportsmen, including golfers, who claim that by imagining themselves crossing the finishing line or making their perfect putt, they actually make it happen.

Before you scoff off, try this creative visulaisation excercise. First, have a memory jogger handy, and find a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down. With your back straight, breathe in gently as you clench your fist, hold for a while and then breathe out completely as you release your fist. Repeat this for a few minutes. While doing this exercise, mentally tell yourself to relax. 

Soft Baroque music in the background will enhance relaxation.

Next, imagine yourself taking a slow-moving elevator from the 21st floor of a building to the ground floor. Observe the lighted numbers on the button panel  change as the elevator slowly descends. You will feel yourself going into a deeper state of relaxation.

Now visualise yourself tackling the problem or issue head-on, through several scenarios in your headspace. This is the fun part of the whole exercise, because you just let your imagination take over. Take as long as you like for this visualisation exercise.

As your return to your original state of awareness by mentally counting from one to five, quickly jot down in your memory jogger all your options that come to you. 

SIMPLE  STEPS TO GET THE IDEAS FLOWING

Dreaming of success, plus a little help from Vivaldi, may well be the key to achieving success.

I like to touch on the power of creative visualisation, or the art of brainstorming without a group.

There are thousands of ways to brainstorm. Albert Einstein used to go to bed and dream about his theories. Archimedes made his famous discovery while taking his bath in a tub.

On a more contemporary note, Dr Yoshiro Nakamatsu, or better known as Dr Nakamats, Japan's inventor extraordinaire who designed the floppy disk, literally goes under. He picks up a water-proof note-book and marker pen, puts on his googles, jumps into a swimming pool and stays underwater as long as he can manage while brainstorming.

For managers who may not want to go to such extremes, there are other tried and tested techniques for getting the ideas flowing. 

While working in various general management portfolios during my almost a quarter of a century in the corporate world, I have gathered and synthesised some of these into the following approach for brainstorming, especially when one is alone. The process goes through several distinct phases.

PREPARATION

Play Baroque and Classical music in the background as you prepare to brainstorm.

Research has shown that such music from the 17th to  18th century can help eliminate stress and enhance performance.

Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and Pachelbel's Canon in D Major are highly recommended for enhanced mental performance,

Other recommended Baroque and Classical composers include Bach, Corelli, Handel and Telemann.

From my own strategic exploration, New Age music selections work beautifully too. My favourite New Age composers include Kitaro (just stay away from his drums), Ray Lynch, Ravi Shankar, Stephen Halpern, van Gelis, and Yanni.

PAINT THE BIG PICTURE

Write down the problem or issue you want to resolve, in key words or phrases. Better still, paint a "big picture" of the problem, using what is popularly known as the mind mapping system.

Mindmapping is described in Tony Buzan's book, Using Both Sides of the Brain. The author explains that the left-brain, which is logically oriented, "reads"only words, numbers, lists and facts. The right-brain "reads" spatial relationships, patterns, rhythms, feelings, colours and "senses" the whole. 

The left and right brains together process the "big picture".

A mind map is just like a road map, with a pattern of inter-related clusters of ideas.

At the centre of a blank sheet of paper, write the key word or create a central image that captures the essence of the problem. Then, as you proceed to think about the problem, you build clusters of ideas around this key word or central image.

As your thoughts flow, you connect or link the many clsuters of ideas. Using different colours to mark different cluster sof ideas, you can make your "big picture" more sensory-rich, since your eyes from the pathways to your brain.

This is a very powerful technique because it is exactly how the brain processes, assimilates and retains information.

For those of you who are seasoned keyboard warriors, you can make use of computer-aided mind-mapping software like MindManager or VisiMap, which are my perennial favourites. 

[To be continued in the next post!] 

DATA, INFORMATION, IDEAS... WISDOM

Just taking a stand:

Information does not equal to insight, provided that we can generate useful ideas to look at more incoming information, and then explore their usefulness and usability in manifesting a productive outcome.

It's pertinent to point out that data is raw and neutral to everybody. It becomes information only when we can make sense of it [i.e. conceptually coherent and personally relevant] and eventually see a use of it.

It is through our perspective of idea generation that insight is finally drawn from the selected incoming information.

Ideas must come first.That's where our personal creativity - and creative imagination - comes to play.

So, without ideas, information is actually useless.

From the chosen workable idea(s), we can then sculpt our decision to act, and formulate a plan for action, which upon implementation and execution, in turn generates real-world experience - knowing what works; what doesn't work, and what could possibly work better the next time. 

This is what we call knowledge.

As Einstein is believed to have said, 'Knowledge is experience; everything else is just information'.

Interestingly, making a decision implies making a choice, which entails a personal accountability for consequences after the choice is taken, in either way, good or bad.

This is the harsh lesson of having gained knowledge or experience.

Nonetheless, cumulative knowledge or experience over time becomes expertise, and the discerning use of expertise is wisdom.

From data - with the crucial participating elements of information, idea, decision, choice, plan, action, consequence, experience, knowledge, and expertise - to wisdom seems like a linear progression.

In reality, it's not; it's more of an iterative and even recursive process, with feedback as well as feed-forward loops.

In a nut shell, this is how insight becomes ultimately BI (business intelligence), at least from my perspective.

QUESTIONS TO DISCOVER NEW IDEAS

Here's an excellent approach from Annette Moser-Wellman, innovation consultant & author of 'The Five Faces of Genius':

[Her 'Five Faces Model' is quite interesting. According to her proposition, we need the five different perspectives - 'Seer', 'Observer', 'Alchemist', 'Fool' & 'Sage' - from which to creatively tackle today's business challenges.

From my point of view, it has more or less a broad parallel to Prof Howard Gardner's 'Five Minds for the Future', who argues brilliantly that we need five kinds of mental abilities - 'multi-disciplined', 'synthesising', 'creating', 'respectful' & 'ethical' - to achieve success in the 21st century landscape of accelerating change & information overload.]

For Individuals:

1) What solutions do you see in your mind’s eye?

2) What do you notice –details, hunches, intuitions – that lead to a solution?

3) What does this challenge remind you of? What ideas come from this analogy?

4) What happens if you invert this challenge? What about absurd solutions?
What if you persevered?

5) What’s the simplest solution for you to create? What ideas do you have when you look to the history of your challenge?

For Groups:

1) Ask each member to describe the wildly successful outcome they see in their mind’s eye. Build on the images to see what solutions arise.

2) Ask each participant to share what makes them curious about the problem. What are the things they don’t know, but would like to?

3) Have the group members think of similar problems in different businesses or industries. How did they solve the problem?

4) What if you approached the problem with a sense of humor? Have member share ideas from this perspective.

5) Ask each member to be the “complexity police”. Have them describe the complex parts of the issue and practice creating simple solutions.

[Source: The Genius Workout: Questions to Discover New Ideas';]

WHAT'S MY LINE?

What follows in this blogpost is a series of wonderful images, all created by Dilip Mukerjea, with their respective captions as shown, & specifically arranged in a convenient sequence.

For the fun of it, I just like to call it 'What's My Line?'.

However, in reality, the sequence actually represents a very powerful idea generation technique.

What technique is that?

SUBSTITUTE

CONNECT

COMBINE

ADAPT

ADOPT

ADJUST

ABSORB

MODIFY

MAGNIFY

PUT TO OTHER USE

ELIMINATE

REVERSE

REARRANGE

RECYCLE

If you are still at a loss, please proceed to this link to get the correct answer.

[All images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]

UNDERSTANDING THE VENTURI EFFECT OF THE MIND

According to Tim Hurson, writing in his book, 'Think Better: Aa Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking', the more ideas we have, the more ideas we will get.

The principle works much like a carburettor in an automobile engine.

Just as air flowing through a venturi tube in a carburettor creates a vacuum that pulls fuel into the combustion chamber of the engine, so too does the flow of ideas create a vacuum that is filled with other ideas.

In other words, the very process of articulating ideas create the conditions in which more ideas are generated.

Isn't it interesting?

DO YOU KNOW . . .?

[All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]