Doesn’t it feel like for every good idea there are many similar bad ones? To illustrate what I mean, here is a text from  “Good in a Room” by Stephanie Palmer:

A year after Legally Blonde was released, a writing team came into my office and pitched me, quite literally, another version of Legally Blonde. Te ideas were the same, beat for beat and character for character, save that instead of going to law school, she went to medical school. It was called Blonde, M.D., I believe. I asked them if they knew that MGM had made Legally Blonde. They did not. I asked them if they knew that I was one of the executives who supervised the movie. They did not. I asked them if they had anything else to pitch. They did. They had a version in which she becomes a spy, title James Blonde.

Although we might think the writers copied the idea of Legally Blonde, there is a bigger chance that they were living in a cave. Sometimes we are delusional and we think we go a “grand idea” out thin air, when is basically something we saw before and we just decided on changing the wrapping (and then forgot where the idea came from). This is not intentional, we are just egocentric beings, which leads to a bad ideation process: developing the first idea we think is brilliant.

By having only one idea, even if we think is original or creative, we  focus on it resulting in our choice, without contemplating if it is really a good. In contrast, brainstorming leads to having many good ideas and bad ones. Since we have to make a choice we need to think and we end up with a short choice paralysis. As a result we have to evaluate which ideas are worth more resources and which not. In other words:

Quantity -> Choice Paralysis -> Thinking -> Quality

My grand mother once told me:

When making a decision, always check with people above you and bellow you

What my grand mother was trying to explain was the value of a individuals perspective on the same matter. Everybody has different experiences that define how they perceive reality. What might be obvious to you is not to others and vice versa.

Brainstorming is not a garantee of us producing great ideas, not even good ones, however we decrease the possibilities of ending executing on a bad one. That is why we always need to test, just by checking with others will be enough. If at the end it was really a bad one, at least we learnt something, not mentioning that we have a pool of more ideas we can prototype and test. If not we will end up with two dumb blondes.

Note: Design thinking is a process that can helps us find those great ideas.

Your team faces a problem and somebody says: “let’s be creative.. and find a solution to this problem” or  “we need to discuss how to do it, lets do something creative”.

Doesn’t matter what you are doing or what needs to be done, if somebody tells you this, mostly like you will end with some sort of “creative atrophy”. Because at some point you will be stressed thinking if your ideas are creative or not, instead of just coming up with many as possible.

In the past month I heard the create phrase a couple of times. I found it amusing, since even if they meant good and wanted to motivate, taking me into the “creative atrophy” path: the only thing I was thinking of  was the word creative and not the problem at hand.

The big issue with using adjectives like creative, awesome, unique, etc. is that they shift the focus in the wrong direction. Rather than focusing on the problem at hand, we try judge or determine: is it a creative idea, a cool solution or it gives you awesome experience. We pressure ourselves, narrowing the possibilities by we starting to throw any idea that we don’t find as creative. Instead of keeping a open mind and giving any idea a chance, without caring how unoriginal  or uncreative that it looks. And that is being creative, not caring or judging and trying to see how to materialize or use every idea.

The best way to approach problem solving or coming up with new solutions, is not to use any adjective that will qualify the idea. Instead just let people speak their mind and acknowledge their ideas. Generally this sessions where people speak their mind or brainstorming follows a normal distribution (see the image bellow).

The session starts very slowly with a couple of ideas. Basically we need sometime to “warm up” and enter in some kind of flow. Once in the flow the number of ideas will increase, almost exponentially. This is due to us getting excited and feeding up from the ideas of others. However the flow, lasts for a limited time and we start to get tired or uninterested and then the number of ideas take a dive. That is why it has a shape of a bell.

Now that we have all these ideas, we weight which are possible with the resource available (we might have unlimited imagination but not resources). Then we decide which we can peruse, we prototype them and test them.

The prototyping and testing becomes “food for thought”, which can lead to complete new ideas or just improvements on current ones. Once in this trail we can be creative, now we are focus on solving a problem, not on judging or limiting the imagination by asking the team to be creative.

Bellow you will is TED talk by Tim Brown, where he “urges designers to think big”, once you watch it you will see where I get influence on the prototyping.

This weekend, I was watching  a Japanese anime called Evangelion. In one of the episodes, I saw 30 seconds of footage, were one of the characters feels uneasy with freedom so, make him more comfortable they remove a degree of freedom (later on how they did this).

The 30 seconds sticked to mi mind, because the images easily portrait why creative thinking is hard. Creativity is define by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “the ability to create”. Generally, when we create something, we use another “something”, as a base and build on it, therefore we are not being creative, because we are not creating, instead we are building. How do we create, rather than building? Here is where “no hold bars creativity” helps. No hold bars creativity, is the process of thinking, where you have the freedom to come with anything, that yet can’t be describe with words. You may ask, when do you really need to go through this creativity process? Well dear reader, by asking you are already lowering your freedom and getting in your comfort zone. The same happens if you argue that everything has been already invented, that is a good start on caging the creativity process: with bars.

Here is the clip to complement the above:

As you can see, the character has full freedom, but he is uneasy. Things get better when a line is drawn and he can see where is the bottom and the top. With the line he achieves a sense of familiarity by walking, however he loses a degree of freedom.

If I ask you: create the craziest virtual world you can? Or the most innovative mobile phone, by doing so, I’m staring to limit you with the words: “crazy” and “innovative”. Asking question will not help you with the process, neither defining a problem, to archive this here are two steps:

First: don’t use the term “No hold bars” or any terms…
Second: create.