Paul Sloane shares six techniques for boosting creativity alone: audit your assumptions, generate ideas through free writing, introduce random inputs like dictionary words to spark new connections, use cross-domain analogies from medicine or sports, work backwards from an ideal solution, and take walks in stimulating places to let ideas incubate.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Paul Sloane. I run workshops on brainstorming and idea generation, and people often say to me, what can I do to boost my personal creativity at work or at home when I'm on my own? I don't have a group of friends to do a brainstorm with. But you can still apply some of the methods that we use in the brainstorm workshops on your own to boost your personal creativity. The first thing I would recommend is that you check your assumptions. What are the assumptions you're making about the situation, about the problem, about the causes of the problem? And you check your assumptions by asking a lot of questions. Why has this occurred? What constraints are we assuming here? Are they real constraints or are they ones that are we can overcome. So you start by asking a lot of questions about the situation to test all of the assumptions, all of the framework that you've put it in. The next thing I would say is for any situation, whether you're writing a novel or trying to create a new recipe or anything else, start with many ideas. Write down lots and lots of ideas. There's a technique called free writing where you just write and write and write, and part of what you write is garbage, it's nonsense, it doesn't matter. The more ideas you write, the more likely you are to reach a really creative idea. When you've done that and you've run out of juice, you've run out of energy, you've run out of ideas, try taking a random input. This is the third recommendation I would give to you. So, open a dictionary at any page and take a noun. Pick up an object from around your home or your office and say, I'm going to force a link between this object or this word or this picture or even a song and the item. And this sounds crazy, but it works. And if you read my article on this, on how to use random word, it explains this in more detail. Another method you can use is similes, where you say, what's this problem like? Who else has got a similar problem in a different walk of life? Maybe in medicine, in the arts, in warfare, in sports, in some other sector. And what did they do to overcome this problem? Can I use their approach to solve my problem, to come up with a creative idea? The next thing I would say is look for an ideal solution. What's a perfect answer for this? What would a really ideal solution look like? If there were no constraints, if there were no resources, if you had unlimited money and time, what would an ideal solution look like? And then you work back from that and say, what's stopping us getting to that ideal? Maybe some of these barriers we've got in place stopping us, we can overcome in one way or another. And finally, I would say If you're stuck and you've tried all of those things, just lodge the issue, the problem in your mind, and then go for a walk. Go for a walk around a museum or an art gallery or a busy city center where there's lots of stimuli, where you see lots of different people, lots of different shops and transport and all sorts of things. And funnily enough, the brain can often then come up with some creative idea based on those different external stimuli. So I'm sure that if you try some of these methods, you check your assumptions, you generate many ideas, you use a random word or object, you look for similes— who's got a different— a similar problem in a different walk of life, you think of the ideal solution and you work back from that, and you just go for a walk somewhere different and let the brain ponder the problem, you'll become much more creative and have some great ideas. Thank you.
