Right on time… Scott Berkun has shared yet another great essay, this time on Creative Thinking Hacks.
Out of this essay, come to critical point:
an idea is a combination of other ideas.
I love the simplicity of this description. But there’s a catch: you must both be open to ideas then fearless about using them. Ah, the rub.
In a recent series of client workshops on a future visioning project, the goal was to exactly this: take existing ideas and combine them in new and unique ways to arrive at a new, multi-channel offering. In the first workshop, we got as many of these ideas out on paper as possible, using a structured ideation process. In the second workshop, we took these point ideas and sought ways to combine them into collections of cohesive ideas.
The challenges we faced, though, with the participants were two-fold. First, we had to convince them that they already had the ideas, right there in the room, in their heads. We had learned this early on in our work with them. As an organization, they were knowledgeable and had loads of interesting ideas but no way to hang them together in a cohesive way. We just kept reminding them of this every chance we got.
Then, we had to help them to take all those ideas and shed their preconceptions about what was possible. This proved tricky. Combining ideas requires experience and practice. While the group got much better at combining ideas over time, the design team–relatively free from politics and willing to take more risks–ultimately synthesized the point ideas and initial grouped ideas into platform recommendations.
