Fighting the desire to have *the* idea
By: Rafael Jiménez
Tags: Ideation, Creativity, Creative Process, Brainstorming

(Versión en Español)

Over the years, I have noticed that many people, myself included, try to come up almost immediately with the solution to a creative problem — as if there was a special prize for doing so, or as if the time allocated to solve it were just a few minutes.

I think the reason why we’re so tempted to do so is because of the way school works: when you’re a kid, you’re rewarded if you answer the teacher’s question promptly and correctly (also, in most subjects at school there is typically one correct answer, whereas when you’re doing creative work it’s good to have many). We then grow up thinking that having the right answer, fast, is the path to success.

Beyond the overall effect this has in our lives, the specific impact it has in creative work is quite significant, mostly because of the cognitive bias known as anchoring: once you think you have a good idea, it’s very difficult to stray from it, and most of the other ideas you come up with will be derivative of that one.

This is not a small problem. As the scientist Linus Pauling once said, the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas — and it’s really hard to have them if your mind is orbiting around that first idea. You need to break free from the gravitational pull.

I once heard Neil French, the multi-awarded ad man, talk about a technique he had to fight this phenomenon. It consisted of writing the idea on a piece of paper, crumpling it, and throwing it in the bin. He said that the act itself, theatrical as it may seem, worked for him, as it liberated his mind to pursue new avenues of thought (he also said that, in case he couldn’t come up with a better idea, he could always go back to the bin and fish for the crumpled paper).

The good news is that there are ways of preventing the whole thing from happening. It involves being more methodical in your approach, which may sound to some as antithetical to the creative act, but the results are truly worth it.

The most well-known way to fight the desire to come up immediately with the right or best idea is to follow Graham Wallas’ four-step creative process, which he documented back in 1926:

It is crucial to follow it precisely, though. When you’re in the Preparation stage, you should be learning as much as you can about the problem, and refrain from thinking of solutions. Then, you direct your attention to something else, to a completely unrelated task, and let your subconscious do the creative work during the Incubation stage. This stage’s duration is quite variable: it may take hours, days, weeks, or more. But surely enough, some interesting, non-obvious ideas will come to you, in what Wallas called the Illumination stage. Then, of course, you have to verify if those ideas are actually solving the problem or not.

I love this process for its simplicity and Zen-like approach. Ideas will come when you’re ready, just relax your mind. Go play basketball or something. Or, if productivity calls, do some work, as long as it’s unrelated.

However, in our rushed, non-Zen professional lives this approach looks like a luxury we just can’t afford to have — and that’s a shame, but here we are. And so we’re left with no time for incubation and pressed to come up with ideas, fast.

I believe there’s another way to fight this desire while actively working on the problem, and even when time is very limited. Thinking about how to do this, and stealing from many different creative processes that have been documented during the last hundred years or so, I proposed this process:

Granted, it looks like a lot more work, but it really isn’t. It’s just more structured. I will go into more detail in later posts, but for now let’s concentrate on the Diverge stages in the middle, which substitute for the Incubation and Illumination stages in Wallas’ process.

The Inspire stage aims to involve both your conscious and your subconscious, by engaging with things that are obliquely related to the problem. That is, contrary to what some methodologies do, which is to ask you to look for existing solutions to similar problems in order to get inspiration, what this process asks of you is to consider as many divergent avenues of thought as possible, sparked by mental associations.

Obviously the tool to use at the Inspire stage is Seenapse. It’s the only one that I know of that leverages free mental associations from other people, so that it’s not only your subconscious working here, but also the subconscious of thousands of people around the world.

The task, at this point, is not to have ideas yet, but to write down as many avenues of thought as Seenapse triggers in your mind, that point to many different directions, and which you feel that there’s something to them, in them.

You can sketch these as a mind-map on a notebook or with software like MindNode, or others like it. I find that it helps to visualize the divergent nature of these avenues of thought.

Then, you start the Ideate stage, in which you, by yourself (this is very important) start writing down whatever ideas come to mind for each of the avenues of thought. Reason is not your friend here. You have to suspend all self-judgement and just write and write, or doodle. Go for quantity, not quality.

It is only after this stage that you will really benefit from brainstorming with others, during the Remix stage. As many people have found, brainstorming sessions have serious shortcomings, and one very good way to make them more effective is to ask participants to come to the session with a list of ideas.

In this way, you use the group setting to elaborate, cross-pollinate, and remix on the ideas that everyone brought (and not just the few extroverts that participate). The goal is still to have many ideas, not to find the greatest one; therefore, the remix session must produce more ideas than the sum of the ones generated individually during the Ideate stage.

Later, in the Converge stages, the selection will begin. But it’s very, very important to refrain from filtering any ideas during the Diverge stages — you never know if that ugly duckling in your Ideate list will become a beautiful swan during the Remix stage.

As you can see, fighting this desire does require some work, but it doesn’t have to take a long time. You can go through the three Diverge stages in one day or even less. I have done 90-minute exercises with my students at centro’s Master in Business Innovation and Creativity that have yielded great results, for example. It’s just a matter of being a bit more methodical.