After reading this page, if you only remember one thing, make it this:
Ideas come deep down from your unconscious mind. Everything you control is just trying to let your unconscious mind free to play about with different ideas, make connections and finally present them to you conscious mind, who claims all the credit.
How Ideas Happen
The 7 Traits of Good Ideas…
Steven Johnson’s fascinating book “Where Good Ideas Come From” gives some wonderful insights into the formation of new ideas and is essential background knowledge to idea generation.
He describes seven patterns / features / traits that lead to good ideas:
1. The Adjacent Possible
The term was coined by the scientist Stuart Kauffman to explain biological development and is essentially the process of evolution. Steven uses it to show how technology also evolves along the same lines. Anyone might be able to come up with radical new ideas but in order for them to succeed or exist a base knowledge must already be present, the foundation for ideas or innovations have to pre-exist. But it is not a fixed constraint, the adjacent possible will change and develop, unlocking new possibilities as new stuff is created all the time. An idea thought of before the supporting technologies, systems, user habits or general environment is ready for it, can be considered “ahead of its time” and will thus likely struggle to succeed.
Basically, almost no ideas are truly original, they are built from ‘parts’ in front of you. Great creatives are constantly seeking out new ‘parts’
Image: The first printing presses were developed by Johannes Gutenberg, a metal worker, who was inspired when visiting wine presses and combined this with his skill of individual metal letters and ink.
2. Liquid Networks
Liquid networks refers to an idea that ever changing pools of knowledge, given opportunities to share and discuss ideas leads to increased creativity. An example given is that most breakthroughs at a research laboratory could be traced to the canteen rather than the lab bench. When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn’t magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete partially formed ideas.
Your brain must be capable of change, a rigid / fixed mind-set cannot create anything new.
Image: Before the 18th century, most of Europe was to some extent drunk all the time. In order to purify and make water safe to drink, it was distilled, fermented or by some other method turned into alcohol. The introduction of the coffee house in Europe moved the population off depressants and onto stimulants…
3. Slow Hunches
Steven discusses the idea that most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. As you will see shortly this is a key principle element of David Jones’ three levels of the brain idea. They perhaps have the seed of something profound, but they lack a key element. That missing element could be living as a hunch in another person’s head. Liquid networks as discussed above, create an environment where those partial ideas can connect and reform. Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.
Scholars, amateur scientists, basically anyone with intellectual ambition would likely keep a commonplace book. Writing down anything they came across that was interesting or inspirational and forming a basic fund of knowledge that might be useful or trigger future ideas.
Always keep a notebook of some kind and pencil with you.
4. Serendipity
Serendipity describes lucky or accidental events that trigger a new idea.
The power of accidental connections and randomness.
We all have slow hunches in our minds building up over time, things we have taken from or given to liquid networks and a world full of adjacent possibilities, but sometimes it’s a lucky event that brings it all together.
The challenge is therefore how to keep your unconscious mind full of inspiration and encourage these accidental mental connections….
The answer is constant curiosity and exploration of new places and things. Collections such as IDEO’s idea trunk (pictured) are full of random objects found by their designers and are a helpful source of inspiration for stuck projects.
5. Error
“Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore… When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them. This is also seen in nature when certain bacteria reproduce identical copies in times of abundance but in times of stress they experiment with random errors and try to evolve into a winning new solution. As stress increases so does the rate of experimentation and genetic error.
A ‘noise’ free environment stifles creativity.
If Flemming had been a tidier researcher and more organised with his experiments, he may never have discovered how to grow penicillin whilst away on holiday!
Feathered Dinosaurs
6. Exaptation
Exaptation: a trait, feature, or structure of an organism that takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution. Many successful innovations are based not on conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.
A classic biological example is the evolution of feathers which are believed initially to have evolved for temperature regulation, helping nonflying dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period insulate themselves against cold weather. But when some of their descendants began experimenting with flight, feathers turned out to be useful for controlling the airflow over the surface of the wing, allowing the first birds to glide.
Being exposed to a diversity of thinking and things increases your chance of making a cross-over connection from something existing to a new function.
The Internet
7. Platforms
The last pattern in Steven’s seven is that of platforms and how they open many new doors in the adjacent possible. Why does 25% of all marine life live in just 2% of the ocean? The denser coral reefs become with life, the more life they breed and support. As discussed previously with ancient Rome, cities are the same, becoming a platform for creativity the more urban the population. The development of GPS and it’s opening up to the world is one such powerful example where a technology designed for a particular function has caused incredible unforeseen benefits since.
Traditional software development assumes users shouldn’t get full access to the software’s secret sauce for fear of losing competitive advantage to others. However the creation of an open platform, allows good ideas to come from anywhere producing the possibility of a new type of cooperative advantage.
Can you be part of a platform, or create a platform with your product to tap into this creative effect?
A large thriving platform makes other factors more likely, serendipity for instance increases dramatically when your in a city compared to a remote island. Bobbi Brown (of the famous cosmetics brand) met her first breakthrough client at a party and her manufacturing partner in a lift in her apartment building. Luck is critical to success, so use the strength of a platform to make yourself more lucky.
Levels of the Mind
This isn’t exactly scientific, but the concept is a useful one.
“Hare Brain & the Tortoise Mind”
Guy Claxton
It’s all in the unconscious
The simplest way to create more ideas is to expose yourself to more ideas.
According to David Jones (a creative scientist, who became famous for creating fake perpetual motion machines, funny fake science writing and exciting science demonstrations), there are only two ways of solving a problem…
If a “rational” solution exists to the problem then it’s a simple matter of putting in the hours and bashing out the calculations to solve the problem. But what if there is no rational (logical, systematic…) answer?
Then you have to be creative.
In order to be creative, Jones believes you have to tap into and unleash the deeper levels of your mental state, the sub-conscious and un-conscious. Starting in reverse order:
Un-conscious
The lowest level, nick-named the “Random Ideas Generator”. This ‘part’ of your brain is active all the time and is where any information, facts, observations, gossip, half-thoughts, other half-forgotten nonsense collides together in a seemingly random fashion. Once an idea has formed it is thrown up to the next level…
Sub-conscious
The gateway between the un-conscious mind and the active conscious mind is the sub-conscious “Censor”. This can work in two directions, trying to prevent nonsense or untruths getting lodged in the lower level and also trying to stop other nonsense or embarrassing revelations leaving!
Conscious
Finally, the top level, this is where all your sensors exist and is the active controllable part of your mind, the “Observer-Reasoner”. Information enters here, is actively processed, passed down to the lower levels and hopefully good ideas leave. Being too active in the conscious mind could, he argues, also act like a censor, as ideas from the lower levels only rise to the surface when the conscious mind is quieter.
Jones argues that in order to be more creative, you have to be constantly curious to keep your un-conscious mind fuelled and then weaken your censor to let more ideas through. Also turning your conscious mind ‘off’ or otherwise occupied with small trivial tasks can allow new thoughts to surface. He suggests that dreams are a commonly talked about way of achieving this and gives many examples of famous inventions that have been attributed to dreams of the inventor.
Other ways to weaken the mental barriers to creativity are day dreaming, telling and hearing jokes, and play. Driving, walking, or other forms of travelling have also been known to help (also see the third B in next chapter), as the constant small and changing observations, help saturate the conscious mind. I would add meditation here as another likely enabler.
Some simple ways to be more creative:
Do all you can to grow an open and absorbing, curious mind
Seek out diversity and variety
Give your brain time to wander
Try things without fear of failure. You learn from failure, being right is purely confirmation
Keep a log book, write things down or somehow create a reference library of ideas or things
Ask questions, watch and copy others.
“My creative process is quite slow. I hear melodies in my head while I’m washing the dishes and I allow my subconscious to do the work.”
Sinead O’Connor
The Three B’s of Creativity
“Bed”
“Bath”
”Bus”
Switch off, relax and explore new things.
Ideas come to us all the time. But the best ideas normally come to us when we’re not trying to think of them and the three B’s are a great way to unleash your unconscious mind and keep it fuelled with inspiration.
Bed…
No joke, go to sleep. Prime your mind with the problem you’re working on and then go to bed. When your conscious mind switches off and your guard drops, the solution might just come to you in a dream. The inventor of the sewing machine had been working on the problem for ages. Then one night he had a dream where he was attacked by a tribe of people with spears and thrown in a pot to be cooked. Whilst obviously having a nightmare one of the spears was thrust towards him and he noticed something out of place… the spear had a hole in the head of it. The next morning the problem was solved.
Bath…
Representing any activity where you can “switch off” your conscious mind and just relax or drift into autopilot. Have a relaxing bath or shower, go for a walk, or take a drive.
Sara Blakely, the self-made billionaire founder of Spanx, wakes up an hour early each morning so she can drive around aimless as part of a “fake commute” because this is when she has her best thinking time.
Nintendo even installed office Bathtubs and it was during one long soak after a stressful time in the 1980s that now legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto thought of Donkey Kong and then Mario.
Bus…
“[Travel is] fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
- Mark Twain
The least literal of the three Bs but representing the broader sense of travel. Changing your surroundings, your environment, the people you hang out with. Spend lunch with someone new and different to yourself, take a different route to the shops, or travel the world. Whatever it is, big or small, the aim is to break up your routine and introduce new fresh ideas and stimuli into your unconscious mind.
J.K. Rowling thought of the idea of Harry Potter whilst stuck on a train for four hours and Nick Woodman, founded GoPro after spending some time travelling and surfing.
“I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.”
- Baz Luhrmann
“The simplest way to create more ideas is to expose yourself to more ideas.”
David Jones