More Creative solutions

If you enjoyed my recent blog on finding creative solutions, which contained some highly stimulating ideas for getting ideas, here are ten more to stimulate and entertain you still further. To remove creative block, try these notions:

• OPPOSITES ATTRACT
Imagine the problem being tackled by the most dissimilar organisation you can think of. What solutions would be natural for them? For example, how would a fast-food company re-design a pension product? How would a software development operation think through an organic farming challenge?

• HONEY, I SHRANK THE PROBLEM
People don’t often want the best, they want the least worse – write down all the really bad things about the problem (how it impacts on clients or customers) then minimise each one. Quite often you can end up eradicating most of them.

• THINK LATERALLY
Provoke your mind. Logical thinking is for developing ideas. Lateral thinking is for changing ideas. For example, try reversing the situation you are thinking about. What’s bad about the alternative, what can you learn from it?

• STAND IN THEIR SHOES
Imagine you’re selling your idea to one of your customers, partners or your senior management team. Now stand in their shoes. What agenda might they have? What are the weaknesses they’ll try to exploit and strengths they’ll try to avoid?

• DON’T BE A STRANGER
Talk to someone in your company who you don’t normally speak to. For instance, those at the coalface often have far more practical solutions than those at a distance.

• AD-VANTAGE
Write an advert for your finished successful project. This will help you see its finished shape and may help you realise ways of achieving it.

• TRUE OR FALSE?
Assumption busting: list all the assumptions you are making with respect to your problem. Go through them one at a time and write a statement to refute them. Now go back to your problem.

• FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Use one of the online language translators, e.g. babelfish.altavista.com, and translate your problem into Russian, Japanese, Greek or Spanish, then translate it back into English.

• STROKE OF GENIUS?
Massage your carotid artery and encourage blood flow to your frontal lobes. Place your fingers where your collarbone stops at ‘bumps’ in the middle, dropping them about an inch and slightly outwards into two small indents either side of your sternum. Apply firm pressure as you massage first one side then the other.

• FIND THE ANSWER
Make sure you’re not missing anything by going back to the all-important questions: Who? When? Where? Why? How?

The Creative Block, a little box of square cards bearing one idea each, is a creative idea in itself, for which marketing consultancy Omobonodeserves much credit. So does its client, the East of England Development Agency, plus the people who produced the ideas. They range from a champion brewer (Paul Wells of Charles Wells) via a vicar (Peter Owen Jones) to a great professional authority on thinking (Edward de Bono).

This variety contains a creative lesson itself. Fresh minds contributing from different angles and backgrounds will help you escape from the Wrong Box (shutting you in with restrictive thinking) and then into the Creative Box – which is based on the thinking of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, authors of Oblique Strategies.