September 5, 2024
Generative Thinking – Bring Fresh New Ideas
With innovation leaping to the top of the list of success factors for companies both large and small, generative thinking is fast becoming an indispensable and obligatory skill. As Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation says, “Without creativity a manager may do a good job, but he can’t do an outstanding one.” Generative thinking is what brings new, fresh ideas to your business practices and leads to breakthrough advances – both much needed if you’re to stay ahead of the game.
The basic purpose of generative thinking is to come up with lots of ideas – it’s your ‘ideas machine’. Thinking generatively involves getting into a frame of mind where you can produce tons of new alternatives, ideas and solutions in relation to your issue, opportunity or problem. You can think inside the box or outside the box, it doesn’t matter, the key is that you open your mind into wide focus to consider all possibilities, whether wacky, conventional or impossible. Psychologist J. P. Guilford puts forward evidence that divergent thinking processes such as generative thinking are a major component of creativity. This is because they encourage your thinking to flow freely and stray off in all sorts of different directions, allowing you to explore and engage with multiple aspects of an issue to spark off as many original ideas as possible.
Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny.
Laurence J.Peter, American educator and writer
Generative thinking is not only for the obvious applications such as new product development and marketing. It’s necessary for all areas of business including strategic planning, operational management and even finance. Tantamount with what most people think of as brainstorming, it plays a valuable role during the early stages of problem solving and decision making which call for exploration, insight and inventiveness.
How to Promote Generative Thinking
Although there can be no ‘rules’ for creativity as such, there are four widely-cited principles that serve to encourage high-value generative thinking. These originated from the ‘father of brainstorming’, Alex Osborn, via his book Applied Imagination, and have since evolved through further psychology and management research. The idea is that following these principles will enable us to release our minds to create more energy and deliver greater creative power than we would otherwise. They can be employed when thinking alone, but work even better in a team setting.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of them.
Linus Pauling, American theoretical chemist and biologist
1) Strive For Quantity
The goal of generative thinking is to generate a multitude of ideas and options… but why do we need to generate so many ideas – we only need one to solve our problem? Because innovation is a numbers game. As the saying goes, the greater the number of oysters, the more likely you are to find some pearls in them. By producing as many ideas as possible, we seriously raise our chances of hitting on the one breakthrough idea that surpasses all previously known limits. And so we must aim to take a leaf out of Thomas Edison’s book – he conducted around 9,000 experiments before successfully developing a working electric light bulb. Through quantity, we can achieve quality. A high correlation between quantity and quality of ideas has actually been verified by researchers such as Diehl and Stroebe, who in a series of experimental studies found that quantity measures are reliable predictors of total idea quality.
2) Encourage Wild and Unusual Ideas
This principle is about assisting yourself and others to open new directions for generating ideas and to express your wilder, madcap notions. There’s an old maxim that says, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore”. This is what generative thinking requires of us. It asks us to go beyond conventional thinking and look at things differently by changing perceptions and patterns and playing with new concepts and starting points. It’s an approach that has lots in common with Edward de Bono’s concept of ‘lateral thinking’, in which the whole idea is to escape the conventional, obvious, cliché train of thought and draw out more outrageous and unexpected associations. These new associations are what will eventually lead us to new shores.
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German playwright, poet and novelist
3) Postpone Judgement
For a generative thinking session to run smoothly we have to suspend any judgement of ideas until we’ve generated a sufficient quantity of alternatives to work with. This means deferring all criticism, analysis, reflection and evaluation – both positive and negative. While all of the four principles are important, ‘holding off’ on judging your ideas and solutions is fundamental so that the other principles can actually operate.
If you’ve ever been in a meeting where people are generating ideas and debating them at the same time, you can understand how much it slows down the session, saps the energy of those involved and reduces the production of ideas. In the time it takes to judge, you could instead be creating twice as many ideas! Much of our valuing can be negative, killing off ideas prematurely. When you suspend the critical evaluation of ideas, you give everyone the green light to exercise their imagination freely. A judgement-free atmosphere is a relaxed atmosphere, encouraging a better flow of ideas without fear of rejection.
4) Build and Combine Ideas
This principle involves creating new offshoot ideas by encouraging participants to improve, link and combine ideas already suggested. Ideas rarely arrive in the world fully formed. Through this principle you can take the buds of success in someone’s half-baked idea and, by process of association, develop it to fruition.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and lecturer
Some of the more wacky and crazy ideas are not solutions at first. This activity is what modifies, expands and transforms them so they can have a better basis in reality. For instance, Art Fry, the 3M company employee who developed a ‘useless’ super weak glue could have just left things there. Instead he continued to build on what he had invented by looking for a solution for his glue. The result is now the multi-million dollar phenomenon known as the ‘post-it’ note.
I start where the last man left off.
Thomas Edison, American inventor and scientist
It’s surprising how by elaborating and expanding on just one idea you can give birth to new and unexpected products or ways of doing things. If you want to be really radical then try combining two ideas that aren’t closely related and see what happens. The number of combinations you create is limited only by your imagination.
