To stimulate brainstorming – in groups, or by yourself – here are seven tools and influences which can help increase your creative thinking.
Built upon the ‘recipe’ from another post, I call these items ‘utensils’ because I see them as useful tools to stimulate or improve how your brain works. Interestingly, each of the items begins with the letter ‘I’.
- Intelligence
- Imagination
- Insight
- Infinity
- Interaction
- Inspiration
- Ideas
Ingredients to Stimulate Your Brainstorming
Here are the seven elements to stimulate your brainstorming.
Intelligence
The combination of your knowledge and skills stored in your brain. You tap this significant wealth to create understanding of a situation or problem. You use these as stimulus to spark ideas and to link disparate (even conflicting) notions together. Intelligence feeds your intuition to stimulate brainstorming.
Imagination
Your ability to create mental visions or pictures. If intelligence is current and past information, imagination is future information. To be imaginative, you must open yourself to everything that’s possible and impossible, You must limit negative or restrictive thoughts. As a skill, I call it day-dreaming – one of the most under-rated and necessary mental activities, particularly at work.
Insight
This refers to isolating the kernel of truth or understanding about a particular topic. (What does ‘X” mean?) Insight is created in two steps, through:
- Observation and discovery, an intensive examination of everything associated with the need or problem, such as its history or the current perceptions of the audiences who might need or use the idea, and
- Obsession, a thorough pre-occupation with both the topic and the problem, often when not directly engaged with the problem.
Infinity
Your ability to create as many ideas as possible. By having more ideas, you’ll also yield more good ideas. See the post entitled .
Interaction
This can be described with the saying, two heads are better than one. Of course yiou can brainstorm alone, but it’s typically more effective if the imaginative power of many people are leveraged at the same time. By sharing individual ideas and energy, compatible ideas from different points of view can be combined and merged into bigger and more successful ideas.
Inspiration
The flash of brilliance! The spark of AHA! Inspiration comes when the other elements combust. Different people describe the moment differently, but more often than not, it’s usually a spontaneous and fateful event, happening when the problem-solver least expects it, during daydreaming, taking a walk or working on a different project.
Ideas
Yes, ideas are needed to make other ideas. That’s not a joke. To produce ideas – either good or bad – your brain thinks of other, older, different ideas which may have helped solve another problem. If the other/older ideas are completely unrelated to the current situation, even better. It’s easy to put this into practice. Bring a large col,lection of pictures of images to your next brainstorm. (Seeor.) Each photo is essentially an idea which you/your brain can merge into a totally new idea.
What else do you use a tool to help stimulate brainstorming? Please add your comments below!
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