Your
‘blue-sky’/dreaming/brainstorming/divergent thinking sessions should generate a number of way
out there ideas. Remember that the sign
for success of that type of thinking is the number and the craziness of the
ideas, not their practicality.
Once you have a
list of ideas, you need to pick the ones to develop into action plan.
Approaching a problem with traditional, linear, left-brain thinking would start
by looking at what was practical right away.
The key to creative thinking is combining this logical, left-brain
thinking, with your intuitive, emotional, right-brain thinking to develop a truly creative solution.
Since all your
ideas from the first stage should all be impractical, crazy ideas, you can’t
really decide on the basis of practicality – that would defeat the whole cause
of creative thinking. What you need to
use to select those ideas you want to develop is energy. Do they annoy you? Do they make you laugh with their
silliness? Do they push or pull
you in some emotional way? What
you’re looking for is those ideas that you react to emotionally, whether that
emotion is laughter about the stupidity, or being annoyed and irritated at how
impractical the idea is.
The emotion that
you feel is your intuitive, emotional right-brain and your unconscious mind
communicating with you. These two
aspects of you see patterns and connections that a logical, linear approach
would not see. It’s like the Sony engineer
who saw kids on roller skates and skateboards and saw kids listening to music,
and thought ‘music on wheels’ to come up with the Walkman. It seems obvious now, but back then, it was a
revolutionary breakthrough.
We’re very good in
our society at thinking logically and rationally with our left-brain. Many of us have to learn to communicate with our right brains, and this emotional
reaction is a first step. What it’s
telling you is that, at some level, you’ve seen a pattern or the essence of a
solution that your logical, rational brain simply can’t see. Those are the ideas you need to grab on to
and work with to create the truly breakthrough ideas to take you a quantum leap
beyond where you are now.
What you have to do
to move from the crazy idea to the solution is find out what the essence
of the idea is and find a way to make that workable. You’re not going to literally make the dreams
happen, but how could it be ‘as if’ you did?
How could you make the essence of the dream workable? That
is the breakthrough that creative thinking allows you develop – it takes you to
a place you could never otherwise have reached because you allowed yourself to
dream first.
