Ideas are the fodder of our lives these days. Gone are the days of physical labour, even in the professions where labour is necessary, construction, agriculture, and others, the application of technology, the result of ideas is everywhere.
So how do you come up with the ideas that make your life more productive and comfortable .
Look at it the other way, rather than just hoping that a great idea comes in a flash in the shower, think about the habits and practises that you need to undertake in order to improve the probability that the ideas will emerge.
Feed your subconscious with the fodder it needs to consume in order that it is able to grow the ideas.
Curiosity.
Questions are the source of most ideas, and we do not ask enough of them, I suspect because we have been trained from an early age to think that asking questions is a signpost to ignorance. Think about how your kids learnt, they asked endless questions, just because they were curious.
What if? why? How does that work? When?
Be a kid again, and ask questions, and from the answers, you will not only learn, you will have the opportunity to have ideas presented to you on a plate.
Brain-dumping and re-ordering.
Consumption of the idea fodder is half the battle, the other half is to find ways to fit it all together in different ways, apply it to a variety of contexts, and problems. In other words, forcing yourself to regurgitate what we see in other forms really works. The story of the development of the post it note is a classic in re-ordering.
Have an idea corral.
Ideas come when they come, and not necessarily when you want them to come. In fact, I have often found that they come at the most awkward times, stimulated by something I see, hear or read, not when I am sitting down trying to bring it on. As a result you need some sort of corral in which to capture these fragments, and ideas before they disappear. There are now many digital tools, but you can still use the old fashioned notebook. I use both, a notebook, and OneNote on my computer to capture the stuff that pops into my head, almost never when I expect and want it to.
Conspicuous consumption.
Ideas are the result of what you consume, the more volume and variety of consumption, the more likely that something useful will emerge. This is not to encourage you to watch more cooking or renovation shows on TV, although they do count, it is to encourage you to widen the reach and increase the quality of that consumption. With the wealth of information at your fingertips, there is no longer any excuse not to scratch the curiosity itch.
Articulate your ideas.
Listening to an idea in your head, is different somehow to speaking it out loud. Saying them out loud, particularly to an audience, even if it is your dog, but even better a few friends, a small network group, those at the pub, whatever it is, speaking out loud helps order the ideas, and subjects them to the discipline of the crowd. As a kid I was a reasonable tennis player, a modicum of talent that was well coached, and combined with a competitive attitude, I was OK. However, when I started coaching, it made me a better player, as I had to articulate all that I had learnt from my coach, and from competition to those I was coaching. In the process, my own game improved considerably, as I applied the lessons articulated.
Devils advocate.
The most productive commercial relationship I ever had was with a bloke to whom I reported for quite a long time, in two different companies. The course of our debates was always coloured by the presence of the devil. Even if we agreed, one of us would take the contrary point and argue it, and the inevitability was that the outcome was better than the starting point. The point is not to win the argument, but to use the different points of view and perspectives productively to arrive at better outcomes.
Think backwards.
Ideas are only any good when they do something useful. Normally that is to solve a problem for someone, so rather than beating your head against a wall trying to come up with ideas, try and identify problems, then think backwards to the solution. I suspect Uber did not emerge as an idea, it evolved as a solution to the problems associated with the taxi industry as it was in most of the developed world. Thinking about the solutions to a problem will always generate ideas. When running a workshop, I would never go in and ask for ideas, you go in and spend some time defining the nature of a problem, and only then go looking for solutions.
Randomise.
Routine is the enemy of ideas, routine allows you to go through the motions without thought, by rote, and it is in the disruption of routine that ideas may emerge. Go to lunch in different places, exercise at different times and in different manners, seek a variety of physical and emotional environments to spark a variety of different thoughts.
Be a changeling
Never believe that the best idea is the first one you have , be prepared to be wrong, to include new information or elements that adjust the original. Do not however, mistake the agility of accepting new information with being unable to make up your mind. Those who get great ideas are in my experience the most disciplined of people despite the sometimes chaotic appearance.
Never forget that ideas come from our ability as human beings to make connections all sorts, in all sorts of ways. Imagination, the creation of ideas, then being able to do something with them, is what makes us human.
