I am often asked by managers and business people that I meet: How can I get great ideas? I tend to answer this question with a metaphor: Getting ideas is like catching butterflies. So what can you do to catch butterflies? Of course, you can equip yourself with a net and run madly behind a butterfly until you catch it. However, chasing butterflies with a net is tiresome work and the results can be rather meager. There is another, better strategy. You can first invest your time and efforts in creating a beautiful garden. Initially, this requires hard work and takes more time. And, on the face of it, seems to bear no relation to catching butterflies. But once the garden is blooming, you just need to step out and the butterflies are there all over the place, attracted by your wonderful garden. Now it’s very easy to catch many butterflies — particularly if you’ve also invested in a net.

Now how is getting ideas similar to catching butterflies? One method of generating ideas is to follow a systematic creative process and to familiarize yourself with serious thinking tools and creativity techniques. By far the most popular creativity technique is Brainstorming. Brainstorming makes use of the collective brains of a team that are brought together into a thinking session for a given period of time (usually up to one hour). Brainstorming is an integral part of the culture and idea generation strategy of IDEO, one of the leading industrial design companies in the world. However, my experience tells me that when Brainstorming, most companies don’t adhere to the four ground rules of this creativity technique: Defer judgment; go for quantity; shoot for wild, crazy ideas; and combine and improve on ideas. In business brainstorming sessions these rules are often violated. All too often, an absurd idea is quickly shot down or ridiculed, which inhibits participants from shooting for wild ideas. Brainstorming has another, more severe downside: Research studies have consistently confirmed that when it comes to generating a huge quantity of ideas, brainstorming is inferior to other creativity techniques. And as Art Fry, the inventor of 3M’s Post-it Notes, emphasized: “The object is to spur as many IDEAS as possible because perhaps one in 1,000 will turn out to fit.” However, one hour of brainstorming with a group of eight participants often does not even churn out a hundred ideas. So what can you do? The answer is to learn more about the ground rules of creativity and about other superior creativity techniques from an experienced creativity coach. There are over 200 other creativity techniques around aside from Brainstorming, and a prime creativity trainer will instruct you in the use of at least 20 tools to enable you to become a savvy creative thinker. Remember Abraham Maslow’s advice here: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

To return to our butterfly metaphor: The other alternative that you have in order to regularly generate many great ideas is to invest in the building of the beautiful garden of your soul — or in other words: to rediscover your Creative Self. We are all born creative. As young children, we were highly creative. But our innate creativity is quieted down by school, our parents, our friends and peers: in short, by the socialization processes of our society. In order to rediscover your innate creativity, you need to invest time in developing positive character traits that psychological research has uncovered behind the great geniuses of all time. You should strive to become a modern Renaissance man by being yourself instead of following the social mask of your ego; being courageous and persistent; being curious, open and tolerant; becoming a “T-shaped person” who combines a deep domain expertise with a broad general knowledge and skills base (just think of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous “T-shaped” Vitruvian Man); and being passionate about what you do. In many ways an example of a highly creative modern Renaissance man is His Majesty, King Bhumibol of Thailand. Examples of modern Renaissance men in business are Virgin’s Richard Branson, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Bill Gates and Thomas Edison, the famous inventor and founder of GE.

Once you have rediscovered your creative self, your creativeness will be on a higher level, as you’ll have learned to make use of the principles of incubation and insight. Now you are also more likely to experience an incredibly empowering “Eureka!” moment — that sudden flash of insight that hit the Greek philosopher Archimedes. Of course the best way to regularly get great ideas is to move up toward the pinnacle of the creativeness pyramid. Here you have transformed into a modern Renaissance man who has learned to master a number of creativity techniques and serious thinking tools, and who has the discipline to follow a systematic creative process. So where do you start? Buying the net? By investing in the creation of a garden? Or maybe by doing both?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2007. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 10 May 2007.