One of the things that I find simply astonishing in my work as creativity coach and innovation expert is the great degree of discomfort that most business people feel toward wild ideas. Today, let’s together take a walk on the wild side and spend some time to better understand and appreciate the immense value of wild ideas.
What’s the purpose of wild ideas? In his classic creativity book Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn, the “father of brainstorming” and creator of a number of other creativity techniques, suggested that whenever we undergo an ideation effort, we must follow four all-important ground rules of ideation. The third of Osborn’s four ground rules goes as follows: “The wilder, the better. Encourage wild, crazy, absurd, funny, silly, zany, weird, off-the-wall ideas.”
Why did Osborn, a sober businessman who built up and ran a highly successful creative agency in New York, charge us to shoot for wild ideas when we brainstorm or do ideation? He understood that a far-fetched wild idea may be the stepping stone for a highly original meaningful idea, or may lead our thinking to an unusual viewpoint or aspect that we’ve completely neglected so far.
Many eminent scientists, thinkers and business leaders have learned to appreciate the value of wild, crazy, absurd ideas. For example, David Ogilvy (another founder of a famous creative agency) noted that “The best ideas come as jokes”, and recommended to ideators: “Make your thinking as funny as possible.” The Nobel prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr once famously remarked: “We all know the idea is crazy. The question is whether it is crazy enough?” Similarly, his colleague Albert Einstein noted that “If the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Given that all these creative high-flyers emphasize the immense value of wild ideas, wouldn’t it be now the best time for you as an aspiring business top achiever to become more open toward wild, crazy, absurd ideas?
How can we notice a wild idea? Wild ideas are ideas that may make you and other people feel uncomfortable because they may suggest a course of action that is shocking, abnormal, illegal, unconventional, impossible, outrageous, impractical or very funny. When you think or suggest an idea that makes you spontaneously laugh out loud —or start feeling uncomfortable in your gut—, you have an encounter with a wild idea. Congratulations. By any means, write it down immediately.
Unfortunately, most businesspeople avoid expressing a wild idea out of fear that other people will think negatively about them. In the Asian cultural context, an ideator is afraid to “lose face” if she puts forward such a wild idea. To resolve this dilemma, you need an experienced facilitator who emphasizes the importance of wild ideas to the group, and who guides the group toward producing a pool of wild ideas (alongside other ideas).
How to get wild ideas? Fortunately, there are a number of potent creativity techniques out there that help you fish for wild ideas. Alternatively, at least at one point during an ideation session, you should make an effort to only come up with wild, crazy, funny, absurd, weird, impossible, off-the-wall ideas for your challenge. Remember that many breakthrough ideas have derived from a seedling that initially was considered a wild, crazy idea by most people. Insofar, reconnect to your wild, crazy side and jot down any wild idea that your subconscious mind suggests to you.
How to deal with wild ideas? Here is an important thing that you need to understand about wild ideas: Normally, we don’t take a wild idea at face value and act upon it ‘as is’. Instead, we treat a wild idea as a stepping-stone to venture off into a completely new direction and create a truly new, surprising yet meaningful idea concept out of it. This can be done by changing one or more words in the idea sentence (e.g., change the wild idea “Hit our customers” into “Hug our customers”), by combining a wild idea with an interesting idea, or by using other formal approaches to tame a wild idea into something meaningful.
Remember that ideas are somewhat like horses. The majority of ideas that people suggest in a normal brainstorming session or ideation effort are stale, dull, and unoriginal; such an idea is like a baby horse that is stillborn — there is no hope for it. On the other hand, when you catch a wild horse, you can turn it into something useful, provided you are committed to invest the time and effort to ride it in. Similarly, there are ways to effectively deal with a wild idea and to turn it into an original, meaningful idea concept; at Thinkergy, we’ve developed a repertoire of half a dozen techniques in our X•IDEA Innovation Toolbox to effectively deal with wild ideas.
Conclusion: “Every really new idea looks crazy at first”, noted the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. So whenever you do ideation, be courageous and shoot for wild, crazy, funny, off-the-wall ideas, so that you might be able to create something really new, great and original.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 17 February 2011.