6 Steps to Get Your Creativity Flowing
Tom Kelley, executive director of IDEO—one of the planet's most innovative design firms—reveals how the rest of us can apply the firm's creativity-generating techniques to get unstuck.
As told to Jancee Dunn
Photo: Oli Kellet/Iconica/Getty Images
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Let No Idea Escape
Ideas are precious and fragile and tend to show up when we're in the shower, in bed or stuck in traffic. So we forget them. Try to capture 100 percent of your ideas—on your smartphone, in a notebook, on the back of receipts or boarding passes. Go for quantity. Defer judgment until later, when you start to sift through them. You'll probably find that you have a thousand concepts—and most of them are bad.
At IDEO, we start a brainstorming session on an empty whiteboard, and in the next 60 minutes we try to fill it with at least a hundred fresh ideas. (By the way, if you number the ideas as you go, no self-respecting brainstorm group would ever want to stop at number 97.) We're happy if we come out with a few leads.
Published 06/16/2015
