Question: How To Have Kick-Ass Ideas?
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, goals, productivity Tuesday May 27, 2008
Answer: Have a lot of ideas.
end of post.
Only kidding. It is true though that most of the people who have had great ideas have had hundreds if not thousands of terrible ones. As Thomas J. Watson of IBM once said: “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
The common approach to getting good ideas is to brainstorm. To get together with others and throw ideas out there while holding back on the inner critic. It’s often advertised as an almost magical, zen like leap into creativity, where all our problems can be solved. Trouble is it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because people can’t keep there mouth shut. As soon as a good idea is put forward, people cannot resist the urge to put it down, either because they fear they might get lumbered with implementing it, or they already have their own ‘winning’ idea.
There is also the belief that good ideas a really hard to come by. That it takes ‘experts’ or large research budgets to uncover them. Surely, most of the best ideas have already been had? What, after all, can we come up with that hasn’t already been ‘discovered’ by the experts and the smart entrepreneurs? Such thinking, while understandable, is hogwash. Let me prove it. At idea-a-day they have been publishing an idea every day for over 2000 days! Ideas generated by the likes of you and me. Not all of them are great; some of them need work. But there are some really good ideas there. The trick is to get into the mindset for coming up with ideas. The first step is to realise that good ideas can be found everywhere. What we need is a better way than brainstorming to get to them. Seth Godin explains a technique called Edgecraft - a way to explore the edges of any activity, product or service that can be used both professionally and personally. It’s basic approach is to identify ’soft innovations’ - innovations that are cheap and easy to discover, and are those that are usually sitting right under our noses. To do edgecraft you take what you are already doing in your personal or professional life and push it towards an extreme - towards an edge. This can involve flipping a characteristic of the thing you are edgecrafting, or adding something or taking something away. Godin gives numerous examples, some of which I’ll reproduce here:
Make an invisible service visible
- labeling organic food organic
- putting yellow ribbons on trees
Make a visible product invisible
- braces on teeth
Make a product that is very safe or very dangerous
- antibacterial wipes for children
- helicopter skiing
Leave something out
- MTV’s unplugged
- caffeine free coffee
Make an invisible product visible
- white earphones on the ipod
Make the permanent disposable or make the disposable permanent
- disposable digital cameras
- $2000 fancy pens
You get the point, and there are many more in his book Free Prize Inside.
Although the book is primarily aimed at professional life and the production of products or services, it can be applied to your everyday life also. Just think about the stuff you do and imagine what it would be like if you pushed it to an extreme. For example, lets take the everyday chore of dusting your nice hardwood floors. How can you make this a fun or interesting activity?
…Introducing the Baby Mop!
Make him work for his mashed up green peas.
OK, perhaps not the best (or ethical) of ideas. But the point is to have fun and see where it takes you. You never know, you might just change the way the world does things from now on.
Update: Michael Norten has written a book outlining 365 ways to change the world, nearly all of them are pretty easy to do and shows how simple ideas are out there ready for the taking.
