Anatomy of Creative Leadership by Russ Schoen

A great question, and the opening line from David Vail’s (Geek Squad agent) latest blog entry on this past week’s Geek Squad’s
Do Tanks at the idea festival in Louisville, Kentucky. David and his fellow agents, idea festival attendees, and contest winners got to
experience a high paced, professionally facilitated interactive innovation session! As David puts it in his blog, "The energy, the excitement was infectious. And it was work."

Why was it work? Because many of us aren’t used to being deliberate in thinking up ideas. But doing so can not only be energizing it can lead to new insights as well.

So what does a rubber chicken have to do with a cell-phone? Well, one of the creative thinking tools we used during the session is called forced connections and here is how it works.

1) Pick a stimulus that is unrelated to the challenge you are working on. In this case, we picked a rubber chicken.

2) List attributes/characteristics of that stimulus.  In the case of a rubber chicken, some attributes/characteristics that might be listed include: yellow, flexible, silly, fun, hungry, stretchy, colorful

3) Pick one attribute/characteristic and use it to force new ideas to the challenge you are working on. Don’t judge the ideas, just list them! In the case of this session, we were working on how to improve upon the idea of a bio-degradable cell phone.

So for example, picking the characteristic of flexible might lead to the idea of having part of the cell phone be degradable (the casing), or being able to crunch up the phone into fertilizer. Picking the characteristic of hungry might lead me to think of food, which leads me to think about a line of biodegradable phones that would be made specifically to biodegrade for gardens ~ Use your phone to grow new food! Or the characteristic of silly, might lead to a line of environmentally friendly phones that educates children about recycling and has a special button (gps) that can tell you the nearest recycling place to your current location!  I could go on and on! But I won’t ~ Instead I’ll invite you to try out forced connections for yourself.

Here’s how:

First state a challenge that you want some ideas on ~ For example, how might you raise funds? or how might you attract new customers?

Now, pick an object unrelated to that challenge.

List some characteristics of that object.

Finally pick a characteristic and use that characteristic to inspire new ideas for solving your challenge!

Challenging? It just might be work at first. But practice this technique and you will be guaranteed to generate some novel ideas!