I went to a presentation by Mike Hutcheson recently – his presentation was titled “Don’t think hard, think easy”. The point of the presentation is that you often think you can just turn great ideas on, or put another way, when you have a problem you can just think hard and turn out a solution. Mike’s point was that you can’t do that. Your brain isn’t a machine or a muscle it's something looser, more organic.
To achieve great ideas you need to relax and you need to mind to relax as well. Obviously the first part in generating a great idea or finding a solution to a problem is to understand the situation and the issues at hand. Immerse yourself in knowing what you need to know. After that your need to relax and allow enough time for you brain to process the information and come up with some solutions.
To make a point Mike gave the example of a major Sydney advertising agency which tracked all of their ideas over a 12 month period. Out of the 300 campaign ideas that were generated over that time, only 14 of them were conceived at work. The rest were at home, in the car, at lunch etc (probably mostly over a long lunch!). So work was about understanding the problem and then implementing the idea – not the place where the inspiration or idea was likely to be born. Out of the work environment, in a more relaxed state, you’re more likely to have that great idea.
Generating the great idea is actually the easy part. Acting on the idea, nurturing it and then implementing it are much harder. Another observation Mike had, was that you need to be very protective and supportive of your ideas, as most people aren’t creative and can’t understand taking an intuitive leap. He cited some informal research that was done where a company had its staff undertake a
Myers Briggs personality assessment.
What they discovered was the people that had an Intuitive profile were outnumbered 4:1 by Sensor profiles (people that like to understand reality and the facts). Now obviously we need people with Sensor profiles, but you can understand how they need to test your ideas, make sure they will work and collaborate to develop and convince others to actually implement them!
So to develop great ideas, immerse yourself in the problem, then relax and let the ideas develop. Once you have a great idea though, develop it, test it and then sell it hard.
Duncan ENTP