Todd Henry is the Founder and Managing Director at Accidental Creative as well as the arms dealer for the creative revolution.  His podcast has been instrumental in my development and it is an honor to have him as a guest on this blog.  If you would like to be considered for a guest post please email me at shawn@shawnwoodwrites.com

Whenever I speak to a group, I always ask “How many of you believe that great ideas are important to the future of your business or career?” Inevitably, every hand in the room goes up. Then I follow-up with“How many of you had time on your calendar in the past week dedicated solely to generating ideas for your work?” Silence. Crickets.

I’ve asked this question dozens of times to groups of every kind and I can count on one hand the number of people who answered that they had time on their calendar in the past week dedicated to generating ideas. (If you want to know what’s important to someone, you look at their calendar and their checkbook. Over and over it seems that idea generation doesn’t even show up as a blip on the radar for either.)

Why is this the case?

I think there are a few reasons. First, I don’t think it ever crosses our mind to plan for personal ideation time. (Idea generation is something that happens in groups, right?) Second, I think many of us are uncomfortable with what what “idea generation time” would even look like. We haven’t been given tools that we can use, and sitting around staring at a blank piece of paper waiting for something to happen just seems like a huge waste when we could be answering e-mail or organizing our task lists.

But once we understand that creative insight can be found through purposeful and intentional process (and that it often feels like work), we can become more structured in how we approach it. By exercising a little strategic ideation on a regular basis we can regularly generate much-needed ideas.

This is one of the reasons my team and I developed the Personal Idea Pad (PIP). We realized that one of the biggest hesitations people have about putting idea generation time on their calendar is that they don’t really know what to do with it. The PIP is a tool that helps you
(1) define a problem in a very concrete way and then (2) surround the creative problem and look at it from four perspectives: future, past, conceptual and concrete. By doing so, you are forced to think about solutions to the problem that may have otherwise been overlooked.

We’ve also used the PIP as an effective free-association tool in creative meetings. When we use it in this way, we typically break teams into groups of five and have them collectively fill out the PIP worksheet. First, they define the problem as a “challenge statement” to refine their thinking. Then they surround the challenge statement with words and concepts that spring to mind when thinking about the problem from the four perspectives (mentioned above). Once they’ve filled in the PIP worksheet, someone in the group calls out word combinations and the rest of the group shares ideas that emerge from the word combinations. (It’s critical to be loose and free with ideas and not to critique them at this point. Quantity of ideas yields
quality.) The PIP will help groups avoid ruts because it forces them to surround the problem and then to smash together concepts that would normally not be associated.

Whether individually or in groups, the important thing is to treat idea generation as a necessary discipline. Brilliant ideas are the currency of our future success or failure, so we need to structure our personal and team time to reflect that reality. We can’t allow necessity to drive our creative process. By building purposeful, rhythmic ideation into our team and personal schedules we can begin to experience creative insight on a more regular basis and stay ahead of the “create-on-demand” curve.