How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas

Shake Up Your Business, Shake Up Your Life

Chris Barez-Brown

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781602392434
• eBook ISBN: 9781626369122
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The one-stop resource for your own brilliant ideas! Stuck in a rut? Bored? Dissatisfied? Uninspired? Got a problem you don't know how to solve? What if you knew exactly what you wanted and could make it happen, right now? To get there, you need creativity—you need some kick-ass ideas. This book is chock-full of practical and inspirational ways to help you jump-start your creativity, identify what you want in life, and then make it happen. Chris Baréz-Brown turns companies around the world into highly creative and successful teams. Here he pours his best techniques into a book that reunites you with the imaginative genius inside you. It's about fun, freshness, and new ways of thinking, filling your life with new experiences, and then getting playful. With these step-by-step activities, case studies, and imaginative practical exercises, you can find out exactly what it is you want and then make it real! 75 color illustrations.

FIFTH BIT:

IDEAS

IT’S IDEAS TIME

CAPTURE YOUR OPPORTUNITY!

When you have done the Insight Exercises in the previous section, you will have a clearer view as to what the specific issue is that you want to crack. Although this may change as you have ideas and ponder it further, for the moment write it down and put it up on your wall. Now you know what you’re going for!

BEWARE OF THE BRAIN TRAP!

Our brains are fabulous learning machines. When we have an experience our brain files it away in case it is useful in the future. When we have a challenge that looks similar to what we have experienced before, our brain goes straight back to what we did last time and provides us with a tried and tested solution.

This is an incredibly fast and efficient way to live and learn. For instance, if I put my hand into a fire one day and burn it, if on the following day I saw another fire that wasn’t the same but looked familiar … you get the picture.

Through this process we learn and we grow. While this process is great for our development as human beings, it is very bad for creativity because whenever an opportunity arises for us to be creative, our brain does quite the opposite. It looks to see what we have done before. In short, we are hard-wired not to be creative.

THE MORE OFTEN YOU DO SOMETHING THE HARDER IT IS TO DO IT DIFFERENTLY

Imagine that you have spent the last 10 years of your life reviewing people. You have been on courses teaching you how to do it and must have done it 500 times by now. You believe that you understand the best way to do it and are happy with your results. Not only are you lacking motivation to try something new, but with all that experience it’s really hard to think of how it could be done. Your brain will automatically reference everything that you have done before and get caught up in your past experience.

A friend of mine was once taught to bake a traditional family cake by her mother. Once it was baked her mother cut the two ends off the cake and threw them in the bin. Intrigued by this, she asked her mom why she had done it. Her response was that she had been taught to bake this cake in this way and therefore that was how she had always done it. So my friend phoned up her grandmother and asked why she had taught her mom to bake like this – surely there was some fabulous family secret. Her grandmother explained that she did it because her baking tray was bigger than her cake tin, so the cake wouldn’t fit in. And that’s the way it works. We always do what we have done before. We are programmed to.

To make matters worse, the more experience we gain on a particular issue – say, reviewing a team – the harder it is to be creative when doing it. More experience means that the hardwiring gets more and more embedded and therefore it becomes harder and harder to break out of a pattern of thinking. In fact, the more expert you become on a subject, the more rigid your thinking becomes.

The opposite is the case with children. They have relatively little past experience and therefore find it perfectly natural to invent 20 ways to use a cardboard box. ‘It’s a spaceship, a fort, a place for spies to plan secret missions, it’s a toilet … oops’ But as adults we just classify a cardboard box as ‘packaging’ because we have seen it before and know what it does. So, as we mature and enjoy rich experiences in our lives, our brains become more programmed with past experience and consequently we find it harder to have new and different ideas. To break out of this backwards thinking we need to stimulate our imagination.

Some stimulus can cause profound reactions whilst others create an impact that is much more subtle. You don’t really know until you try, so playing with stimulus is experimental and is best done in a playful frame of mind. Some you win, some you lose. If you don’t get new and different ideas, just try something else. Stimulus should create energy and engage you. If they don’t, you are either not being playful enough or it’s simply not stimulating – so move on! Simple examples of stimulus include writing your opportunity or challenge in a different way or learning how someone else has faced a similar issue.

While there are thousands of types of stimulus, they can be grouped under five main principles:

1. Re-expression
2. Related worlds
3. Revolution
4. Random links
5. Relax

(These principles are covered in more depth in the fabulous book Sticky Wisdom. But for now, pages 166-82 are a summary.)

STIMULUS IS ANYTHING THAT CAUSES A REACTION IN US

RE-EXPRESSION

Perspective is everything! How happy we are, how we live our lives, how successful we feel, all comes from our perspective – as does getting stuck or achieving breakthroughs. There are many ways that you can re-express an opportunity or issue that is concerning you.

SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO

The words we use give us a very rigid view of our issue. By using different words to describe our issue we look at it differently. (See the example on the opposite page.)

So by describing your issue in a different way, you will see it differently and will consequently have different ideas. Doing this before starting any creative process gives you fresh insights and angles on the matter in hand.

There are many ways to look at your issue differently. You could draw it, sculpt it, mime it, bake it, or you could look at it as if through someone else’s eyes: a hobbit, Angelina Jolie, Ian Fleming, Christopher Columbus, a pigeon, Neil Diamond. It doesn’t matter what the angle is, as long as it changes your perspective and helps you create new and different ideas.

Some of my favorites are featured later in the book in a highly ‘do-able’ form:

• Splurge Time
• Back to the Future
• My Clever Friends
• Go Visual
• Through a Child’s Eyes

RAC – BREAKDOWNS ARE BUSTED

The breakdown and recovery market is under pressure. There is intense competition and cars are more reliable than ever, so there are fewer breakdowns needing such a service. Drivers also don’t like the idea of breaking down, it has such negative connotations as it means something has gone wrong.

By changing perspective, we re-expressed their business goal as ‘keeping drivers on the road’. This re-expression lead to the idea of RAC Solutions featuring a 28-point preventative car check and no call-out discount. The aim of the idea is to keep motorists on the road and avoid breakdowns...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTORY BIT
• FIRST BIT: - FREEDOM
• SECOND BIT: - THE PROCESS
• THIRD BIT: - MOJO-MAKING
• FOURTH BIT: - INSIGHT
• FIFTH BIT: - IDEAS
• LAST BIT: - IMPACT
• PICTURE CREDITS