CREATIVITY

How to generate different ideas

When you need it - or want it

Have you already been bored, without anything for do? Have you already felt yourself prisoner to the same previously followed ways, and you would appreciate very much something different? Would you like something that stimulated your mind to seek the new, the different? Or even better, several new and different things, so you can choose the best?

We're going to describe here a creativity technique called "random word", a very simple one, that doesn't demand learning and produce immediate results. It is based in the huge capacity that our brain has to establish relations, links and connections between anything; in fact, we do it all the time, linking what we see and hear to what we already know. In this technique, instead of sitting down waiting for the apple to fall, we are going to shake the tree.

The technique consists in choosing a word related to that we want and then choose randomly another one, tying them with the word po and observing the connections that arise. The word po comes of possibility, hypothesis, supposition.

Follow the steps:

1. Choose a word that represents the target situation or direction: "learn", "cigarette", "job", "discipline".

2. Provide a random word (a noun). Don’t choose it by yourself, since we want to avoid the existing thoughts. The word can be selected in the following ways:

a) Use a dictionary. Think in a page number (for example, 238 in Webster’s) and a position in this page (for example, 9). To do this you can also look at the seconds pointer of a watch. Open the dictionary in the page 238 and find the ninth word. If it isn't a noun, continue until find one.

b) Close your eyes and place the finger tip on a page of a newspaper, magazine or book. Choose the noun nearer to the finger.

3. Attach both words by the word po: "unemployment po program", "discipline po exam". Register the ideas produced by the provocation.

Applied to this site, one of the good ideas produced, with the word "disability", was that of a section about people that go besides their presumed limits, as those without arms that paints holding the brush with the lips. See other ideas generated by means of this technique, for the theme "class":

Class po lip: To attract students attention or to make fun, keep the lips moving itself while stopping emiting sounds, as if you had been dumb. Improve the diction. For women, increase the lips with lipstick to make them more attractive and make the students pay more attention. Plan a full class without talking anything.

Class po rusk – to speak eating rusk and let crumbs get out of mouth to make them laugh.

The random word main idea is the provocation and search for new and different options of thinking. To preserve this spirit, follow the guidelines:

-  Don't decide that the current word isn't usable, departing immediately in search of others. You will be only waiting for a word that mortise in the existing ideas.

- Don't take too much steps: this suggests that... that carries to that... and that reminds me of...

To obtain the random stimulus you can use also images and objects, though words usually be wealthier (they are "packed” information) and more practical to use. Know more of this and several others techniques in de Bono's book.

V. V. Vilela

Editor

Based on Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas, Edward De Bono

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