5 Ways to Make Sure You Are Always Generating Ideas

That light bulb moment – the one we constantly crave. A flick of the switch that takes you from a blank page to a whirlwind of possibilities. Inventions, products, companies, recipes; we live and breathe ideas. We eat them for breakfast, we debate them in the boardroom, we vote for them. Perhaps our greatest commodity, they deserve some attention.

Which begs the question: why should we always have to wait for the lightbulb? There are ways to help hone the idea-generating process for both you, and your business – sharpening the way you develop thoughts to foster creative thinking.

Generating ideas – or at least good ones – is a skill, and like most skills, it can be learned. This isn’t an overnight, one-stop solution, but a case of putting procedures in place to change the way you connect the dots.

1. Structured Exercises

In business, structure breeds creativity. Putting time aside to get the brain working creates focus. At BBT, if we are facing a specific problem, I will always look at ways an exercise could stimulate a solution.

An example of this would be splitting the team into partners and giving them 15 minutes to come up with 40 ideas on a specific topic. They might only come up with 30 (or even less) but somewhere in there, there’s usually two or three gems, or something we can use as a starting point.

2. Randomly Research

Google is great when you know specifically what you’re looking for, but the best in idea generation often comes from the unexpected. The strange and obscure often has a way of stretching the brain a bit and asking it new questions.

Stay with me here. You don’t need to be a deep thinker to generate ideas, you just need to break your conventional way of thinking. Take an hour each week to research randomly. Try Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button and you’ll be pleasantly surprised where you end up.

3. Hone Observation

Steve Jobs once said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.’ Observation and “doing” has everything to do with idea generation. So, go for walk! Travel somewhere you’ve never been before, change up the usual. And take a notebook.

4 .Get Annoyed

What gets on your nerves? What do you wish could be different? When managed correctly, irritation has the power to tap into the best ideation. Keep a running list of the things that bug you and then seek out solutions to put a cap on those annoyances.

In business, we so often look for the answer, when really we should be looking at the problems first. Put what infuriates you under a microscope, and soon you’ll find you have more of a drive to make change because you’ll really want it.

5. Look From The Outside In

We all know the feeling of being too close to a project. This can create a mental block and getting a fresh perspective really can make all the difference. Because ideas can be so precious, many in business choose to keep them close to the chest, when the fact is greatness can often come from collaborative thinking.

Whether you chat with a colleague or bring it up over a beer with a mate, get someone who is unfamiliar with the situation or topic to ask you questions about it. This will lead you to ideas you may have overlooked because they were too obvious, or something completely new.

Great ideas aren’t reserved for the masterminds – they’re all around us, every single day. To generate them, fundamentally, we need to implement processes that free us from the conventional. So commit to those processes and give yourself and your team the space to think differently.