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A technique to open yourself up to new ideas quickly. For more of these kinds of resources go to the website of creativity@work, the company I run with my friend and business partner, Andy Green. We can be found at: www.creativityatwork.co.uk
Exercise - Random Word
This is a powerful technique to generate new ideas in a short space of time – it is a technique that is forcing you to look at a problem in new ways to gain new insights and ideas for action.
As the first step, identify an issue/problem/challenge in your business or in your life you need some new ideas or insights on to move forward. It can be anything though we recommend for the purposes of this particular exercise that you choose a small to medium kind of problem – you’ll know the one to work on. State the problem as a sentence (you can if you wish, draw it or represent it in some way instead of writing it as a sentence).
Then get a newspaper, magazine or book, take a pencil/pen, and without looking at the words, move the pencil/pen around above a page and then put the point on the page at random. See what word the point of the pencil/pen is on and write this word underneath your issue/problem.
You now have five minutes to jot down on your paper all the connections you can make between your problem and the word you have chosen at random. Warning! – Your first response is very likely to be "I can’t make any connections!" Know that this is your existing mind-set in action. The trick here is to write down anything, without evaluating it or considering it. Once this first stage of the exercise is finished you can then review what you have written, until then just put down whatever comes to you. This exercise is essentially using the associations you make using the word chosen at random. Have fun with this, be as crazy as you like for now – the review and evaluation comes later.
On one of our courses, one of our participants at this point sat for five minutes staring blankly at his page. His problem was how to get the various companies involved in the ‘Snagging Process’ for a new building (6 months after the building is first completed) to liaise more effectively than they were. His word was ‘Island’. He shared that he couldn’t make any connections. I responded, "Well what comes to me is the phrase ‘No man is an island’". It was as if a light bulb came on above his head, he wrote quickly for about two minutes and then said to us, "I’ve got my presentation to make to the companies!" It was that fast! We have had plenty of examples of people generating successful, practical solutions to their problems with this technique. So, even if your habitual thinking is going "It doesn’t make sense!" Go for it! It is not meant to make sense – that’s the whole point!!!!
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