The Idea Place

By Peter Lloyd

Where is your Creative Space? Where are you when you get your best ideas? Can a place actually help you be more creative? These questions have intrigued me for some time now. I've snooped around a bunch of creative spaces. Some stand alone brainstorming centers, some rooms dedicated to creative thinking inside advertising agencies and innovation-focused corporations, and some of the places I've made more conducive for my own inventive efforts.

I've looked into creative space, because it seems to me that if we knew whether or not a place could improve creativity, we might go there more often or at least whenever we wanted great ideas. Which begs the question, when don't we want great ideas?

In my pursuit, I've surveyed working people from a variety of organizations. "Where are you and what are you doing when you get your best ideas?" I ask. The most surprising result--people do not get their best ideas where they work! It's not surprising that I get this answer. It is surprising that we keep insisting on spending so much of our time in the place where we get the least desirable results. For a lot of people the office is an idea desert.

And another surprise: None of the companies I surveyed has incorporated into their work routines the simple solution of going to the places where they do get their best ideas. Some of those places--like the shower of bedroom--don't exactly make great office meeting rooms, but some do. Some people think better outside, for example. I once worked with an art director at an ad agency, who agreed with me that our office just wasn't an idea-generating asset. We made a habit of going outside and walking around our block together. Bingo! Every time we did this we never failed to come up with excellent results.

In our book Think Naked: Childlike brilliance in the rough adult world, Marco Marsan and I offer four principles for getting better ideas. The first is to find your Happy Place. That is, surround yourself with the people and conditions most likely to support your creative efforts. You know who these people are and what those conditions are. If you don't, keep your eyes open for a while and notice. When you get a great idea, note and remember where you are and what you're doing. Then do it some more.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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