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Trouble-less Creativity

By Peter Lloyd

Every creative problem solver—that’s all of us—deals with the problem of generating really fresh ideas. Especially after a while. The longer you work on a problem, a scientific project, or a problem-solving team, the more difficult it can be to generate any kind of breakthrough.

It’s been called burnout. The solution to creative burnout is to introduce random stimulation. Randomness reigns as one of the most effective stimulants for kicking creative butts back into gear.

Alphabet Soup
I write songs for fun. With a hundred or so actually completed, it’s not as easy as it used to be to sit down and write one on demand. Here’s how, in one songwriting challenge, random stimulation saved the day.

descriptionIn the middle of writing a mystery story, I found myself in need of a song. "Write about what you know," I’ve been advised, so my story’s protagonist was a songwriter. Another character suspects him of a crime after finding what she thinks is the name of the murder victim embedded in one of his song lyrics.

Faced with the challenge of writing a lyric with a name embedded as an acrostic, I wondered, how is this going to happen? I began by writing the victim’s name in a column down the left side of a blank piece of paper. Now what?

To my surprise, the lyric seemed to flow out of nowhere! I’m convinced that giving myself an arbitrary outline absolutely breezed the song my way. Not worried about what to write, I started simply having fun beginning each line with a arbitrarily assigned letter.

I should have known. I’ve gotten great results facilitating brainstorming sessions by asking the players to confine their output, for a short period of time, to ideas that begin with a random letter of the alphabet. They work for a few minutes, then I call out a different letter. It works! I named this technique Alphabet Soup.

Other stimulation techniques use similar random input. In a game I call Rock the Boat, one person comes up with an idea and the next has to base a new idea on the opposite of the first. Players continue rocking the boat, as it were, by generating opposites.

You can make up similar games. The essential ingredient is randomness.

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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