Steps to thinking outside the box

[Teacher]

World expert on creative thinking Michael Mikalko has written The Rice Storm and 21 More Ways to Think Outside the Box with tasks, games and puzzles to improve lateral thinking. Read excerpts from the book:

1. Change circumstances

Try to program changes in your daily life. Make a list of what you are doing in a once and for all routine. For the most part, it will include minor, habitual activities that make life comfortable and enjoyable. Then take a list of habits, study and try to consciously change them one by one during the day, week, month.

- Change your road to work.
- Change your sleep time.
- Change the running time.
- Listen to a different radio station every day.
- Read different newspapers.
- Meet.
- Try new recipes (for example, culinary).
- If you usually take a vacation in the summer, take it in the winter.
- Make changes to the reading circle. If you usually read nonfiction, switch to fiction.
- Change your eating habits at work. If you usually drink coffee, now drink juice.
- Visit a new restaurant.
- Change the type of stay.
- Go rowing instead of golf.
- Take a bath instead of a shower.
- Listen to another TV browser.

2. Collect ideas.

Ideas must be accumulated and stored. Start a special container (a coffee can, a shoebox, a drawer, or even a closet will do) to store ideas and their triggers. Start collecting interesting handouts, quotes, ideas, questions, cartoons, cartoons and just words that can trigger a chain of associations.

If you need an idea, shake your container and pull out a couple of sheets at random. See if they will help you, if they will not turn on a chain of associations that can lead to the birth of a new thought. If not, shuffle everything and try again. Even if not the first time, but in the end you come across an intriguing combination that will lead to a useful thought.

Somehow I pulled out two clippings from my databank. One was about a man who made a new coffin, cheaper and more reliable than the others. Another article told about a new video rental service. A stream of associations poured in: death - funeral - video film - video rental and so on. And then it dawned on me: the video as a tribute to the memory of the deceased. It is possible to make short videos of scenes from the life of the deceased - in particular, using photographs superimposed on beautiful landscapes.

3. Use synonyms

This simple way of getting different wording is to replace the keywords of the same definition with synonyms. But first of all, it is necessary to study the existing wording and highlight the keywords in it.

The production manager of OV'Action from Leuven (Belgium) was faced with the following challenge: how to develop a new, unique food product? He replaced the word “unique” with “amazing”, the word “develop” with “transform” and formulated the problem in a new way: how to transform a food product into something amazing?

He began to think about what could surprise him, and then - what could surprise customers. He would be impressed if some familiar object took an unusual shape, such as an airplane in the shape of a cow. Likewise, he thought, familiar foods will seem surprising if they look unusual, such as a banana-shaped loaf of bread, pyramidal tomatoes, or square potatoes.

As a result, the solution came: square eggs. And he "developed" boiled square eggs with a yolk inside, with a shelf life of 21 days, suitable for heating in a microwave oven (how they compare favorably with ordinary eggs, which "explode" at the same time).

Needless to say, OV'Action was confident that Americans would immediately rush to buy up new amazing food as soon as it was on sale. A seemingly frivolous play with words gives a serious incentive for the birth of new ideas. Successful words are like a twist thrown into the insipid dough of a boring formulation.

4. Swap words

A game of swapping words can push you to generate ideas for new products and new services. Let's say that our trade is not going well. Let's play with the word bottle again. Let's combine the words “bottle” and “sell” in two ways: “selling bottles” and “selling bottles”. The first phrase will push us to consider problems related exclusively to trade, and the second - to look for ways to popularize products /

5. Write down your thoughts

Writing down your own thoughts is one way to intuitively solve problems. Sit somewhere in a calm, secluded place and relax. Write down the essence of your problem on a piece of paper and think about it for a few minutes. Record questions that are relevant to the problem, such as "What interests me the most?" "What should I do?" "What results can I achieve?"

Then wait a few minutes and you may "hear" the answers. They can be voiced by an inner voice or reach you in the process of mental dialogue with someone else. Write these answers down without trying to ponder. Keep asking yourself questions and record all the answers “heard” until they stop. Only then analyze your notes, and, perhaps, after that a solution to your problem will be found.

The owner of the wellness center was trying to develop a new weight loss product. Using this method, he highlighted two facts:

1.people on a diet drink a lot of water;
2. Those wishing to lose weight are engaged in physical exercises, using heavy things as hand-held gymnastic apparatus.

As a result, the entrepreneur found a brilliant solution: to release water in special one-pound plastic bottles. During exercise, the bottles are used as dumbbells, and after exercise, their contents are drunk.

6. Look for new meanings in familiar things

By daring to look into other areas that seem in no way connected with the task at hand, you increase your chances of seeing it in a different light. Drawing analogies helps in this. The stranger the analogy seems - that is, the more “distant” the concepts under consideration are from each other - the higher the likelihood of a new idea emerging. For example, if you are looking for a way to protect roses from disease, then it is more likely that you will find an original solution if you look for analogies with protecting against diseases of rattlesnakes, and not some other flowers or plants.

Preparing for the opening of the nightclub, its owner decided to make some unusual invitation cards. He pondered the analogies between an aspirin pill and an invitation. As a result of the search for relationships and similarities between such different things, an unusual solution was found: to make invitations in the form of pills. Round boxes covered with black velvet and containing a blue pill were sent to all the guests. The accompanying instructions read: “Put it in warm water. Take after complete dissolution. "

The “secret” of the pill was that after its dissolution, a piece of cellophane floated to the surface of the water, which indicated the address of the new club, the time and date of its opening. Each invitation cost the owner only one dollar and ten cents, but the success of the new establishment was overwhelming. By mixing unconnected thoughts, you are planting a lawn on which unprecedented ideas can grow.

5. Use direct analogies

Direct analogies are probably the most productive way to generate ideas. This technique allows you to come up with comparisons and find similarities between various and facts, as well as events in the so-called parallel worlds on the principle: "If X acts successfully in a certain way, then why cannot Y act as successfully ? "

Alexander Bell compared the functioning of the internal organs of the ear to the oscillation of a membrane and invented the telephone. Thomas Edison created the phonograph by drawing analogies between a children's toy funnel, doll movements and sound vibrations. Underwater structures became a reality when the habitat and behavior of molluscs were investigated.

One day in the late 1940s, the Swiss inventor Georg de Mestral went hunting. By chance, he and his dog wandered into a thicket of burdock, the fruits of which immediately clung to the dog's fur and the clothes of its owner. For most people this would be a little annoying, but de Mestral saw an interesting problem here. Arriving home, he examined the fruits of the burdock under a microscope and found that their thorns have tiny hooks at the ends, which cling to the fibers of fabric and wool. This discovery prompted him to think about a new type of fastener.

Many years have passed from concept to implementation, but now de Mestral's invention (Velcro) is used everywhere - from blood pressure measuring devices to tennis players' equipment.