Individual Ideation – A lost art?

The term “individual ideation” is what is popularly known today as “brainstorming” – except that it is carried out an on individual basis. You may be familiar with this process already when you are mapping out ideas for a project or for a post on a blog or for a paper due in college. Many writing courses touch on brainstorming as one of the methods for coming up with ideas on how to lay out a paper necessary to satisfy the requirements for your course curriculum.

However, brainstorming for papers is just one application of individual ideation. The practice of coming up with ideas that can be used to improve yourself and your life is hardly engaged in AT ALL by the general populace. Years ago there was a popular self-improvement program by the late Earl Nightingale by the name of Lead the Field – in which one of the exercises promulgated by the program was to exercise your mind on a daily basis by setting aside an hour for five days a week to deliberately turn on your mental faculties by means of individual ideation. Earl recommended that you take an hour every day and brainstorm up to 20 ideas on answering two questions:

How can I increase my service today?
How can I improve what I now do?

The purpose of this endeavor was to exercise your imagination and creativity in productive ways for your life and your career. What’s interesting to me is that I do not know one person whom today engages in ANY form of mental exercise aside from filling out crossword puzzles, solving a sudoku puzzle, or playing video games. If they do engage in any form of mental exercise, it’s the usual casual reading or hobbies that usually do not exercise any form of ingenuity but rather hone some sort of skill that may or may not be practically useful in society.

Also, I have noticed that when you mention the word “brainstorming” the image that is usually conjured up in the average person’s mind is that of some colleagues in a corporate boardroom sitting before a dry-erase board hastily jotting down ideas that are being shouted out left and right in a haphazard, unstructured way. What’s interesting about current perceptions of brainstorming is that the original rules of “deferred judgment” are not at all followed – critical comments are not suspended in these settings and only some ideas are agreed upon. This yields to the phenomenon known as “groupthink” which tends to perpetuate the status quo rather than coming up with anything new. Therefore, brainstorming is seen as a group phenomenon instead of carried out on an individual basis.

If it is carried out on an individual basis, it is usually in preparation for brainstorming a topic for writing a paper. Even then, the original ideas promulgated by Alex F. Osborn (the undisputed father of brainstorming) of suspending judgment and allowing your imagination to explore infinite – even crazy – possibilities are seldom practiced today. Therefore, many do not see the value of coming up with ideas that they can implement in their everyday life, nor do they believe that they are capable of doing so.

To recover what I feel is the lost art of Individual Ideation – let’s turn to the founder of this form of creative thinking for insight on how to liberate our imagination again and turn off the brakes of judgement for at least a period of time every day. That founder is the inventor of brainstorming himself – Alex F. Osborn.

I recommend highly (even though it is quite dated) his book Your Creative Power. In this book he highlights some important themes that I believe our rapid-fire changing world could use to be more adaptable in our everyday life. These themes are delineated as follows:

Good ideas are like diamonds. If you continuously hunt and dig for them you will find them.
Working your imagination is like a hobby – the more you work it – the better it will work for you to come up with ideas that will improve your work and your life.
Creative power can be stepped up by effort. The more you step up this power – the more it will add illumination to your life – like rubbing an Aladdin’s Lamp.
Stepping up your creative power can help you advance in your career or in your status in life – even if you are starting from scratch.
Creative power is often stifled in our society. It is our responsibility to increase our own creative power through exercising it.
The best way to use your creative power is to “imagineer” – that is where you let your imagination soar and then engineer it down to earth. The best way to do this is by fashioning ideas that you can use in your everyday life to improve it.
Applied imagination can help improve various aspects of our life – not just career – but with relationships and even our mental health. Imagination can be used to brighten our lives.
Creative thinking can help us think ourselves out of trials and difficulties common to us all. The difference is that we will be contributing to our ability to solve problems instead of being a constant helpless victim to them.
Individual ideation can help us exercise our imagination in more positive ways – instead of negative ways like incessant worrying.
Many of our imaginative powers are latent – but can be awakened through conscious use. Often people only become creative through force of circumstance or necessity – never consciously.  Individual Ideation is one of the prime methods of turning this around.
Creative ideas have come from various walks of life – educated or uneducated – and from a variety of different fields. Creative ideas are not dependent on intelligence or level of education, but rather from individual effort and work.  History points out that really outstanding creative individuals were largely autodidacts – that is, they were self-taught or self-educated.
Fuel for ideas does not come from just facts but also observations and experiences unique to the individual. Fashioning ideas unique to you can help you advance since no one else has your unique set of experiences and circumstances.
The faculty of memory and imagination go hand in hand. A powerful memory is cultivated by the combination of imagination and association.  Exercising your imagination can therefore improve your memory dramatically by increasing your ability to associate ideas.
We exercise our creativity by asking ourselves questions – positive questions that can help advance our career or activate our potential. You set a daily quota – such as 5 ideas a day or more – and exercise your imagination to come up with as many ideas as you can for improving yourself or your work.
Ideas tend to come forward when we suspend our judgmental faculties and instead engage our wild fancies or imaginings – at least temporarily. Our education system exercises our judicial, discriminatory functions (analysis, etc.).  However, the imaginative and illogical thought processes get rusty.  Suspending disbelief and judgment can help circumvent this.
Creative thinking actually is stimulated by a positive mental attitude and with a measure of self-discipline. Ironically, this fuels creative effort rather than diminishing it.
Exercising our creative thinking faculties helps us fashion our own ideas and not be at the mercy of following other people’s ideas. We increase our ability to think for ourselves.
Creative individual ideation helps resurrect the spirit of inventiveness, exploration, ingenuity, and industriousness that were the characteristics of the founders of great nations – such as the United States.
Unless our educational system addresses the deficit and fills in the gaps by means of creative education techniques, America (at the time of writing of his book) is in danger of losing its creative and inventive power that made its economy rise in the 20th century. (Unfortunately, this has become horridly prophetic).

The above themes that Mr. Osborn proposes in his landmark book begs the following question…how can our individual ability to fashion ideas be awakened then?

Answer! By focusing a little more closely at the already aforementioned theme from above…which I will mention again for emphasis:

We exercise our creativity by asking ourselves questions – positive questions that can help advance our career or activate our potential. You set a daily quota – such as 5 ideas a day or more – and exercise your imagination to come up with as many ideas as you can for improving yourself or your work.

In order to perform the above, I recommend some preliminary practices first:

Schedule a time – Schedule a time and a place where you can be completely alone and where you will not be distracted. For some, this is early in the morning, for others this is later in the evening.  However, find a time and place for you to go to be alone and undistracted.
Get a notepad or notebook – Whether it is a drawing tablet or a legal pad, find something to record ideas as they come to you. If you want to use technology, perhaps a digital recorder or your tablet.  I prefer pen and paper because I find recording ideas this way more stimulating.
Have a purpose – what main purpose are you wanting to accomplish in your life? Write this down and think about it often.  There is usually a reason for you wanting to improve your life…find it.
Set your timer for about an hour or even 30 min. – you want to set your timer because once you get the ideas and creative juices flowing you may “space out” and forget that an hour has passed. Or, no ideas are coming and you’re wondering how long you can do this.  The timer helps bracket your creative thinking sessions so that you provide space for your imagination to soar.  It also helps you to adhere to a schedule in case you have other obligations to attend to.
Start off your session by relaxing and going to a special workshop in your mind. You may first deepen your breathing…relax all your muscles from head to toe…and then descend to some special cavern or ascend to some lofty abode where you can imagine all sorts of different scenarios.  Go to my post on invoking your imaginary workshop to get more insight on how to do this.
If you want, also stimulate your mind with a nice cup of hot tea or coffee at your side…whatever flavor or herbal essence that you find stimulating to your creative mind.
Then, ask yourself questions that stimulate your thinking process. What problems have you been experiencing lately?  What questions would you ask yourself to help improve your life?  How can I become a better person? How can I increase my effectiveness at my work?  What do I need to advance further in my current career? How can I get along better with friends, colleagues, family members?  How can I become more resourceful, industrious, ingenious?  How can I increase my contribution to my community? Family? Humanity?  How do I improve my work?
Jot down as many ideas as you can that answer these questions that you ask yourself. Now the above are my examples, be creative and come up with stimulating questions that are unique to you and who you are.  Try to set a daily quota…whether it be 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.
When the timer goes off…end your session. You may want to review your notes.  If you do, you may find that some of your ideas will be bad, some so-so, some good, and occasionally you will get an awesome idea.  When you do, circle, put a star next to it, or highlight it so that you can reference later.
Be a scientist and “test” your ideas in you daily life. See if they yield to the results you are seeking.  If they do, you are increasing your effectiveness as a person and your ingenuity will become more pronounced.  If they don’t yield to results, it is time to go back to the “drawing board” and evaluate, modify, rearrange, or re-engineer the ideas you came up with to combine into even better ideas to test and get results from.

Personal Experience

When I have performed the above suggestions, I find that my brain at the end of as session has had quite a workout. Just like the body releases “endorphins” when you have had a good workout and you feel good as a result, in a similar way the brain feels good – perhaps releasing what is known as “enkephalins” – when you have given it a thorough workout like the above. I sometimes feel exhilarated when a really good idea pops in my head to solve a difficult problem or give me direction on an endeavor I am currently pursuing.

There is another phenomenon that seems to happen when I do this exercise that I will not elaborate too much on this post for now…but I will in the future. Let’s just say it has been given the names synchronicity and serendipity. Opportunities that I seem to ‘miss’ when I am not exercising my mind seem to become more apparent when I do the above exercise. I hope to elaborate and articulate this more in the future. For now, exercise that creative, ingenious mind you already possess and don’t copy the rest of society and allow it to decay or rust!