RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts

ideation

  • Breadth! Breadth! Breadth! The main idea is to open your mind and broaden your scope of knowledge. Creativity is a by-product of breadth. 10 × more than depth. Pulling ideas from arenas brand new to you and translating them into your sphere of interest is key. (This is not a mechanical act. I’m talking about subconscious novel connections that sneak in when you are, say, dealing with thorny issues.)

    Read fiction. Fiction is all about people and relationships. This and that cause your mind to expand and productively wander in ways that are invaluable, but of which you are unaware. Subliminal impact. Your mind is broadened. And somehow or other, the new things you’ve been examining in your reading sneak into your way of being and impact your practical, and long-term strategic, actions.

    — Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism by Tom Peters

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  • You may discover, as many questioners do when they begin to burrow into a problem, that there is much more to know than you could have imagined at the outset. Don’t be put off by learning how much you don’t know. That darkness was always out there, surrounding you; you just had no idea how vast it was until you began probing with your question flashlight.

    — A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

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  • A question that’s hard enough to be interesting, but realistic enough that you have some hope of answering it. (Not that you have to find an answer to all beautiful questions; the string theorist Witten, for instance, has never fully answered his biggest questions about the nature of the universe, but he told me that the pursuit of those questions has led him to many other interesting discoveries along the way.)

    — A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

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  • Articulating a personal challenge in the form of a question has other benefits. It allows you to be bold and adventurous because anyone can question anything. You don’t have to be a recognized expert; you just have to be willing to say, I’m going to venture forth into the world with my question and see what I find.

    As you do this, you’re in a strong position to build ideas and attract support. Because, whereas people are more likely to ignore or challenge you when you come at them with answers, they almost can’t resist advising or helping you to answer a great question. All of this helps to build momentum. Questions (the right ones, anyway) are good at generating momentum, which is why change-makers so often use them as a starting point.

    — A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

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  • But the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job. Make no mistake about that. Another point to encourage you. No doubt you have seen people who seem to spark ideas—good ideas—right off the “top of their heads,” without ever going through all this process that I have described.

    Sometimes you have only seen the “Eureka! I have it!” stage takes place. But sometimes you have also seen the fruits of long discipline in the practices here advocated. This discipline produces a mind so well stocked, and so quick at discerning relationships, as to be capable of such fast production. Still, another point I might elaborate on a little is about words. We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.

    — A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Young

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