When it comes to creativity, the quantity of your ideas is more important than the quality, says Stanford University professor Jeremy Utley.
“If you want good ideas, generate more ideas, and if you want to generate more ideas, come up with bad ideas," he tells Jesse Mulligan.
Photo: RNZ
He teaches innovation and design thinking at Stanford University and is co-author of the new book Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters.
The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated how the path to good ideas is via bad ones, Utley says.
“Sir Jony Ives at Steve Jobs' memorial said 'Every day Steve and I would sit down ... He'd say 'Hey Jony, you want to hear a dopey idea? And Sir Jony has said many times they were dopey. In fact, often they were truly terrible. But every once in a while, they'd take the air out of the room and leave you breathless with wonder.”
Jobs arrived at delightful ideas through the process of sharing his dopey ideas, Utley says.
Bad ideas, although they're not good as ideas, can be a good thing.
“One of the things that Edward de Bono, the author of Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking, said, which I think is really profound is; The value of an idea is not in its own merits, but in what it does to one's thinking.”
Utley encourages groups searching for solutions to be as open-minded as possible to new ideas.
"Most people's bias is to interact with an idea with this question - What do I think of this idea?'
"We invite a deliberate flip, where instead of saying 'What do I think of this idea?' you say 'What does this idea make me think of?”
Creative people tend to be “input-obsessed" when it comes to pursuing inspiration, Utley says.
“I've had the chance to see it up close. My wife is a fashion designer, and I remember, when we were first married, she would say she had to go to Paris for inspiration. And I'm like 'that's a boondoggle - you just want macarons, right?
“But she would come back with her head and her heart overflowing with textures and patterns and colours, and that would fuel her work. And I started to appreciate how seeking input drove the output of her work.”
People who don't think of their work as creative tend to have a more limited view of the problem-solving tools that are available to them, he says.
“There's that instinct among artists to go out and look, that's how you get ideas. You're not looking in your brain.
"But professionals in many other contexts, when a problem presents itself, they just look in their brain, they don't have any other instinct.”
Ideaflow book cover Photo: supplied
Creativity is often stymied by a common cognitive bias known as the Einstellung effect, which Utley calls the "anti-Einstein effect".
“What researchers at Oxford and many others have demonstrated is, when we think of a solution to a problem, we stop looking.
“And yet, there's no correlation between the quality of our ideas and when they arrive to us, meaning, often better ideas will come later if we keep looking.”
To quote Nobel prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, to have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas.
“Most people are astounded to discover the empirical definition because most people think 'Oh, if I want to get a good idea, I need like 20 or 30.
“And the research at Stanford is it's actually more like 2,000. You need thousands of ideas to have a good idea. And that's what people don't really appreciate is the volume of raw material.
“It's not thousands of good ideas to get a good idea. It's thousands of raw ideas, bad ideas, normal ideas, silly ideas, brilliant ideas and stupid ideas.”
Exercises such as filling a 'daily idea quota' can help get your brain to a better space for idea generation, Utley says.
“You're always encountering problems for which you're looking for the right answer; whether you know it or not.
"At least once a day just select a problem - it can be what's the subject line of this email? Or how do I give this feedback? Or how should I open the sales presentation? Or where should we go for our off-site [party]? Any problem where you're looking for the right answer.
Flip for five minutes - ask yourself 'What does this idea make me think of?” - and come up with 10 answers.
"What people find, what I have found myself, not only does the practice strengthen the instinct to generate volume instead of quality, it also routinely generates a better idea.”
