New Year, New Crazy Ideas

In my last post, I introduced my love of mashups, which, as I tried to articulate, is one of many ways to tap into the broader concept of creative thinking.

With that in mind, I want to share a couple of quotes from a book I’m currently reading titled, “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Starting on page 68, it helps explain my previous thought and makes a case for crazy ideas…

“Designers love to ideate broadly and wildly. They love the crazy ideas as much as or more than the sensible ones. Why? Most people think that designers are just “out there” and prefer crazy stuff because they’re edgy, avant-garde, dark-sunglass-wearing kinds of people (think berets, cool shoes, and the hippest restaurants). That may be true, but it’s not the point. Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment. Our brains are so tightly wired to be critical, find problems, and leap to judgment that it’s a wonder any ideas ever make it out! We have to defer judgment and silence the inner critic if we want to get all our ideas out. If we don’t, we may have a few good ideas, but the majority will have been lost — silently imprisoned behind the wall of judgment our prefrontal cortex has erected to safeguard us from making mistakes or looking foolish. Now, we love the prefrontal cortex and wouldn’t be caught in public without it, but we don’t want it taking our ideas hostage prematurely. If we can get out into the wild idea space, then we know we’ve overcome premature judgment. The crazy ideas may not be the ones we pick (and rarely are, actually), but often after having the crazy ideas, we have moved to a new creative space, and we can see new and innovative possibilities that can work.

So let’s bring on the crazy.”

What’s the point? Well, I’m not all of the way through the book to give a full report, but I know the concepts of design thinking (see graphic below), and on the very next page, the book gives us a sneak peek as to why we need to have the confidence to make room for crazy ideas as we set out to build a well-lived, joyful life.

“Our goal is to energize and expand on your capacity for generating lots and lots of solutions to the myriad problems that come up when you are designing your life.

As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies:

1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from.

2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.

Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea. This relationship almost never works out. Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very craetive. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence.”

I like that! But, you don’t have to take my word for it…

Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test for yourself…and see what happens.

Here’s to a New Year (and new crazy ideas) full of curiosity, creativity, and a bias towards action!

-AP

The classic design thinking process graphic, adapted from Stanford’s d.school.