Where do our best ideas come from?
Our best ideas do not usually come from sitting around trying to think of our best ideas. They also don’t typically come from a conference room of people brainstorming.
This is a co-authored post by Randy Gibson and John Vanderveen. We realize a 10-minute read is a big investment in your time so this is why we spent over 30 hours apiece researching and writing this.
Our best ideas do not usually come from sitting around trying to think of our best ideas. They also don’t typically come from a conference room of people brainstorming.
The legend goes — in 1939, an advertising executive was frustrated with employees’ inability to generate ideas, so he gathered people together in a room and “brainstorming” was born.
Now, the brainstorming method is ubiquitous for people seeking to generate ideas. For the most part, we have not questioned the method since its origin. Although, in design and creative circles, questioning it has become the norm.
There’s a great story from the book “Sprint” where an epiphany is made,
One day, in the middle of a brainstorm, an engineer interrupted the process. “How do you know brainstorming works?” he asked. I wasn’t sure what to say. The truth was embarrassing: I had been surveying participants to see if they enjoyed the workshops, but I hadn’t been measuring the actual results.
Then, the authors point to a Yale study from 1958 and confidently debunk brainstorming.
This is a great example of why we should ask “why?” with everything we do. Without asking this question, the status quo could be lurking.
So then, John and I ask, “Why is brainstorming so ineffective?”
As we asked this question, we found an illuminating meta-analysis of research on brainstorming. Come to find out, the efficacy of brainstorming is actually more controversial than the conclusion made by Sprint’s authors and many others who have jumped on the bandwagon (which shows the value of asking “why?” even regarding a result of someone asking the same).
Putting the debate aside, Where do our best ideas come from?
The best ideas come from the brains of humans, of course, but how so?
It is tempting to dive into the differences between thoughts and ideas and how humans are uniquely positioned to transcend thoughts into ideas, but we digress. Ideas are thoughts we reflect on, imagine with, and envision as potential solutions.
How can we ensure our brain and our environment enables thoughts that turn into the best ideas and solutions?
We’d like you to imagine our brain as a large database with many tables of data. Just like companies keep up databases with many tables of customer information, we have our own databases in our brain filled with tables of information.
For a company, data is organized into tables and the collection of those tables makes up a database. A table is like an excel or google spreadsheet, it is just rows and columns of information.
Example Tables:
When questions or needs arise, the company will scour those tables for useful information. Data is then combined together and communicated.
Example of data combined and communicated from Tables 1, 2, and 3:
This is a simple example but it illustrates how data is organized.
Your brain organizes similarly but on a more massive scale. Every minute of every day your brain is consuming and storing data. A lot of times, it is consuming data to which you are not even consciously aware of.
Instead of a person or program retrieving data from a company’s database, for us, environmental cues are the start of that data retrieval process and this cue can come externally as well as internally.
As we move through our environments, our brain uses environmental cues to retrieve useful data, and this data gets sent back in the form of thoughts and emotions. This process mirrors the combining and communicating of data that the company would do in the example above.
In a company’s database, tables are equal in their importance. But in the database of your brain, some tables are retrieved more frequently than others, and the retrieval is seemingly haphazard.
For example, there’s the availability heuristic, which is the ease with which a particular idea can be brought to mind, and it is driven purely by your environment. An example of an availability heuristic is that we tend to overestimate deaths from a tornado or terrorism, but more common events we underestimate, like deaths from suicides, strokes, and diabetes. Similarly, the recency effect biases our brains to more easily retrieve a piece of data that was the first, or most recent, we learned of.
Then, there is Associative Coherence. Take a look at the image below:
The same shape is read as a letter in an environment of letters and as a number in an environment of numbers. Your interpretation is ignited by the environmental cue (e.g. it’s a B next to letters and a 13 next to numbers)
Therefore, it is imperative that your brain contains data of substance to be retrieved and the right cue for igniting the retrieval.
Based on this understanding of how data is stored and retrieved from our brain, we believe there are two strategies that help answer the grand question, “Where do our best ideas come from?”:
We can work on improving the quality and quantity of data in our brain database
We can work on organizing our environment (internal and external) to enable better retrieval of useful data from that database
Strategy 1: Improve the quality and quantity of data in our brain database
A. Fuel your subconscious brain with substantial information
A few ways you can do this are to learn broadly, learn deeply, seek breadth, and control your inputs as Thich Not Hahn advocates:
Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. It’s as true of food as it is of information.
B. Expose yourself with information about needs, then your brain will utilize this information to create connections which inspire ideas, as Teresa Torres explains when building products:
We make decisions every day and they all matter. We want to infuse as many of those decisions with customer input as possible. That means we need to reduce the cycle time between customer touchpoints.
C. Control your environment or it may control you as Daniel Kahneman discusses in Thinking Fast and Slow:
A convict being granted parole may change significantly depending on the parole judges’ lunch schedule. Because you have a little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances.
This includes your internal environment as Marcus Aurelius suggests:
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts; therefore guard accordingly.
D. Give your brain downtime so this database can reorganize and clean itself:
There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. It’s the greatest creative aphrodisiac.-Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org
In 2016, productivity expert Scott Barry Kaufman did a study that revealed 72% of people get creative ideas in the shower.
Strategy 2: Organize our environment to enable better retrieval of useful data
A. Try brainsketching which is a collective approach that utilizes the power of each individual:
We’re not asking you to sketch because we think it’s fun. We’re asking you to sketch because we’re convinced it’s the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team — without any sales pitch. And, perhaps most important of all, sketching allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone. -Jake Knapp, Sprint
B. Be purposeful about your environment by fostering one that encourages creativity. In his book, “Sketching User Experiences,” Bill Buxton suggests that we must surround ourselves with reference material to inspire and cue our own data. He references Hutchins’ “Cognition in the wild:”
Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers.
C. Utilize analogies by “Laddering up and down”, explained by Dan & Chip Heath in their book “Decisive”:
One of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy. When you use analogies — when you find someone who has solved your problem — you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions. When you’re stuck, you can use a process of ‘laddering up’ to get inspiration. The lower rungs on the ladder offer a view of situations very similar to yours; any visible solutions will offer a high probability of success since the conditions are so similar. As you scale the ladder, you’ll see more and more options from other domains, but those options will require leaps of imagination.
An example of this laddering up analogy can be seen from a Designer at Speedo, who used biomimicry by utilizing sharks as an analogy to improve the way a Speedo moved through the water.
D. Enable a Hub and spoke environment, which makes distractions more productive, as Cal Newport explains in “Deep Work”:
We can dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement:
Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
E. Move around more.
Michel de Montaigne got his best ideas while horseback riding:
Riding frees us from work without encouraging idleness. Montaigne has his best ideas while in the saddle, an activity that even allows him to forget about his bladder and kidney stones.
-Antoine Compagnon, A Summer With Montaigne
And, Friedrich Nietzsche is confident in his proclamation:
It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.
F. There are also tables of data in the crevices of your brain that just need the right cue or the right coherence to retrieve them.
One way to enable this coherence is through an altered state of consciousness. Steven Kotler calls this “ecstasis” in his book Stealing Fire.
Altered states have shown efficacy in complex problem-solving because of their ability to enable coherence across brain regions.
By taking the default mode network offline for a period of time, altered states can, in effect, “reboot” the brain, jog it out of its accustomed grooves and open a space for new pathways to arise. [Research] Labs have made maps of the brain’s traffic patterns on psychedelics showing that, when the default mode network is quieted, myriad new connections spring up in the brain, linking far-flung areas that don’t ordinarily talk to one another directly. -Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
Or, there’s Dr. Joe Dispenza who has been at the forefront of rewiring our brain and increasing coherence of the mind and body to fuel optimal thinking.
By consistently utilizing these two strategies, we upgrade the performance of our database. Once this happens, clearer thinking will begin to take place, better ideas will emerge, and serendipity will be commonplace.
Randy gets his best ideas when he focuses distraction-free all morning, walks to and from the gym, and combines a hot sauna with a cold shower. The walk home becomes a race to jot down his thoughts and ideas. But, he says the real magic comes when these ideas are then infused and iterated upon, by a team of individuals harnessing each of their own unique perspectives.
John arrives at his best ideas by deconstructing the problem into its basic elements and trying to solve it via first-principles thinking. He spends a lot of time imagining until he can see a blurry vision. Then, he starts adding reality back in until it breaks. When it breaks he questions why and determines how to overcome it. He keeps at this until he has a solid concept.
As you can see, we aren’t following a script and neither should you. We are just recommending that you apply the principles behind the strategies.
Now, let's bring brainstorming back but in a new light:
We call it Diverge & Converge Brainstorming
This approach to brainstorming focuses on a combination of convergent and divergent thinking in no particular order. Convergent thinking is to narrow your focus and critically think. Divergent thinking is an exploration into many possibilities hoping for unexpected connections to be made.
Below is a hypothetical example to help visualize how this could play out:
Seek out in discovery of a problem or unmet need (Diverge)
+Strategy 1: Fuel your brain with substantial information
+Strategy 1: Expose yourself with information about unmet needs
+Strategy 1: Give your brain downtime
2. Research to deeply understand the need or problem (Converge)
+Strategy 1: Expose yourself with information about the need
+Strategy 1: Control your environment to exclude outside influences
+Strategy 1: Give your brain downtime
3. Individually explore inspiration (Diverge)
+Strategy 2: Harness the Laddering up and down method
+Strategy 2: Move around
+Strategy 2: Give your brain downtime
4. Collectively sketch and iterate on ideas (Converge)
+Strategy 2: Brainsketching
+Strategy 2: Hub and Spoke method
+Strategy 2: Be purposeful about your environment
+Strategy 2: Give your brain downtime
5. Try the idea or Experiment (Diverge)
Those familiar with design-thinking strategies will recognize much of the suggested approach and its cyclical nature. There is no permanent start or endpoint. The process is fluid and only requires that you are diverging after converging and vice versa.
What we are suggesting (which admittedly, isn’t totally novel) is the conscious focus on improving the quality and quantity of the data in our brain database (Strategy 1), and optimizing our environment to enable better retrieval of relevant data (Strategy 2). We hope we’ve inspired new ways of thinking and exploring ideas, so that the next time someone asks why you left your workspace on a walk, you can tell them you’re working on your database.
