Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

by Michael Michalko

Outline. Outline a book before you read it, or read the first half, stop and write an outline of the latter half. Imagine what you will find before you read the table of contents or the book. This was George Bernard Shaw’s favorite exercis...

Read biographies. Biographies are treasure-...

Read how-to books on any subject. Exercise your mind by manipulating the ideas of others into new ideas. Read books on crafts, automobiles, carpentry, gardening, and so on. These books give you tool...

Read magazines on varied subjects. Walt Disney relied on the Reader’s Digest for many of his ideas. He was quoted as saying: “Your imagination may be creaky or timid or dwarfed or frozen at points. ...

Read nonfiction. When reading nonfiction books, practice thinking up solutions to any problems presented in the book before the problem is solved. This was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite exercises.

It’s a big surprise when the solutions that I come up with eventually align with the solutions shared in the book.

Think. Think as you read. Search for new solutions to old problems, changes in business, trends in foreign countries, technological breakthroughs, connections, and parallels between what you read and your problems.

Scan your junk mail before you discard it. What trends in advertising, marketing, new products, and new values can you discern?

Let your junk mail collect for a month or two before scanning it. Patterns and trends are more readily apparent, because you can see the repetitive nature of emerging trends.

Actively observe popular culture. Watch network and cable TV, rent videos, read popular magazines and books, go to movies, and listen to popular songs. What are people interested in? What values and lifestyles are portrayed? Who are the popular heroes? Why are they heroes?

Think about how your job has changed. What is in your “in” basket as compared with its contents this time last year? Has the corporate emphasis changed? Do you have more paperwork or less? More meetings or fewer? Where is the company heading? Talk to the people you work with for clues to the ways work attitudes, values, and commitments are changing.

Attend as many business conferences, seminars, and le...

Listen to a different radio station every week to get a variety of perspectives. Who is the market for the station? What are they address...

Collect and store ideas like a pack rat. Keep a container (coffee can, shoe box, desk drawer, or file folder) of ideas and idea starters. Begin collecting interesting advertisements, quotes, designs, ideas, questions, cartoons, pictures, doodles, and words that might trigger ideas by association.

When you are looking for new ideas, shake up the container and pull out two or more items at random to see if they can somehow trigger a thought that might lead to a new idea. If not, reshuffle and eventually you’ll come up with some intriguing combinations of useful ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen in your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear.”

Psychologists have demonstrated that we are able to keep only about five to nine pieces of information in our mind at a time. We have all had the experience of looking up a phone number, then being distracted before dialing and forgetting the number in a matter of seconds. What is happening is that new information is bumping out older information before your mind can ready the older information for long-term storage in your memory. In general, short-term memory can hold items fairly well for the first few seconds. After about twelve seconds, however, recall is poor, and after twenty seconds, the information will disappear entirely, unless you keep repeating it to yourself or write it down. Writing signals your brain that this piece of information is more crucial than others and should be stored in your long-term memory.

Consciously work to make your thinking more fluent and more flexible (fluency means the number of ideas, flexibility refers to creativity). Making lists is a powerful way to increase your thinking fluency, as it forces you to focus your energy in a very productive way.

Flexibility in thought means the ability to see beyond the ordinary and conventional roles. It means you are more improvisational and intuitive, can play with context and perspective, and focus on processes rather than outcomes. Psychologist J. P. Guilford, a pioneer in the study of creativity, believed the following exercise helps exercise thinking fluency and flexibility, and enhances the ability to organize such complex projects as plots for novels, scientific theories, plans for new business organizations, or the building of any system which is interrelated and interconnected.

The idea log is one of the CIA’s favorite techniques for recording information. There is a written log for each problem, which is used to record ideas, facts, thoughts, questions, and so on. This enables the agent to instantly focus on all the ideas, comparisons, interrelationships, and data relating to a given problem.

Maintain an idea log. Each section could be devoted to separate aspects of your business and personal life. Sections could include: marketing, product, selling, corporate, personal, services, special projects, and new business possibilities.

Experiment with different methods of capturing ideas before you decide which is best for you. Reviewing your recorded ideas periodically is a good way to titillate your imagination. Each time you review them, you will begin to search out connections between a recorded idea and your present situation or experience.

Pumping your mind is like making a path through tall grass. Originally there is no path, yet as you walk the same way each time, one appears. In the same way, you may have no ideas at first, yet as you exercise your mind using these techniques, ideas appear.

A problem is nothing more than an opportunity in work clothes. A successful businessperson pays attention to problems, converting the problems into opportunities and deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing. These opportunities become productive challenges.

Unless you set your business problems down in writing, your attention is constantly shifting and you become indecisive about what, if anything, you should focus on. Listing problems is a way for you to decide which ones are worth solving. It transforms a body of information into a set of components that can be restructured, checked, and searched.

In the same way, the mere act of writing a challenge may trigger your mind to create something meaningful to fill in the gaps and solve it.

Ideas sometimes grow out of irritation, like the pearls that grow when an oyster is irritated by grains of sand inside its shell.

“Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise, for the result is a waste of time and general stagnation.” SUN T

Weigh each challenge for personal benefits before you commit yourself. The best ideas come from those hungry for success and those who cultivate the spirit of enterprise.

If you feel that it is not necessary to realize any personal benefits before you dedicate yourself to solving a challenge … just lean your head sideways and watch the sawdust pour out of your ear.

just lean your head sideways and watch the sawdust pour out of your ear.

After you decide what challenges are most interesting and likely to yield solid benefits, it is important to accept the challenge. To accept a challenge means to accept responsibility for generating ideas as possible solutions to the problem. The more you accept responsibility and dedicate yourself to g...

After you decide what challenges are interesting and will yield you solid benefits, it is time to state those challenges in the most useful way possible. This will allow you to most effectively use Thinkertoys to generate creative solutions.

To start with, it’s helpful to coin problems in a particular way. Write the problem you want to solve as a definite question. Use the phrase “In what ways might I …?” to start a problem statement. This is something known as the invitational stem and helps keep you from settling on a problem statement that may reflect only one perception of the problem.

However, you would then waste your energy trying to get to the second string, which is not possible. If, instead, you state the problem in a different way: “In what ways might the string and I get together?” you will likely come up with the solution—to tie a small object (such as a key, ring, watch, or belt) to the end of one string and set it in motion like a pendulum, then grab it while still holding the second string in your hand.

The product manager of OV’ACTION of Lievin, France, faced the following challenge: “In what ways might I develop a unique food product?” He changed “unique” to “surprising” and “develop” to “transform” and restated the challenge to: “In what ways might I transform a product into a surprising food?” He thought of things that might surprise him and then about how food products could surprise consumers in similar ways. For instance, one thing that would surprise him would be to see a familiar object in an odd shape, such as an airplane shaped like a cow. Similarly, he would be surprised to see a familiar food product in a strange and different shape, such as a banana shaped like a loaf of bread, tomatoes in the shape of pyramids, or square potatoes. These thoughts led to his idea: a square egg.

To keep your mind open to all possibilities, stretch your challenge by asking “why?” Asking “why?” will help you identify your general objective and allow you to challenge your assumptions. This, in turn, enables you to redefine and shape your challenges.

The idea is to look for the appropriate level of abstraction, the best viewpoint from which to gather ideas. A phrase such as “increase my wealth” allows your thinking to embrace far more opportunities than “sell more computers.”

To squeeze a challenge and ascertain its strengths, weaknesses, and boundaries, ask who, what, where, when, why, and how.

Who helps you identify individuals and groups who might be involved in the situation, have special strengths or resources or access to useful information, and who might gain from a resolution of the problem.

What helps identify all the things, objects, and items involved in the situation, the requirements, difficulties involved, rewards, and advantages and ...

Where considers the places, locations, and focal poin...

When probes the schedules, dates, and timeliness ...

Why helps you reach an understanding of your ...

How helps you recognize how the situation developed, actions that may have been attempted or are now occurring...

A design company framed their challenge as: “In what ways might we design a unique and convenient trash container?” To squeeze the challenge, they asked these questions: “Who can help us design the container?” “What material should we use?” “Where can we get other materials?” “When should we make it?” “How can we make it more conven...

The subproblems become: “In what ways might others help us design a better container?” “In what ways might we make containers out of other materials?” “In what ways might we obtain other materials?” “In what ways might we schedule the project?” “In what ways might we make containers more convenient?” “In what ways might...

In order to get original ideas, you need to be able to look at the same information everyone else does and organize it into a new and different pattern. This is active thinking

Few people will spontaneously see it as columns of alternate squares and circles. This is because we tend to passively organize similar items together in our minds. Once it’s pointed out that it can also be viewed as columns of alternate squares and circles, we, of course, see it.

To go beyond the boundaries in your mind, you need to become an active thinker, to organize information into new patterns. It is the formation and the use of new patterns of information that gives rise to new ideas.

Take two accomplished waffle-makers whose waffles are equal in quality and price. One is a passive thinker, the other active. For some reason, people stop buying waffles. The passive thinker does nothing and goes out of business; the active thinker fashions the waffle into a cone and creates a whole new product: the ice cream cone. A passive thinker is unable to move beyond the given information to new ideas, while an active thinker is constantly organizing information into new ideas.