Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

by Michael Michalko

Fitting your challenge in an Idea Box simplifies and condenses it in a similar way. It forces you to find new connections and new meanings; your imagination must leap to fill the gaps and make sense of the whole.

“Therefore the skillful commander takes up a position in which he cannot be defeated and misses no opportunity to master his enemy.” SUN TZU There is a vast order in the universe. Every time I throw a coin in the air, it returns and hits the floor. Because there is a vast order, things can be separated and understood. When NASA sends up four rockets one-half second apart, their afterimages are approximately simultaneous. We can say that we see four rockets “at the same time.” This is the illustration of simultaneity. To see order, we attempt to comprehend spontaneously things that are nonspontaneous. In the figure below, the two horizontal lines are the same length, yet the top one appears to be longer. This is known as the Ponzo illusion and is explained by the fact that we attempt to comprehend the image as a whole and are led by our experiences to see the vertical lines as if they were railroad tracks receding in the distance. The only way to comprehend what is really there is to examine each line individually, as a separate “event.” The universe of business is also composed of separate events, yet we say things like “that is a good business” or “that market is solid,” as though all of the events were appearing as a singular entity at the same time. To find opportunities, you need to look at the separate events that make up the universe of business and understand their relationships.

One day the frog poked his head out of the well and boasted to the sea turtle that no creature was happier than he. Why, he could dive up and down in the mud and enjoy a freer range of movement than all those shrimps and tadpoles living around him. He invited the turtle to come down into the well and see for himself. The turtle declined and instead boasted of his perspective outside the well. “A distance of a thousand miles is not sufficient to describe the extent of the ocean, nor can one ever hope to sound its depth,” the turtle said. “It’s sad to see you peeping at the sky through a tube.” The frog was awed when he heard this and realized how living in a well limited his perspective.

In a way, are we not like the frog? All of the elements of an organization are in separate wells, and we see only what is in our particular well. Buyers are in the well of supply, human resources are in the well of personnel, facilities are in the well of facilities, and so on. The whole organization is operating like frogs in the wells. There is no 360-degree perspective. We need to get an oceanic view of our problems. We need to know the goals, themes, and sub-themes in order to generate meaningful ideas.

LOTUS BLOSSOM You start with a problem or idea and expand that theme into themes until you’ve created several different entry points. In the Lotus Blossom, the petals, or themes, around the core of the blossom are figuratively peeled back one at a time, revealing a key component or sub-theme. This approach is pursued in ever-widening circles until the theme is comprehensively explored. The cluster of themes and sub-themes that are developed in one way or another provide several different possibilities.

In the Lotus Blossom, ideas evolve into other ideas and applications. Because the components of the technique are dynamic, the ideas seem to flow outward with a conceptual momentum all their own. Lotus allows you to track whole systems of interacting elements. Ideas and thoughts are not merely isolated acts and parts floating around in your mind. Unless you look at a whole system and all of its components, you may miss the key relationships and how they interact.

“The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought.” SUN TZU

Phoenix is a checklist of questions developed by the Central Intelligence Agency to encourage agents to look at a challenge from many different angles. Using Phoenix is like holding your challenge in your hand. You can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it up to another position, imagine solutions, and really be in control of it. Use the Phoenix checklist as a base on which to build your own personal checklist of questions. Note good questions when you hear others ask them, and keep adding them to your own checklist. With the right questions, you can solve a challenge the way Columbo would solve a crime; i.e., ask a number of questions, then suddenly ask the question that turns everything around. When that happens, you might say you “Columboed the challenge.”

THE PHOENIX CHECKLIST THE PROBLEM Why is it necessary to solve the problem? What benefits will you gain by solving the problem? What is the unknown? What is it you don’t yet understand? What is the information you have? What isn’t the problem? Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory? Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure? Where are the boundaries of the problem? Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants (things that can’t be changed) of the problem? Have you seen this problem before? Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem? Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown. Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method? Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed? What are the best, worst, and most probable cases you can imagine?

THE PLAN Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem? What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it? How much of the unknown can you determine? Can you derive something useful from the information you have? Have you used all the information? Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem? Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step? What creative-thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques? Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see? How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem? What have others done? Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result? What should be done? How should it be done? Where should it be done? When should it be done? Who should do it? What do you need to do at this time? Who will be responsible for what? Can you use this problem to solve some other problem? What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other? What milestones can best mark your progress? How will you know when you are successful?

Suppose you defined a “rose” as a red, pink, or white flower one gives to a beautiful woman, a pleasant hostess, or a deceased friend. The tagging of a complex flower with the single label (rose) and one description would not inspire your curiosity. However, if you asked a series of questions about roses, you could better describe the flower, how it is grown, its thorns, its blossoms, its fragrance, how others have used it, and how to best package and use it.

A group of new young managers asked aggressive questions about every step of the steel-making process and discovered that the integrated process contradicts basic laws of economics. What they discovered was that since the early 1970s, the demand for steel had been going up. However, for integrated mills to meet the demand they had to add new units, which required a substantial investment. Since demand rises in small steps, the expansion would not be profitable until the demand reached the mill’s new capacity. If a mill chose not to expand, it would lose its customers. In the steel business, if you can’t deliver orders on time, customers don’t wait. Faced with this choice, companies expanded. Consequently, companies were profitable for only that time when the demand reached the new capacity. When the demand exceeded that capacity, the integrated mills would be forced to expand again. This discovery led to the solution.

The idea: The young questioners proposed a shift from the giant, ever-expanding “integrated” plant to a “mini-mill.” The end uses are the same as the integrated mill, only the costs are substantially lower. A mini-mill can be built for one-tenth the cost of an integrated plant, uses heat only once and does not quench it, starts with steel scrap instead of ore, and ends up with one final product (for example, beams, rods, etc.). The mini-mills offer modern technology, low labor costs, and target markets. An executive stated that if these young men had not asked the right questions, we would still be making steel the old-fashioned way.

A question checklist also helps you increase your observation and a...

We do not see the stars in motion, though they move at speeds of more than a million miles per day. We do not see the trees grow or notice ourselves aging each day. We do not even see the hands of a clock in motion. We tend to think statically and are surprised, often uncomfortably and sometimes fatally, by the constant changes in our world.

Static companies become frustrated and confused about the nature of their business; they often try to become all things to all people.

To get effective new ideas for your business, you must know what your business is and what it should be. Only by knowing these things can you apprehend the changing business world.

On the face of it, nothing may seem simpler or more obvious than to know what a company’s business is. A railroad runs trains, a publisher produces books, an automobile company manufactures cars, and so on. Actually, “What is our business?” is almost always a difficult question, and the right answer is often anything but obvious.

BLUEPRINT Ask “What is our business?” and “What should our business be?” These questions focus your attention on where to look for new ideas. Define and organize your business according to products or services, markets, functions, and technologies. For instance, the key descriptors for a business book publisher would be: Products or services: Books. Markets: Books for the business professional. Functions: Books that provide business information. Technologies: Books based on the latest printing technologies. Under each variable, list the key words for the business: Key words describe the products or services, markets, functions, and technologies in your industry. A key word index for the business book publisher would be: PRODUCTS hardback books softback books floppy disks cassettes electronic networks FUNCTIONS information entertainment education training resource MARKETS libraries bookstores universities industry military TECHNOLOGIES print electronic audio modular video SERVICES professional discounts book clubs newsletters seminars information services Mix and match your products, markets, functions, services, and technologies in various ways to explore new ideas.

A business book publisher might connect the following key words to create a new idea: cassettes, training, industry, audio, and seminars.

An essential step in deciding the nature of your business is a systematic analysis and combination of the key words that describe existing products, services, markets, functions, marketing, and technologies. Are they still viable? Will they remain viable? What can be connected to produce a new idea? Think of your business as a pot with two handles. One handle represents the nature of your business today, the other represents what your business will be in the future. To hold the pot steady, you have to grasp both handles by asking: “What is the nature of my business?” and “What should my business be?”

One thing is certain: We are all traveling toward the future at sixty minutes per hour, no matter who we are or what we do, and we are all going to arrive there no matter what. The first scratch on a new car is a stinging little reminder of the inevitability of a coming future. What is the future of your business? How can one prepare for it?

All human experience is expansive and omnidirectional, including the future. Because the future is not linear, you cannot prepare for it with one single plan. To harvest profits in the future, you should have several alternative plans based on improbable as well as probable future events. Think of future profit as future fruit. Having only one scenario is planting one strawberry instead of a whole field of possible strawberries. Scenarios, like strawberries, may spoil. If you have only one scenario and it spoils, you have a problem.

Therefore, when you think about the future of your business, you also force yourself to think about what is happening in your business now and what has happened in the past.

BLUEPRINT The procedures for preparing for the future are: Identify a particular problem in your business. State a particular decision that has to be made. Identify the forces (economic, technological, product lines, competition, and so on) that have an impact on the decision. Build four or five future scenarios based on the principal forces. Use all the available information and develop scenarios that will give you as many different and plausible possibilities as a pinball in play. Develop the scenarios into stories or narratives by varying the forces that impact the decision. Change the forces (interest rates escalate, a key performer quits, need for your product or service disappears, etc.) and combine them into different patterns to describe the possible consequences of your decision over the next five years. Search for business opportunities within each scenario. Then explore the links between opportunities across the range of your scenarios, and actively search for new ideas.

The more possible futures you foresee, the more options you can create; the more options you have, the greater your chances of finding the unexpected opportunity.

These techniques reorganize information in ways that help you break away from the most obvious and reasonable perspectives. An obvious rearrangement of information is often too closely related to old, familiar patterns to provoke a big idea. The more dramatic your change of perspective, the greater your chance for an original insight or breakthrough idea. Think about siphoning water from a bucket. You start by doing the unnatural and unexpected—sucking water upwards into a tube. Yet, once the water reaches a certain point in the tube, the siphon effect takes over and the water flows naturally out of the bucket. In the same way, a seemingly unnatural use of information can produce a perfectly natural idea.

BRUTETHINK Technique: Random stimulation. Profile: Forces a connection between two dissimilar concepts to create a new idea.

HALL oF FAME Technique: Forced connection. Profile: Produces ideas and insights by creating a relationship between your challenge and the words an...

CIRCLE oF OPPORTUNITY Technique: Forced connection. Profile: Generates ideas by forcing a connective link between com...

IDEATOONS Technique: Pattern language. Profile: A way to get ideas by using abstract ...

CLEVER TREVOR Technique: Talk to a stranger. Profile: How to get ideas by increasing the number and kind of people y...

“To foresee a victory which the ordinary man can foresee is not the acme of skill.” SUN TZU The pattern below appears to be a grid, but it is not. None of the lines touch each other, yet we see the empty spaces as circles or squares hiding the grid intersections. We connect the illusory figures to create a street-like effect out of empty spaces.

In order to get original ideas, you will always need a way to create new sets of patterns in your mind. One way to do this is to force yourself to see relationships between dissimilar things. When you can do this, you will see ideas where none existed before. We all see relationships between those objects that we’ve been taught are related, such as chair and table, ham and eggs, bread and butter, brother and sister, teacher and student, work and money, and so on. In traditional thinking, we put things together because there is a reason to put them together.

In the world of art, however, it is common to put things together which have no obvious connection; the random juxtaposition of unrelated objects provokes new ideas.

From the juxtaposition come ideas of function, durability, and mundaneness contrasting with beauty and nature. One observer might feel the need to reexamine routine objects in his life for beauty, while another might look for more function in nature. It is not uncommon for an artist to come up with a unique pattern which scientists later find in nature. Brutethink lets you learn from relationships that might not occur spontaneously by pairing two things that have nothing in common and seeing what emerges. Trying to define the process is a little difficult, somewhat like trying to bite your own teeth.

The human brain cannot deliberately concentrate on two separate objects or ideas without eventually forming a connection between them. No two inputs can remain separate in your mind no matter how remote they are from each other. Eventually, like the tetherball, you will wind one around the other. The trick is to hold both of them in your attention and to look for relationships and connections between the two. Your attention is the restraint that helps make this a closed system. Once you become aware, you will routinely see connections between dissimilar things.

The brain tends to fill in the gaps in order to perceive complete forms, and to fill in the missing information to make a relationship whole.

The connections will provide you with new information about your challenge: a different perspective about the problem or perhaps an analogy that has its own line of development.

You can now identify many issues and many ways to respond to the challenge of trying to improve your relationship. A chain of ideas stretches out from the random word to link up with the challenge. Some of the links may be helpful, others not. The purpose of using a random word is to generate a large number of different ideas in a short period of time.

When you are looking for a fresh approach to a challenge, bring in a random word. the word you bring in must be truly random and not selected for any relevance to the stated challenge. Random words will spark a fresh association of ideas in your mind. Like pebbles dropped in a pond, they stimulate other associations, some of which may help you to a breakthrough idea.

Sometimes searching for ideas is like being a mosquito in a nudist colony. You know what you want to do but don’t know where to begin. Forcing connections between random words gives you one starting point, but there are some other useful ways to stimulate the random juxtaposition of ideas.

VERBS aND NOUNS Play with noun and verb relationships to think up new and useful ideas, goods, and services. For instance, take the sales problem for which we randomly chose the word “bottle.” Consider the words bottle and sales as both nouns and verbs: “bottling sales” and “selling bottles.” Bottling sales suggests looking for ways to close sales; selling bottles suggests looking at ways beverages are sold and distributed.

PACK RAT Collect and store ideas like a pack rat. Keep a container (coffee can, shoe box, desk drawer, file folder, or the like) of ideas and idea starters. Collect interesting advertisements, quotes, designs, ideas, questions, cartoons, pictures, doodles, words, and other intriguing items that might trigger additional ideas by association. When you are looking for a new idea, shake up the container and pick one at random, then see what intriguing connections you can discover between the item and your challenge. You may find a diamond shining in the trash.

Might have excavated the purpose of my extensive Kindle library and browser bookmarks.

MAGAZINES Randomly pick up a magazine and read one article, no matter how remote its subject is to your challenge. Then contemplate the connections between the article and your challenge; try to generate some new ideas. Any such exercise is extremely valuable in helping you set up and cultivate habits that encourage random input.

SHAPES Select a shape, such as a circle, and focus on that shape for a day. When you enter a room, pay attention only to objects that are circular, and try to make connec...

The idea: A restaurant called “The cruel Grill.” The restaurant could feature a grill where patrons could watch the food being prepared. The menu would feature items such as oysters, which could be placed on a grill while still alive. As they fry, their shells would open and shut, making sounds. Shrimp, lobster, and other shellfish could be broiled alive. You could advertise it as the restaurant that serves cuisine from Hell. Such restaurants are already quite popular in Japan.

Looking for ideas using Brutethink is like sleeping under a too-short blanket. You pull it up, and your toes rebel; you yank it down, and your shoulders shiver; but cheerful folks always manage to yank and pull until they get it just right and sleep in comfort. Your comfort results from yanking and pulling on dissimilar objects until you come up with new ideas.

“And therefore only the enlightened sovereign and the worthy general who are able to use the most intelligent people as agents are certain to achieve great things.” SUN TZU

This is the way your mind works; for every action there is a reaction. When looking for ideas, picture yourself jumping from your challenge to a quotation or great thought. The quotation, like the boat, will turn and crash into your challenge, sparking a new idea.