Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

by Michael Michalko

Hall of Fame helps you gain new insight into your challenges by consulting the world’s great minds, both real and fictional. Quotations contain seeds and principles of ideas that can be applied to a variety of challenges, and when you find the seed of one idea you find many ideas.

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Collect your own quotations and thoughts from books, biographies, the Bible, the Talmud, newspapers, magazines, cartoons, movies, and television. Record and collect any quotation that appeals to you. You can categorize them according to subject, or randomly. Some of my favorites come from the Talmud:

“He who walks with butter on his head should not walk in the sun.” “Don’t hitch a horse and an ox to the same wagon.” “One coin in a bottle rattles; the bottle filled with coins makes no noise.” “Woe to him who makes a door before he has a house or builds a gate and has no yard.” “If two logs are dry and one is wet, the kindling of the two will kindle the wet one, too.” “Just as wheat is not without straw, so no dream is without some nonsense.”

Some of my other favorite quotations: “Ruling a big country is like cooking small fish.”—Lao Tzu “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?”—Victor Hugo “There are two ways to spread the light, to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”—Edith Wharton “God is a geometrician.”—Plato “Handle your tools without mittens; remember that the cat in gloves catches no mice.”—Ben Franklin “The perfection of art is to conceal art.”—Quintilian “Not only strike while the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.”—Oliver Cromwell “And I must find every changing shape, to find expression.” —T. S. Eliot “When you eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”—Arthur Conan Doyle “Form ever follows function.”—Louis Henri Sullivan

Create your personal Hall of Fame. Select those people, living or dead, real or fictional, who appeal to you for one reason or another. Following are some of the members of my personal Hall of Fame: Ben Franklin Bill Moyers Mark Twain Clarence Darrow Rupert Murdock George Patton John F. Kennedy Dorothy Parker W. Somerset Maugham Winston Churchill Sherlock Holmes Diogenes Ralph Waldo Emerson Andrew Jackson Sigmund Freud Peter the great Leonardo da Vinci Pearl Buck Adlai Stevenson Albert Schweitzer Jesus Christ Julius Caesar Plato William Shakespeare Aristotle Robert Frost Eugene O’Neill Aldous Huxley Sun Tzu Thomas Jefferson

Ponder the quotation. Write down your thoughts, regardless of appropriateness to the challenge. If you think it, write it, and try to use these thoughts to generate more relevant thoughts. The basic rules are: Strive for quantity. Defer judgment. Freewheel. Seek to combine and improve your thoughts.

I record the thoughts and ideas that the quote elicits from me, without censoring. There are no wrong answers. I write whatever comes to mind, and end up with: What does the customer see as important? How can I deliver? Can I go the extra mile for the customer? Will it make a difference? Will they become loyal purchasers? What can we do? Woods are full of trees. Trees are customers. How are trees tended? Cared for? Harvested? What similarities are there between trees and customers? Can I nourish customers daily? Weekly? What are the customer’s deep and dark desires? Can I discover them? Should I work harder? Longer? Should I make company promises in writing? Should we rewrite our guarantees? What can I do so the customer perceives me as honest and hardworking? Wood comes from trees. Wood builds. In what ways can I build better relationships with customers? More establishment? More service? Problem solving? Provide information? Robert Frost made personal appearances. Should we have executives make personal calls? Seminars? Trees are pruned. Do I have too many customers? Should I prune the unprofitable accounts so I can devote more time to our profitable ones?

The resulting ideas for building better customer relationships are: Analyze the customer’s problems and provide the best and most current product information possible to help them address their problems. Entertain customers more with the idea of finding out what’s important and what is not to the customer. Ask key customers to work for me as consultants. Help the customer do more business by supporting their endeavors more. Suggest and initiate marketing programs for key customers. Inform them about what their competition is doing. Become a clearinghouse of information about the customer’s competition. Make sure salespeople are compatible with their accounts; if not, switch accounts to ensure compatibility between salespeople and customers. Give loyal customers preferential treatment. Larger discounts, a special service line, guaranteed response time, better credit terms, and so on.

A dead coal can be rekindled when a live coal is placed next to it. When your creative fire has gone out, place a quotation or great thought in your mind to rekindle it. For variety, you may wish to try another way of consulting advisors: Create your own personal, imaginary Board of Directors.

The Board of Directors is a fantasy board of powerhouse business leaders and innovators who will assist you in overcoming your business challenges. Imagine having at your disposal the experience, wisdom, and know-how of Thomas Edison, Douglas MacArthur, Alfred Sloan Jr., Lee Iacocca, Thomas Watson, John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, Sam Walton, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Donald Trump, Ted Turner, or whomever you admire most, living or dead.

Select the three to five business movers and shakers, living or dead, whom you admire most.

Get photographs of your Board (these could be photocopied from magazines), and pin them on your wall in a prominent spot. These photographs will constantly remind you of the talent at your disposal.

Research your heroes: Hit the library, read their biographies and autobiographies, read what their critics say about them; in short, read everything about ...

Take notes on your favorite passages, perhaps about obstacles and how they overcame them, or anything that strikes you as relevant and interesting. Pay particular attention to the creative techniques they employed to solve problems, their secrets, what made them stand out, wh...

When you have a challenge, consult the members of your board and imagine how they would solve it. How would Henry Ford resolve a labor problem? Can you think of the ways Thomas Edison would suggest to look for new products or ...

“As is your sort of mind, So is your sort of search; you’ll find What you desire.” Robert Browning

I was reading the other day, that your perspective of the world is shaped by your own experiences, predispositions, and worldview. Even narratives of reality, which should be objective, are often painted with our own unique perspectives.

If you expect to find ideas in the thoughts and words of others, you will believe you can, and you will.

Circle of Opportunity randomly isolates one or two attributes of your challenge for comprehensive consideration—all the other attributes stay “stacked up,” allowing you to comprehend or “land” a new idea.

Free-associating is a great way to release creative energy. Start with your first idea about the attribute and keep making connections until you trigger an idea or the beginning of a line of speculation. Free-associating should feel like driving a car around a long, gentle curve until you arrive at something worthwhile. In the figure below, the attribute “yellow” spreads into a number of associations.

Let’s construct another Circle of Opportunity with a different set of common attributes. Imagine that we are trying to come up with a new package design for a product. Instead of randomly selecting attributes, this time we’ll use attributes that pertain to packaging: inexpensive, loud, rectangle, light, selling, exotic, blue, strong, words, porous, sharp, and conservative. Our circle would look like this.

“Therefore, when I have won a victory I do not repeat my tactics but rearrange them to circumstances in an infinite variety of ways.” SUN TZU

This is how visual and verbal thinking work. What we call verbal thinking is always on the outside. But the visual thinking is always there, on the inside, and when we turn our thinking inside-out, we call that thinking, too.

In the same way, verbal and visual thinking coexist in your mind. There is no reason to believe that one is better than the other, but we tend to rely too heavily on the verbal. Ideatoons show you how to liberalize your thinking by turning it inside out.

Pattern language is a visual thinking technique. It was originally invented by architects Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein to help create new building designs. The visual, flexible nature of pattern language makes it a useful creative device for seeing new and different relationships between attributes.

You can make pattern language as simple or as complex as you wish. One possible technique is to use a different color for each parameter of the challenge in addition to the graphic symbols that describe the attributes.

Ideatoons is a device that allows you to express, see, and think about your business challenge in a different and unique way by seasoning your challenge with the sauce of pictures.

Creative businesspeople have begun using pattern language to increase their capacity to divide wholes into parts and regroup the parts into a variety of new patterns. Symbols also help you develop a deeper insight into any situation.

Sometimes when your imagination has been warmed by verbal techniques—many times, too many times—it ends up like coffee that has been microwaved too often. You need to change your techniques and alter the way you use them to keep your imagination fresh-perked. Pictures permit you to look at challenges with a pair of fresh eyes. With fresh eyes, you may see the idea bouncing around on your desk like a chicken trying to avoid becoming Sunday dinner.

Some social scientists believe that the more expert you become in your field, the more difficult it is to create innovative ideas—or even obvious ones. This is because becoming an expert means you tend to specialize your thinking. Specializing is like brushing one tooth. You get to know that one tooth extremely well, but you lose the rest of them in the process.

Organizational psychologists will beg to differ. That said, they’re usually in favor of tendencies that prepare an individual to be a great contributor in a specific role, not a generalist who is able to think across department lines to come up with something new.