Ideaflow Quotes

“Learning circles Unlike tactics tied to a specific role, project, or enterprise, establishing a Learning Circle—a group that connects regularly to share and discuss ideas—will provide a lifetime of divergent inputs for you.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Most of the time, the problem is the problem.” If you’re not willing to reframe the problem to explore a more productive avenue, you’ll end up spinning your tires.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Never put what you can do (feasibility) ahead of what the market wants (desirability”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Test before you invest, not once but at every stage. Testing is forecasting. It’s how you see your success before you achieve it.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“This means allowing yourself, just for this window of time, to think “irresponsibly.” When you adopt a divergent mindset, there are no longer mistakes. Only, in the words of the great creativity expert and landscape painter Bob Ross, “happy little accidents.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Warm-ups also shift the group out of the conventional, convergent mindset they rely on at work. When we’re doing our jobs, we’re primed to notice mistakes, minimize risk, organize chaos, and stay on point. Generating ideas together requires a different mode of operation.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“If you have more than one pressing idea problem, create a Problem Queue. (You can never have too many good problems to work on.) As you unwind for sleep, select a problem from your Problem Queue and let your mind play with it in a relaxed and unfocused way. You might even spend a few minutes doing some related reading. Don’t force solutions, though. What you’re doing here is luring the interest of your subconscious. Ponder the relevant details, but don’t try to make everything fit together yet.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“From now on, you will feed your brain high-importance problems, pointing it toward areas where new thinking will contribute meaningfully to your goals.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Performing an Idea Quota is a simple, three-S process: Seed. Select a problem and study it. Sleep. Let the unconscious mind process the problem. Solve. Flood the problem with ideas.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Every morning from now on, you will write down ten ideas. (We’ll get to what kind of ideas in a moment.) The quality of these ideas isn’t the point. Contrary to what you might believe, you can’t judge the merit of an idea while it’s still inside your head. Idea validation is as crucial to the creative process as idea generation. But that happens later. For now, our aim is just to freshen up stale thinking”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“THE IDEA QUOTA Loosening up your stiff creative muscles every morning helps you make the crucial flip from a mindset of quality to one of quantity when it’s time to come up with ideas. Making the following Idea Quota a part of your day will lighten the subconscious pressure for perfection that stymies creative exploration.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“Instead of struggling to come up with a single perfect solution, you go from: Quality to quantity Precious to scrappy Perfection to practice Done to doing Your perspective to someone else’s Isolation to collaboration Relevance-requiring to randomness-embracing Focused to mind-wandering Order to chaos Your expertise to unfamiliar territory Output-focused to input-obsessed”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“In tough times, however, we’re praised for staying at our desks and burning the midnight oil. How are you supposed to see the horizon with your nose pressed against the grindstone? Thanks in large part to the factory mentality of modern workplace culture, organizations discourage the very behaviors that can save them.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

“So much advice around innovation and creativity amounts to more: more methods, more habits, more techniques. If we don’t simultaneously carve away less important uses of our time to create space for reflection and contemplation—distance from the problem at hand—we only undermine the effort to boost ideaflow. Caught up in the day-to-day, our imaginations become blocked, just as David Ogilvy warned at the top of this chapter. To escape “the tyranny of reason,” we must be as tactical about withdrawing from a losing battle as we are about gathering divergent inputs or vigorously testing our ideas. The “Father of Advertising” was an ace at the mental game of creative output. He intuitively understood that generating more ideas required doing a little less.”
― Jeremy Utley, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters