A Technique for Producing Ideas
2 Principles and a 5-stage Method for Generating Ideas
First written in the 1940s, “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young is a concise and powerful book on creativity. Whether we need to prepare a presentation, write an article, or creatively look at our past experience to prepare for an interview or think about the next steps in our career, the Principles and the Method introduced in this book will help unblock the barriers to creativity.
Key Takeaways:
Principles and Method Are Everything.
In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing because they are made up of rapidly aging facts. Principles and methods are everything.
2 Principles for Producing Ideas
An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Consequently, the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.
The 5-stage Method for Producing Ideas
Though it’s not in the book, I find that they fit nicely into an I-D-E-A-S mnemonic.
I - Information - we gather raw materials
We gather information, raw materials both of our immediate problems (this is our current information-gathering job) and materials that come from a constant enrichment of your general knowledge (this is our life-long information-gathering job).
This step is so crucial, but is a terrible chore, so no wonder we often try to dodge it.
Every really good creative person has two notable characteristics, and both have to deal with insatiable curiosity: (1) there is no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested; (2) she is an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.
The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The construction of an idea is akin to turning a kaleidoscope: the more of the elements of our kaleidoscopic world are stored in our pattern-making machine, the mind, the greater chances we have to produce new and striking combinations, ideas.
D - Digestive process - we seek relationships
We take different bits of material that you have gathered and feel them all over.
What we are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
Three things will happen as we go through this process:
(1) little tentative or partial ideas will come to us. We should put them on paper no matter how crazy or incomplete they seem - they foreshadow the real idea to come.
(2) We will get very tired, but we should persevere. The mind has a second wind. So we go after at least this second layer of mental energy.
(3) We will get hopeless. Everything starts feeling like a jumble, with no clear insight anywhere. When we reach this point, we are ready for the third stage.
E - Escape - We drop the problem completely and escape to other things that stimulate us
This is an incubating stage. Here, we let something besides the conscious mind do the work of synthesis. For that, we drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates our imagination and emotions (music, nature, sport, theatre, poetry, etc.)
A - A-ha! moment - We see the birth of the actual idea
This is the birth of the actual idea.
It will appear out of nowhere and when we are least expecting it.
This is the way the ideas come after we have stopped straining for them and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation.
S - Submission to reality-check - We take our idea to the world
This is the cold, grey dawn of the morning after.
We take our newborn idea into the world of reality.
What we usually find is that it is not the marvelous child it seemed when we gave birth to it.
We should not make a mistake and hold our idea close to our chest. Instead, we should submit it to the criticism, to the reality check.