However, if you want to come up with more creative ideas, change your perspective to reverse thinking and think about how to… make the situation worse! What would you have to do if your goal was the opposite of what you intended?
In the case of a slow website, the question would be: how can you make the website as slow as possible? You could, for example, flood it with high-resolution graphics and install a ton of plugins. And voilà! Now you know what to avoid and what to work on.
Removing negative factors may be easier, less expensive and less time-consuming than finding a solution that would eliminate their harmful impact.
By figuring out how to make the situation worse, you will also identify previously unrecognized threats and develop solutions that will effectively deal with them.
Sometimes it's worth indonesia phone number example thinking the other way around!
5. From ball to thread
You know that moment when, after a long brainstorming session, someone finally comes up with such a simple and obvious idea that everyone wonders how they couldn't have thought of it themselves?
This is a typical situation related to lateral thinking (so-called 'sideways thinking') - an approach to a problem that, unlike logical (vertical) thinking, is not a conventional reasoning process, and therefore is not based on deduction (drawing conclusions from what is known) or induction (creating a theory based on observation).
Instead, lateral thinking uses creative techniques such as taking unusual perspectives, changing assumptions, breaking through constraints, and even elements of randomness.
Once the solution is known, the mind can propose a chain of logical derivation that would seemingly lead to similar conclusions, but for some reason it doesn't work the other way around!
That’s why it’s sometimes worth starting from the end: instead of asking how to improve the current state of affairs, move forward and think back: what is the last step to take to make your goal a reality? And the stage preceding it?
Repeat this process, going back one step at a time, until you get to where you are now and your strategy is ready!
6. Put on a hat (one of six!)
The Six Thinking Hats method is a creative thinking and decision-making technique developed by the Nobel Prize-nominated Maltese psychologist, physician and creator of the term lateral thinking – Edward de Bono.
It involves using six different thought perspectives in the process of finding solutions and making decisions.
The white hat is an objective way of thinking , based on available data and traditional reasoning. The task of the person thinking in this way is to collect the necessary information, assess its credibility and draw conclusions from it.
The red hat symbolizes the often underestimated emotional approach . With it on your head mentally, you will give voice to your emotions and subjective feelings, and you will also take into account the voice of intuition.
The black hat is critical thinking – when you put it on, you take on the role of an analyst whose job is to point out what could go wrong in order to avoid failure. But be careful: this is not about a subjective approach like “I don’t think this will work!” The black hat uses objective thinking and is based solely on specific and rational arguments.
The Yellow Hat, like the Black Hat, is concerned with evaluation, but unlike the Black Hat, it thinks optimistically! When using the Yellow Hat, you use speculative-positive thinking – you consider what benefits may result from a given solution and generate ideas, assuming that everything can be done!
The green hat is responsible for creativity and lateral thinking – there is no judgment, but there is fun with thought and an unfettered search for even the most absurd scenario! Thanks to provocations such as: “what if hamburgers were square” (an example from the book The Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono) and not questioning ideas, we can easily move to another place in the thought process and come up with the most non-standard (but already consistent with reality!) solutions.
The blue hat is ultimately about managing the thought process . By putting it on, we become a project manager who directs the search, sets the next stages, and controls all the other hats. This is a particularly useful role if we use the de Bono method in a team and each way of thinking is represented by a different person.
But be careful! Just as you don’t wear three hats at once, you shouldn’t use several ways of thinking at the same time – the idea of the thinking hats method is to take only one perspective at a time. Otherwise, you could end up going around in circles and blocking one way of thinking from another!
How to regularly come up with brilliant ideas?
Use tools that stimulate creativity – stream of consciousness writing, 'think inside the box' solution-seeking, critical thinking (why won't this work?), reverse thinking (how can I make things worse?), backward thinking (what is the last step I need to take to achieve my goal?) and six perspectives, illustrated in the form of thinking hats by Edward de Bono.
This way you will avoid creative blocks, streamline your thought process and… come up with REALLY innovative solutions!