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------------------------------------------ This is the fourth of nine chapters of THINK THUNDER! AND UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY Copyright (c) 1989 by Thomas A. Easton ------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 4: BRAINSTORMING Everyone is creative, to some extent, but very few have enough of this distinctively human talent to base their careers on it. Very few can be novelists, painters, sculptors, inventors, and scientists. The reason is in part that most people don't dare to exercise what creativity they have. They are blocked by fear of ridicule, fear of failure, fear of success, and ego. Yet there are ways around these blocks, and an industry has grown up to tell people how to find and use these paths to freeing their creativity. This creativity industry peddles books, tapes, seminars, and courses to students, writers, business people, and others. They even have some success at teaching creativity, but unfortunately, no one solution to the creativity problem works for everyone. Most of the solutions to blocked creativity involve varieties of brainstorming. This book's solution--computerized brainstorming--is no exception, though it works better than others. But before we can get down to seeing how this one works, we need to discuss brainstorming in general. WHAT IS BRAINSTORMING? The term "brainstorm" is a metaphor that evokes the image of inspiration striking like lightning. It is especially apt for people who do not have vigorous popcorn minds. For such people, novel ideas come only occasionally, and when they do the sensation can be downright electrifying, much as we imagine a lightning bolt would be. For people with vigorous popcorn minds, "brainstorming" is what we have called "popping." This is what most naturally creative people do very easily. The link between their conscious and subconscious minds is loose, and they are continually stirring and mixing the stock of raw material in their brains. New combinations of words, images, and ideas--jokes, stories, poems, insights, inventions, and theories--pour forth unstoppably. This is why the creativity industry relies on the various forms of brainstorming for its product. Brainstorming--or popping--IS the raw stuff of creativity. It is also a way to help yourself come up with ideas for absolutely any purpose whatsoever. It is a classic technique for MAKING lightning strike. To those who teach brainstorming, it is a jump start for the less creative or blocked brain. The problem is coming up with ways to make brainstorming a teachable process. HOW DOES BRAINSTORMING WORK? Most of those who peddle brainstorming techniques believe that absolutely everyone is capable of developing a full-blast popcorn mind. They offer two major reasons why most people are not creative. The first is that they become too mired in conventionality to break free, to be unconventional, to be creative. They need, the brainstorm peddlers say, a whack on the side of the head to shake up their ideas and get them to see the world in a new light. The second reason, say the brainstorm peddlers, is that people's critical minds suppress almost everything their popcorn minds produce, dismissing it as laughable or worthless. The key to teaching popping or brainstorming must therefore lie in showing people how to turn off their critical minds. Once they can do that, the flow of novel combinations of words and ideas will be free to well up from the unconscious to consciousness. The "nonsense" inevitably generated by the popcorn mind will become visible, and they will be able to examine it, and then to find things the critical mind was unjustly suppressing. The point is first to collect the popcorn, and only then to sort out and discard the old maids. Both of these reasons amount to the same thing, as our discussion of blocks in Chapter 3 suggests. A hyperactive critical mind is hyperactive because of childhood-based fears of ridicule, failure, and success. Being stuck in conventionality amounts to being afraid to be seen as unconventional, and therefore ridiculed, disapproved of, or even persecuted. Habit may play a role, but habits that are not reinforced by one's value system are relatively easy to break. You escape both reasons when you use a system like that offered in this book. It aids both the popcorn and the critical minds by diminishing your self-involvement in your creativity. At the same time, as we will see, it strengthens habits of unconventional, creative thought, even until you can do without the system. BRAINSTORMING TECHNIQUES You don't need this book's system in order to brainstorm. There are a great many ways to do it, and they all work, for someone. For each of them, the key is the same: You write down one thing, and then, as spontaneously and uncritically as possible, you write down everything else that pops into your head, in response to your starting point or to your later responses to that starting point, or in response to something in the street outside your room. You may or may not try to steer the process by insisting that the second stage be in some way linked to the first. The point is the spontaneity, the uncritical lack of restraint. It is, in short, what the psychiatrists call free association. Let's see how it works. You are a student who must write a paper on BEOWULF. That is all you know, though you have read that ancient epic. In addition, it has occurred to you that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER would have had a field day if it had existed at the time of the saga. One approach to finding the idea for your paper is "free writing." You sit down and begin to write, starting wherever you like, even with something that seems to have nothing to do with BEOWULF. You then follow your mind as it wanders. Inevitably, because BEOWULF is on your mind, in time you find yourself in useful territory, and with a nice chunk of the paper written, to boot. I prefer true brainstorming, which also relies on trusting the subconscious to generate and recognize useful ideas. Its advantage, to my mind, is that it is less formless and more efficient and wastes less time in the groping stage. Where free writing may occupy a person for an hour or so, brainstorming can be finished in five minutes. In one form, brainstorming works like so: Take a sheet of paper and write "Beowulf" in the center. Then, scattered on the page around that word, write down whatever pops into your head about it: "heroic," "epic," "classic," "adventure," "monsters," "a bore," "mother-love," "science fiction," "I wanta go see a movie," "fantasy," "fairies," "Was Grendel a Fairy?" "Was BEOWULF Science Fiction?" "Was It Fantasy?" "Was Grendel a Space-Alien?" "Tabloid scandals." When you run out of steam, lean back and stare at your sheet of paper. Look at what you have written, and ask yourself: "What makes sense?" Before long, you find yourself putting several of your words or phrases together. Lightning strikes, and--Surprise!--you are beginning to scribble the first draft of your A paper, "The Epic Tradition in Science Fiction," or "Fairies Make Bad Neighbors," or "The NATIONAL ENQUIRER as Modern Epic." The result is a novel combination of ideas that existed before in your head. What you have done is draw those ideas--or some of them--out where you can see them. Then you have let them combine, with each other and with ideas still buried in the murk within your skull, until some combination has stimulated you to think, "THIS makes sense." Let's look at another, more focused approach. This time you are a product developer in a major corporation. Your R&D (research and development) people have come up with a brilliantly colored dye that also kills bacteria. Your job is to figure out what to do with it, preferably in a way that will make your company several million dollars. This time you write in the center of your paper, or on a blackboard, "Dye, bright, bactericidal. Uses ???" Then, as in the case of the student, you free-associate, but you do not do so entirely freely. You don't want just anything that pops into your head. You want USES for a specific product. But, really, you shouldn't ignore everything that pops into your head. As you write down uses--"Paint insides of toilets," "Dye washcloths so they don't smell," "Colored bandages"--you glance at the next desk over, where someone has left the swimsuit issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. And suddenly you think, "Aha! Add fragrance! And we've got armpit paint that adds decorative, colorful flash and also serves as a deodorant!" That's some brainstorm. And it has been a long time since anyone came up with a truly new cosmetic. Deodorant armpit paint might actually fly as a product. BRAINSTORMING TEAMS Brainstorming need not be a one-person activity, and in fact it is a great deal more fun when done in a group. Imagine a typical bull-session: There is an ebullience of mutual inspiration that makes the ideas flourish, and an outside observer must think that "popcorn mind" is a very apt description of what is going on. Now restrict the bull-session participants to a single topic, ask them a specific question, and watch them pop. When this group process is working well, it makes the single brainstormer look timid and unimaginative. It generates more and wilder ideas than you would think possible. This is the principle behind the approach used by a number of professional think tanks that sell brainstorming, on a contract basis, to corporations in search of ideas. I learned about the approach when, several years ago, I received a phone call from Innotech. This company, my caller explained, was a Connecticut think tank in the commercial brainstorming business. Its client had, as in the above example, come up with a substance (the secrecy agreement I signed prevents greater specificity) that needed uses in order to turn it into a salable product. Innotech's task was to gather several experts in various areas, only some of which were related to the client's interests; it called me because I was both a biologist and a science fiction writer, and thus someone they could count on--they hoped--to furnish a wilder imagination than usual. Once it had the experts together in one room, Innotech explained the nature of its client's substance. Then it asked us what such a thing might be good for, encouraging us to come up with ideas as wild as possible. It gave us Tinker Toys and other gadgets to inspire us to flights of fancy. It covered easel pages with our suggestions and pinned them to the wall. (And every idea that anyone in the group mentioned stayed on the wall, in order to stimulate more ideas.) It organized our suggestions into categories and narrowed in on various specific categories. Never did it throw an idea out, for fear of dampening our creative enthusiasm. Only when we had left for home did the Innotech personnel turn their own critical minds loose to wade through the vast bulk of our ideas in hope of finding a gem or two among all the garbage. And they did. They found a number of product ideas that seemed sound, including at least one that I have noticed since on the market. STORMS OF IGNORANCE Adapted from T. A. Easton, "The value of ignorance--For writing students and 'pros'," THE WRITING TEACHER, Fall 1985. We said above that brainstorming makes ideas that are already within your mind more available for your inspection, evaluation, and use. Still earlier we said that creativity requires a stock of knowledge. The clear implication here is that you must have something in your head before you can brainstorm or be creative. This is why some people feel they cannot create. They think of themselves as lacking both ideas and knowledge, as beyond the help of brainstorming or any other creativity-enhancing "system." They may be right. But it is possible to brainstorm without ideas of your own, or at least without many. It helps to be able to tell whether a topic is important or significant or interesting, whether there is likely to be enough material in the library for further development, and whether you can hope to say anything original or useful. Still, detailed knowledge is NOT necessary for at least one kind of brainstorming. Consider the thoughts of a writer who has just been asked by a magazine to write an article on, say, consultants. He (or she) knows nothing about consultants, other than that they exist and that they are used by business, government agencies, and educational (and other) institutions. This much he has gathered from all the newspaper articles he has read, which frequently report that some organization has called upon a consultant for the sake of his or her special expertise and the advice he can supply to help with some problem. Since the magazine is, let us suppose, a business magazine aimed at small business people, he knows immediately that he should focus his discussion on business consultants. But now what? Our writer is ignorant. All he can do is scratch his balding head and ask himself: --What ARE consultants? --What, exactly, do they do? --How many of them are there? --What kind of people are they? --What's their training? --What good do they do a business? --Come to think of it, I've heard they make lots of money. Just how much do they charge? --Whatever they do, are they worth it? --How does a business pay and evaluate them? --And so on. As he looks at his list of questions, our writer realizes that he has before him the outline of a book on consultants (and an outline very like the one I prepared, in much the same way, for my and Ralph Conant's USING CONSULTANTS: A CONSUMER'S GUIDE FOR MANAGERS [Chicago: Probus, 1985]). The questions flow from one to the next in a very free-associational way, and all the writer need do is answer them in turn. Each question becomes the title of a chapter, and its detailed answer becomes the body of that chapter. Our writer has organized--outlined--a book entirely on the basis of his ignorance, letting his questions shape the void, dividing the unknown into a series of little boxes that need only be filled in. But perhaps turning ignorance into a book is easy. After all, ignorance is infinite. We were talking about a magazine article, and it is clear that our writer's list of questions covers far too much ground for such a small piece of writing. He must narrow his focus--a common necessity for students as well--and he can do this very effectively by picking one of his questions. Any of them will do, so let's look at the seventh: How much do they charge? His first step, once more, is to define his ignorance by asking questions: --Do all consultants charge the same prices? --If not (and they probably don't), then how can I break "all consultants" into subgroups? --What do the various subgroups charge? --Do their charges vary with context? --What are the contexts? And here is an outline for a magazine article. All our writer now need do is find the necessary answers to fill in his blanks. He will then have precisely the information he needs to write his article. You don't have to be a professional writer to use this technique. It is useful for students, executives, scientists, and all others who must deal with topics about which they know too little. You--whoever you are--should begin, once you have picked or been assigned a general topic area, by defining your ignorance as specifically as possible. "Exactly what do you want to know about, or within, your topic?" is the first question. If you already know a great deal, rephrase that as "What does your audience want to know about it?" If you are writing a paper or report, the ideal answer will be a second question whose answer will work out to a paper of just the right length. Length is in part a function of the scope of the question and in part a function of the level of detail that will satisfy your appetite for information. Scope may be best defined as the number of subsidiary questions you can ask in the next stage; "level of detail" is the length of your answers to these questions. The resulting list of questions serves as two things: a guide to research in the library (or elsewhere), and a rough outline of the report or paper. Your ignorance is thus an extremely valuable tool. It defines a body of knowledge to be acquired. Through a chain of free-associational questions, each one prompting the next, it also defines the components of that body of knowledge. Your task is then to learn the answers to the questions, and then to record those answers in your report. In essence, your ignorance provides a set of instructions for you to follow. And yes, we are talking here about a form of brainstorming. There are the same free association and the same list of everything you can think of. What is missing, perhaps, is the need for lightning to strike. Outlining from ignorance is well suited to dealing with creative tasks that require some body of knowledge. You may not have that knowledge, but you know it exists, and you can ask questions about it. And those questions inevitably produce the outline--the instructions to follow--that you are seeking. If you use this technique to write a report or paper, and if you use it effectively, the result can be a delightfully clear and readable piece of writing. One of the most important aspects of writing clearly is to anticipate the reader's questions, never to give the reader a chance to say, "Hah? I don't get it!" The best writers seem consistently to ask of themselves the same questions their readers will later ask of their writing, and in much the same sequence. As they answer these questions for themselves, they also answer them for their readers. They thus constantly satisfy their readers' curiosity, forestalling from moment to moment their readers' wish to know more than they are about to provide. THE NEED FOR LIGHTNING Can questions help you be creative in other ways? Can they help you write poetry or short stories, invent new products, or make scientific discoveries? Of course they can. Every creative person must always begin by generating possibilities, new combinations of the words and ideas and concepts and images that stock their minds. They must pop, or brainstorm, until they come up with the one possibility--deodorant armpit paint--that makes them say "Aha!" Then they must begin to ask themselves how to make that possibility real. Yet the process does not work in quite the way it does for writing papers on assigned topics. With art, science, invention, and product development, you may have only a vague idea of what you want to do. You know, perhaps, that you have a colorful bactericide and that you want to find a profitable way to use it. You can ask a single perplexed question, but that question amounts to little more than "Huh?" Once you find an answer to this puzzlement, you can ask more questions. With deodorant armpit paint, those questions would have to address whether anyone would buy the product, whether it might have undesirable side-effects such as indelibility or allergies, how best to advertise it, and dozens of other topics. But you can take it from here. Scientists must be creative in much the same way as product developers. They are curious about some aspect of nature, and they ask, "How does this work?" or "Why?" If they think they know the answer, they ask, "Does it check out?" Questions guide their work, but those questions are what we usually call experiments. The answers, at ascending levels of certainty, are hypotheses, theories, and principles. What about the artists? The poets, novelists, painters, sculptors? They too need the new combinations of words, ideas, concepts, and images that flow from the popcorn mind, and they too must pop, or brainstorm, until they come up with some insight or other idea that makes them say "Aha!" Once they have such a lightning bolt of inspiration, they can ask some questions--What images, characters, plots, or media best express the insight? What will the characters do now? But the best way to describe what happens in the post-inspirational creative phase may be to say that it is a matter of free association guided by a sense of fit. The artist must pop constantly, and he or she must ask of every idea, "Does this, somehow, somewhere, fit into what I am doing?" The questions must always be asked by the individual creative person. There is so far no way to automate the process. But we can automate the popping or brainstorming that precedes the questioning, and that is the point of this book. We will begin to see how it works in the next chapter. For now, let me say simply that computer brainstorming works. That was what gave me the idea of armpit paint. SUMMARY Most solutions to blocked creativity involve brainstorming techniques that loosen the ties that restrain your subconscious and allow your stock of words, concepts, ideas, and images to recombine to form new ideas. They make the "nonsense" generated by the popcorn mind visible and let you examine it to find things your critical mind was unjustly suppressing. One of the least efficient ways of brainstorming, to my mind, is "free writing." Better are those methods that call for free association to a key word such as an assigned topic for a school paper or a need for a solution to a specific problem. These methods can be used by individuals or by teams, such as those organized by contract brainstorming firms. Once they produce something that makes you say, "Aha!" you can then work on developing the idea. This often involves asking a series of questions. The questioning process can also be invaluable for developing assigned topics, for it allows you to use your ignorance to generate instructions on what to do next. These instructions are the questions you ask and the answers they demand, which can serve as an outline for a paper. A similar questioning process can help guide the work of artists, scientists, product developers, and other creative people. ------------------------------------------------------------- Press <ESC> to exit this chapter and BROWSE the next chapter. ------------------------------------------------------------- Complete book and software available from R.K. West Consulting P.O. Box 8059, Mission Hills, CA 91346.