Ideate

You should now have one or more statements of your issue in the form of "We want to think creatively about..." Let's start generating ideas!

Nobel prize winning scientist Linus Pauling (he won it twice, for different ideas!) was once asked how he came up with so many great ideas. He replied, "The way to come up with good ideas is to first come up with lots of ideas, and then throw away the bad ones."

So, the aim of the tools in this module is to help you generate lots of ideas. In the Select module that follows we'll teach you how to "throw away the bad ones."

With that in mind, the ground rules for classic brainstorming apply to all of the tools in this module:

• Criticism is ruled out (every idea is a good one... at least for now)
• Go for quantity (we don't want one idea, we want dozens)
• Encourage wild ideas (these often provide breakthrough insights)
• Build on the ideas of others (let your mind freewheel)