Book Review

The typical brainstorming session, when it happens, looks like this…

Facilitator: (standing at the white board) Ok, who has an idea?

Group: (murmur)

Facilitator: (becoming anxious) Ok, I’ll start. What if we got NASA to loan us a rocket so we could transport our goods super fast? That’s way out there!

Group Member: (begrudgingly) Maybe we could look at alternate vendors for trucking???

Facilitator: (Over-enthusiastically) Goooooooood. What else?

This painful saga plays out over the course of an hour or two as the participants, who initially welcome the respite from work, soon regret their decision.

The end result of the session are some outlandish impractical ideas (so that you can say that you were wild and outlandish) and several safe incremental suggestions that are inevitably chosen to be pursued. So, at best the team suggested a few ways to get a little better and at worst the endeavor is a complete waste of time. With these types of results it’s not surprising that business' put forth little effort into idea generation.

But what if there were a way to really generate good ideas? Not just scratch the surface type of stuff. But honest to goodness – OH MY GOD – type of revelations? This is the premise of Igor Byttebier's and Ramon Vullings's new book Creativity Today.

To be fair, the problem of getting better ideas is Advanced Placement type of stuff. Most organizations suffer from not being able to do the simple stuff. But after accomplishing the simple stuff how do you figure out how to solve the tough problems?

In the book the authors explains why new ideas are resisted, (it turns out that pattern-breaking thinking isn’t preferred by Nature) when creativity doesn’t matter, (the problem context matters more) the emotional states associated with the development process (if you know them you can deal with them) and most importantly, ways to get a group of people to actually think deeply about an issue and come up with ingenious solutions.

It’s rare for one resource to neatly and succinctly explain such a complex issue such as creativity, provide concrete methods of facilitation, walk through multiple illustrative examples, and be easy to read. If you’ve struggled with brainstorming in the past, or are looking to come up with some novel ideas to a particular solution, it is guaranteed that you get your money’s worth from this book.

This review was part of the Post 2 Post Virtual Book Tour hosted by Idea Sandbox.