Where Do Your Great Ideas Come from?

• When and where you get your best ideas
• How your sources of great ideas differ from others, and why
• How you can make more time and space for creative activities

The chart above compares my scores on the 36 questions with the normalized* answers of other respondents. If you want to create your own chart like this, using Excel or a similar spreadsheet software, here’s how to do it:

• From the Idea Champions’ survey page, copy the 36 questions, and paste them to the first column of your spreadsheet using Paste Special\Text. Copy your scores into the next column. Then copy the normalized average scores from the bottom of this post into the third column, using Paste Special\Text. Highlight the entire table you’ve created and sort it in ascending order by your scores. Then add a row at the top of the chart and type in column headings.
• Then highlight the entire table you’ve created and Insert a bar chart, which should look something like the chart above.

Interpreting your Profile: In my case, brainstorming, creative thinking techniques, talking with customers, taking time just upon waking, taking breaks, and listening to music are my six ‘sure-fire’ ways to generate creativity, so I should learn to draw on one or more of them whenever creative thinking is needed. I should keep a pencil and paper beside the bed for waking-hour inspirations. And since I take a lot of breaks and walk around, I should get wireless headphones so my music goes with me. I should study creative thinking techniques so that they become second nature. And I should spend more time talking with, and listening to, current and potential customers.

What’s more, the last three of these six creativity sources are unusual to me, and not effective for most others, so if I’m in a group creativity setting I should be cautious about suggesting others take breaks or listen to music. I should be sensitive to the fact that happiness is an essential precondition to creativity for most people, though it isn’t for me, and also that most others will be more creative if they take a walk, read books, talk with friends, or spend time thinking just before bed, even though those techniques don’t work particularly well for me.

There are some other interesting differences between my creative places and times, and those of most others. I find flying and commuting very stimulating — perhaps it’s the movement, and the fact that my commutes are off-rush-hour and hence fast-paced and relaxing. I find television stimulates my thinking more than it does for most others, but that’s probably because of what I watch — documentaries, mysteries, in-depth investigative reports and foreign programming. And the least effective three sources for me — internet surfing, vacationing and exercising, are all fairly intense, focused activities for me, that don’t leave many ‘cycles of brainpower’ for creative thinking, though I can appreciate that others who find these activities more recreational could also find them more creatively stimulating.

Next I asked myself how I could find more time and space for the creative activities that work best for me. To answer this I added another column to the spreadsheet, and entered for each of the 36 activities the amount of time each week I currently spent on each. I again used a scale of 1-5 for this:

• Activities that consume >20 hours of time a week — 5
• Activities that consume 15-20 hours a week — 4
• Activities that consume 10-15 hours a week — 3
• Activities that consume 5-10 hours a week — 2
• Activities that consume <5 hours a week — 1

Now I added one more column that showed, for each of the 36 activities, my rating (1-5), divided by the amount of time I spend at it each week (1-5, using the scale above). If you do this and re-sort the 36 activities in ascending order of this last ‘Personal Score/Time Spent’ column, the resulting chart looks like this:

What this second chart reveals is what, ideally speaking, you should try to spend more time doing (the activities at the top of the chart, which you’ve rated as a source of great ideas, but which you spend relatively little time doing) and what you should try to spend less time doing (the activities at the bottom of the chart). In my case, I should ‘get out more’ — spend more time brainstorming with others and just moving around, and less time in front of the computer. I also need to use creative thinking techniques more often. My ‘catch-all’ #36 ‘other source’ answer was spending time in the hot tub, which I suppose must somehow work for me the way showers work for others. What is it about being in the water that gets us thinking creatively? No wonder dolphins are such imaginative creatures! Though to my surprise, others’ top ‘write-in’ answer for question #36 was ‘on the toilet’, so perhaps we should see whether porcelain has some mysterious power to spark ideation.

While others spend their time in airport lounges, airplanes and traffic either bored or fuming, I find these activities ‘transport’ me and get me thinking very creatively. Because it’s dangerous to write while driving, I’ve learned to use mnemonic devices to capture and remember ideas that occur to me until I can safely write them down (works in the shower, too). If I could find a dictating machine that worked with my voice-recognition software I’d probably use it instead — maybe even write a whole paper or blog post simply thinking out loud while I drive. It’s quite possible, though, that since much of my travel is early-morning, it’s actually that time of day that’s responsible for the flurry of ideas, rather than the movement. Though since I’m a night-owl, usually miserable in the morning, I’m not sure that my body clock, or the ones around me, could handle it if I tried early-to-bed, early-to-rise. It hurts just thinking about it.

What works for you, and why? Are there times and places and techniques that aren’t on this list at all that seem to surface great ideas for you? In what ways does your ideal environment for idea generation differ from mine, and from the other survey respondents’? And are there ways you could be spending your time a little differently to allow your right brain to get some more exercise?

* How I normalized the ‘average’ answers to the survey: First of all, I double-counted the ‘5’ scores, the proportion of people who found each time or place a ‘sure-fire’ source of great ideas, because I think that’s just as important as ‘average’ score. Then, because when you average scores you get most of them clustered around the 3 average, I ‘stretched’ the results so that the top-scoring source (brainstorming) received a normalized score of 5 and the lowest-scoring source (being sad or depressed) received a normalized score of 2. Finally, I rounded the results to the nearest 0.5. The results then more closely map, in standard deviation and distribution of results, an individual’s scoring.

Here are the normalized scores in order for the 36 questions (for copying and pasting into your own spreadsheet):
4.0
4.0
3.0
3.5
3.5
4.0
3.0
4.5
3.0
3.5
4.5
4.0
5.0
3.0
3.0
3.5
4.0
3.0
2.5
2.5
3.5
3.0
3.0
4.5
4.0
4.0
2.0
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
4.0
4.5
5.0
3.5
4.0