One of my favorite foods is my free-range and pasture-raised, organically-fed eggs. Rightly or wrongly, I imagine a brood of healthy chickens running randomly around a field, laying their eggs for my future breakfast. (I may not be totally off the mark here. Check out the producer of the eggs I buy: Vital Farms.).
But this post isn’t about my love of eggs. It’s about one of the best parts of a creative project for me—the early stage I spend creating a high volume of ideas, lay them out in front of me, and try to look for patterns and relationships.
I have three rules for this stage of a project.
- Volume first. Whatever number of end-stage ideas I think I will need to tradeoff, I try to increase the initial ideas by a factor of ten. For example, if I think I will want to propose five possibilities for improving patient experience, then I need to shoot for a starting list of fifty ideas. there needs to be a critical density of ideas to play with to make things work.
- Non-judgment. There will be plenty of opportunities to kill an idea, but at this very earliest stage, the wilder and less realistic the idea the better. Why? Because it’s within this group of wild ideas, perhaps joined with something more mundane, that real progress waits and hides. Don’t kill your chicks too early.
- Have fun. In any creative process, there will be times when things just get difficult, times when one just wants to give up. So, to help balance out those times, it’s a great idea to embrace the joy of creation. If I am not occasionally having fun during the creative process, then I am doing something wrong.
OK. Time to go a find me some creative idea eggs and make an “innovation omelet!” (And yes, I know I have carried this analogy too far!)