Creative technique: list ideas following a prompt

Put all of your ideas on the beach. See connecting waves. Collect shiny ideas as pearls on the shore.

Listing and enumeration can be useful creative methods. Start with a clear prompt to drive idea generation with clarity, set a fixed time, constraints help creativity. Write one idea per post-it/note/node. When done, present each idea with one sentence to give context, and aggregate the explained ideas to create clusters by topic or other useful aggregating ideas.

This facilitated creativity activity is similar to the “Post-it, post-up” gamestorming tool.

Generating ideas about Problem-Solving

Thanks to Lady Bear, we’ve come up with a list of ideas related to the question, “What do you think and do when you have a problem to solve?”

The initial list.

A list of possible concepts, actions, ideas related to problem-solving, generated in 5 minutes:

  1. Simplify
  2. Count (inventory)
  3. Separate
  4. Order (Sort)
  5. Trash (Thrash would have been far more evocative but definitely out of context. Thanks to Brendan Seibel.)
  6. Catalog
  7. Knot, mark
  8. Tie, connect
  9. Be patient
  10. Search
  11. Find
  12. Research
  13. Ask
  14. Situate, position
  15. Place side by side
  16. Observe
  17. List (THIS!)
  18. Present (put in the way so you can stumble upon it)
  19. Memorize
  20. Learn, understand and prevent
  21. Visualize
  22. Combine
  23. Compare and contrast
  24. Make a paragon
  25. Imagine
  26. Play
  27. Tell a story
  28. Beautify
  29. Explain
  30. Do not procrastinate

It’s hugely satisfying to spend no more than 10 minutes with another person to come up with raw creative material to work on. That’s what it took to create the previous list.

List, enumerate, itemize, count, inventory.

When you’re stuck and don’t know where to start from, take a partner and play to list their ideas following a clear and concise starting question. You will have the maximum creative outcome with the minimum effort.

Put all of your ideas on the beach. See connecting waves. Collect shiny ideas as pearls on the shore.
Put all of your ideas on the beach. See connecting waves. Collect shiny ideas as pearls on the shore.

Leave a Reply