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512 : APPLYING CREATIVITY TO THE IDEA DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

G Check your objectives – you should always establish whether the
idea really applies to the problem you are trying to solve

G Improve ideas – where ideas look close to what you need, improve
and strengthen them

G Avoid discarding potentially good ideas prematurely
G Be open to novelty – this involves keeping an open mind because

radical ideas by their very nature sound absurd and may otherwise
invite instant rejection.

actively managing the different phases It is vital to separate the
two different thinking phases so that the particular objectives of each
phase can be achieved.

You must allow each phase to run its due course.

allowing divergence to deliver The generation of imaginative ideas
during a divergent thinking phase can be stopped dead in its tracks by
criticism, evaluation or judgement.

You might just have thought up an innovative idea based on a
particular statistic or piece of market data and then you start to worry
whether this piece of data was correct. Or you might have rushed ahead
in your mind’s eye to checking that the idea could be implemented and
are now starting to grapple with objections and obstacles. Or you might
have realised a flaw in the idea which you have just put forward. Or
you might have discovered a solution which intuitively works – indeed,
your solution may work in practice, but that is not to say that there is
not a better solution just waiting to be found.

With each of the above examples, you have allowed judgement to
interfere and thus break the stream of idea generation. The successful
business leader identified by Alex Osborn had it right when he claimed
that chief executives have just one purpose, namely to ‘keep closed
minds open’.38 Judgmental thinking stifles imagination.

chief executives have just one purpose,
namely to ‘keep closed minds open’