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I hate brainstorming. It was created by advertising executive Alex Osborne as a technique for developing advertising ideas. Among the rules established by Osborne was the “suspension” of judgment or criticism of ideas. However, without judgment ideas are frivolous at best. While this may work in the advertising world, it’s not of much use in any other part of the organization. We need to be skeptical. We need to understand the weaknesses of our ideas because that’s the only way that we can develop them. The creative process is an evolutionary process and judgment is the mechanism we use to drive the progression.

An idea – in and of itself – is worthless. The value in an idea only lies in its implementation, in doing something with it, in bringing it into the world. Most organizations are full of good ideas although few are full of great ideas. The great ideas are the ones that you can implement, that evolve with implementation as part of the criteria we use to pass judgment on it.

A Fortune 500 executive recently told me that they have plenty of great ideas … they just don’t know how to implement them. Well, I had to disagree with him because a great idea has its implementation built into it. Great ideas are ones where the implementation is obvious (not always easy, but always apparent). At some point in the evolution of your idea you need to build the implementation into the idea itself. The fifth chapter of my book explains how.

The creative process begins with the problem. Identifying it. Understanding it. And then defining it and re-defining it. When I’m working on a concept development team we spend a lot of time on the problem.  The first chapter of my book is devoted to understanding problems and how to define them. For example, In the 1920’s Henry Ford defined his  problem as “building the least expensive car.” And he did and was very successful. But William Durant over at General Motors defined the problem a little differently, he said “let’s build a car that people can afford.”  This led to a huge innovation … the formation of GMAC and the financing of automobiles. GM was able to make much more interesting cars and make them affordable through monthly payments.

I when I hear executives tell me that “we’ve got a lot of great ideas, but we just don’t know how to implement them” it’s like the sound of set of finger nails being dragged across an old school chalkboard. You see, a great idea is one that’s constructed with its implementation as part of its DNA. In other words, the implementation of a great idea is obvious (not necessarily easy) because the thinker considers implementation as she constructs the idea. If the implementation isn’t obvious, and it usually isn’t, then that just means that you’ve got more work to do on the idea. You’ve got to re-structure it so that it can be implemented.

If you don’t know how to implement the idea, you haven’t completed the thinking process.

Skepticism is instrumental to the creative process. Creative people are skeptics. It takes a cynical mind to drive the process. Without one, you simply accept the way things are and have no internal need for creating, which means a need for doing things differently.

Most companies have either a formal or an informal brainstorming process, often mediated by an outside source. However, the great misconceptions that result from brainstorming are more detrimental to the creative process than anything that results from the process itself. The constraints of brainstorming leave out many important aspects of the creative thinking process. In particular, most brainstorming moderators tell you to suspend judgment, and most of us erroneously take this to mean that criticism and judgment are detrimental to the creative process. They are not, they are instrumental to the process. Without them your ideas are trivial and frivolous.

George Carlin’s obituary in Time Magazine pointed out his fascination with fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking and how he marveled at oxymoron’s like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence”.  An oxymoron, you’ll recall, is a figure of speech that combines two contradictory terms. Like Carlin, I’m also fascinated with them and so I chose to title my new book “Borrowing Brilliance” since these two words aren’t usually associated with each other and at first blush appear to contradict each other. But first appearances can be misleading, for in my book I explain that there’s a fine line between plagiarism and creativity, that creative thought begins with copying, that you build new ideas out of existing ideas, and that originality is a perception and not a reality. For me, this was a liberating insight and changed my relationship with creative thought: it became the search for ideas and the process of re-combining and re-structuring them to come up with a new one.

And so, as I go out into the world and teach people about creative thought, I’m often asked by managers on how to apply this into an organization. They want me to talk about “corporate creativity” and “innovation management” and at first blush “corporate creativity” seems like an oxymoron. It seems like two words that contradict each other, like “jumbo shrimp”, “military intelligence” and “borrowing brilliance”. But they don’t have to be, in fact, once you understand the basic mechanics of creative thinking, the basic block and tackling skills of the thinker, you can turn your organization into creative factory that churns out creative ideas through intelligent collaboration and the development of a corporate culture that fosters “corporate creativity”.

I’ll explain how later.  

Two common (and related) questions I get as I lecture about creativity and innovation are these:  How do you know when you have a great idea?  And: When does the innovation process end? 

I answer the first this: A great idea is one that solves an important problem. The first step in the innovation process is defining that problem since a creative idea is the solution to a problem. A great idea solves that problem better than any other competing solutions. That’s why, in business, it’s wise to solve an important problem that no one else is solving … for that guarantees a great idea.

I answer the second like this: The innovation process never ends. Sure, you’ve got to implement your ideas, and so for a brief moment the ideation process stops. But your ideas (be they products or marketing campaigns) need to evolve.  There are barbarians at the gates, competitors who will come in and try to solve your problem better than you … and if they succeed they’ll outsell your idea. So, you’ve got to working it, evolving it, stay out front, so no one has a chance to catch up.

Innovation is a long term commitment. It never stops.

I’ve been out on the road for two weeks plugging my new book. I’m getting some great feedback and I’ve learned a lot about the perceptions that people have about creativity and innovation.  Perhaps the most glaring observation is that people really want a “process” … they really want step 1, step 2, step 3 … etc. They want me to tell them how to do it.

The good news is: That’s exactly what I am explaining to them.  The bad news is:  At the end of the day, it’s an iterative process of trial and error.  Ideas take time to evolve and you have to get your feet dirty.  Creative thinkers will always leave a trail of failure on the way to success.  Steve Jobs lost (nearly) his entire Apple fortune with NeXT computer.  George Lucas produced Howard the Duck. And Isaac Newton spent most of his career studying alchemy trying to turn iron and zinc into gold and silver.

There’s a “fear of failure” that the creative thinker is going to have to accept. It’s just a stop on the road to success.

The primary premise of my book is that new ideas are constructed out of combinations of existing ideas.  In other words, over time, we make new combinations out of existing combinations and so the world becomes more and more complex as time marches on. My daughter grows up in a far more complicated world than I did growing up.

This became even more evident to me as I looked at a coffee table book in my sisters apartment. It was a book about Boston called “Then and Now”.  Each page had a picture of Boston taken a hundred years ago on the left hand side and then a page taken recently on the right hand side. The point of view was the same in each photograph, the buildings were the same, only the people had changed.  And the change was rather startling. The people from a hundred years ago, for the most part, were all wearing the same cloths – the men had dark suits, bowler hats, and white shirts – the women were also dressed similarly in long dresses, hair up, and covered with demur shawls. This was in sharp contrast to the recent picture.  Today, instead of being dressed similarly, the people in the photograph have a wide variety of different looks, some are wearing suits, some have on shorts, dresses of different lengths, some with hats, others without … I tried, but couldn’t find one person wearing something similar to another.

Creativity is more important than ever.  We demand it in every part of our lives.  From our business models to the cloths we choose to wear.