THE PRINCIPLE

Forcing a connection between your challenge and an unrelated word yields new ideas

This method is one of the most popular brainstorming tools, for a very good reason: it’s simple, you can do it alone or in a group and it works.

You begin with a list of random words. You can pick them out of a newspaper or magazine, and the words can be anything: an object, a place, a type of person, an emotion, an action. Write down at least 20 of them in a vertical column on the left side of a page. For our example, my list includes:

Bedlam

Fish

Soloist

Door

Kidnapper

Joke

Then pick one creative challenge where you need some fresh ideas. Next, write a summary of the issue across the top of the page. For example, let’s say you’re a parent who is trying to motivate his or her teenage son to study more.

The method is to see what ideas come up when you combine that challenge with each word on your list. Let’s see how it works.

What could be the connection between the teenager who needs to study and ‘Bedlam’ (which was a notorious insane asylum that allowed tourists to come and watch the inmates for the visitors’ amusement)? It’s important to remember that the forced association is designed to start a flow of thoughts – you don’t have to stay with the word itself. So, in the case of Bedlam, we might think of the humiliation of the patients. Perhaps you could tell your son that unless he studies more, you will show up at school every day to walk home with him (no teenager could imagine greater humiliation than that …).

Studying combined with ‘Fish’ might remind you that consuming certain types of fish helps brain power. And that might motivate you to check your teenager’s diet to make sure he’s getting enough Omega-3 fatty acids.

Studying combined with ‘Soloist’ might remind you that when he’s studying alone he tends to get distracted. So maybe it would be worthwhile getting him a tutor once a week or, to combine this with humiliation, study along with him.

Give it a try yourself with a real challenge. Start with my list just to get a taste of how easy and useful this method can be. Then generate some random word lists of your own, so you have them ready whenever you want to generate new ideas quickly. You can employ similar methods with pictures by forcing an association between your topic and random images from magazines.