So you’re sitting in a candlelit room with gentle music playing, or maybe you’ve gone out for a run, or to do a bit of gardening – whatever gets you in the right mood for thinking imaginatively. You’ve worked out where the box is, and you’ve climbed out of it. You’ve primed yourself to be non-judgemental and give every idea a chance. So what now?

Where are you going to start? If you empty your mind completely, you’re likely to fall asleep or start thinking about irrelevant nothings. You need to kick off your thoughts in some direction and then follow them. And you want them to wander in a direction they don’t usually go – obviously, to give them a chance to arrive somewhere new, interesting, original, intriguing.

One of the best ways to get started is to look at your project from someone else’s perspective. Almost anyone’s really, so long as it has some relevance, because this doesn’t have to be more than a starting point. So if you’re launching a new service in your business, think about it from the customer’s perspective. Will they be interested? Why not? What might interest them? When or where will they be open to the information? Will they trust it? How would they be most likely to pay attention?

If you’re planning that wedding in the village hall (if it’s still in the village hall – indeed if you’re still getting married) imagine it from the guests’ perspective – what makes a wedding good or bad from their point of view? The amount of time spent waiting around? The food? Whether they can see and hear proceedings properly? Who else they know? The chance to dress up?

These might seem like straightforward questions, but it’s not about coming up with black and white answers. The point is to get a whole new take on things. For example you might decide to focus your wedding reception on getting old friends together with each other. Or on providing a meal to remember. Or arranging things so everyone feels involved … each of these would steer you towards a very different occasion, and by following these threads – and it’s important to follow them as far as you can – you might end up requesting everyone to provide 30 seconds of film of themselves when they were younger, or involve all the guests in the ceremony itself by getting them to ask in chorus ‘Do you take this woman … ’, or hang all the food on sparkly threads from the ceiling – I don’t know. And that’s the point: I don’t know and nor do you until you try it. It could lead you anywhere but it’s bound to be interesting and creative. You might rein the ideas back a bit at a later stage. Or you might not.

I saw a news article recently about an ice cream parlour that wanted to come up with a festive Christmas ice cream flavour. So they asked themselves what everyone likes to eat at Christmas and that led them to ‘pigs-in-blankets ice cream’.¹⁷ Sounds revolting, but they went for it. Surprisingly, the journalists covering the story couldn’t find anyone who didn’t really like it, and they got national press coverage for it, too.