From the course: Practical Creativity for Everyone

A process for generating better ideas

From the course: Practical Creativity for Everyone

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A process for generating better ideas

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- [Instructor] Many people think of creativity as an anarchic, unstructured act, but I want to show you that it's actually a process. It can have some anarchy within that but it's a good idea to understand the structure. After looking at how lots of organizations solve problems from NASA, to police forces, to designers, I created a model that brings all of these together, and it's called RIGHT Thinking. RIGHT is a pneumonic that stands for research, insight, generate ideas, hone ideas, and test. Let's expand on them. Imagine that we're trying to deal with unhappy train commuters. We start with research, and that doesn't just mean Googling something. What are the commuters saying? How are they behaving? What do other train companies do? In this case our commuters are complaining about waiting for their trains. Once we've got lots of information we try to find some insights. For this process, an insight is the interesting reason behind an interesting observation. In our example we find that people are getting increasingly irritated waiting for trains because the station doesn't have good mobile signal. That kind of insight helps us when it comes to generating ideas. We could request another transmitter mast, we could offer free wifi, we could come up with ideas for things to occupy people's time while they wait. A good insight starts to lead us towards solutions. Once we have some good ideas we need to hone them. That's about making the ideas as good as we can get. At this stage you'll flesh your ideas out and into the nitty gritty of how you'd actually make them happen. Finally, we want to test the ideas. We do that by creating a basic prototype and using it to get some learnings. We might want to make adjustments at this stage or use our results to help persuade decision makers to back our ideas. Once you understand the journey to great ideas, it makes it much easier to get there.

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