What can a professional photographer teach us about better brainstorming of ideas?
Subject: Creativity - Brainstorming
Event: Birthday of Alex F. Osborn, 1888
Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us will put out more and better ideas if our efforts are appreciated. -Alex Faickney Osborn
Today is the birthday of Alex F. Osborn, the father of brainstorming. Born in New York, New York, in 1888, he pursued a career in journalism but eventually found himself working in business, first in sales and then in advertising.
Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay
In 1938 the advertising company that he founded (Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn) began using an organized method for generating ideas. Although Osborn is credited with coining the word for this technique, brainstorming, he never took full credit for the word; instead, he acknowledged his colleagues who along with Osborn used their brains to attack or storm a problem. Osborn also credited religious leaders in the East, saying that Hindu teachers in India used a similar technique for more than 400 years. In India it was called Prai-Barshana: Prai for “outside yourself” and Barshana for “question.”
Regardless of where the word came from, brainstorming is a vital technique for generating ideas in business, government, and especially for writing.
Typically brainstorming sessions work best in small groups so that individuals can join forces and build on the ideas of others in the group. The goal is to create a list of ideas that has flexibility and fluency. Fluency means the number of ideas generated, and flexibility means how different the ideas are from each other and how different they are from what most people think up.
In order to create a list of ideas that has flexibility and fluency, follow these rules:
Defer judgment. Don’t edit, eliminate, or hold back any ideas. Criticism kills participation, and often an idea that looks bad at first turns out to be a good one in the long run. Osborn used the following analogy to illustrate the need to put criticism aside when brainstorming:
If you try to get hot and cold water out of the same faucet at the same time, you will get only tepid water. And if you try to criticize and create at the same time, you can’t turn on either the cold enough criticism or the hot enough ideas. So let’s stick solely to ideas-lets cut out all criticism during this session.
Generate lots of ideas. The more ideas, the greater the likelihood that some of those ideas will be good. A good analogy for this is a professional photographer who takes hundreds of pictures, knowing that only a very small percentage of those pictures will be worth keeping.
Encourage wild, exaggerated ideas. Free from the criticism and logic of the left brain, the right side of the brain, the creative side, will have a higher likelihood of creating something new. Imagine how absurd the initial idea of selling bottled water must have been twenty years ago? Why would people pay for water when they can get it free from the tap?
Alex Osborn believed in the power of the human imagination to generate new ideas that can change our lives for the better. His 1953 book Applied Imagination is a pioneering work in the field of creativity. In this book, he outlines techniques like brainstorming that help us to enter into the creative mindset and stay there for a longer period of time.
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Why is it important to defer judgment when brainstorming ideas? When it comes to brainstorming, what is the difference between flexibility and fluency?
Challenge - The Forecast Calls for Brainstorming: Using Osborn’s three principles of brainstorming, produce a list of at least 20 “Keys to Preparing and Presenting a Successful Speech.”
Also on this Day:
May 24, 1905: Today is the anniversary of the first Toastmasters meeting, held in Bloomington, Illinois. The idea for the club was hatched by Ralph C. Smedley, and education director o the YMCA, who wanted to teach speaking skills to the young men in his community. Today, Toastmasters clubs span the globe in 142 countries, providing men and women opportunities to practice their public speaking.
Sources:
1 – Gurule, Jason. “Alex F. Osborn.” The Seminar on Theories of Persuasive Communication and Consumer Decision-Making for Dr. John Leckenby at the University of Texas at Austin.
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