Let Your Hands Do the Thinking

Another creative thinking technique involves thought association. Like word association, in which I say and you tell me what other words come to mind, this technique draws associations to totally unrelated entities.

Let's say wanted to look at your business in a totally new light. Take a phone book,open it to the Yellow Pages, and let your your hand do the thinking. Someone starts fanning the pages, and someone else inserts a a ginger or a pen or a piece of paper at random to select a page. Then someone else takes a stab at the page with eyes closed to select a category. It might be anything from AA (Alcoholics Anonymous or the Automobile Association) to Zoos.

After a category is selected, the group then brainstorms, or what-ifs, how their company or department or whatever other challenge they are working on is like Alcoholics Anonymous. Or how their company is like a zoo. Who is the ringmaster? How are the animals trained? What makes our zoo better than the others? What liabilities or risk must we assume?

Letting your hands do the thinking allows people to look at issues, challenges, and solutions from a completely different perspective, with some humor and out-of-box thinking. Political correctness is no longer a barrier. Like "whatiffing," this technique also makes weirdness normal.