Sometimes inspiration can be elusive – it seems to happen out of the blue, or not at all. But are we really just passive recipients when it comes to getting ideas? Or can we do something to encourage the muse to stop by? Of course we can! There are various different techniques for giving our brains a helpful nudge. Flashes of genius aren’t necessarily guaranteed – but they might well produce a solid idea you can work with. Give them a try!

What-if questions
Creativity doesn’t wear out. So you can feel free to deploy it with lavish abandon, even on completely crazy thoughts – which could be the starting point for concrete ideas. With what-if questions you set your imagination going, breaking through habitual thought patterns by entirely bypassing existing rules and requirements. Do this by asking yourself questions about everyday things or situations – for example “What if costs weren’t an issue in the supply chain?,” “What if employees in transhipment had four arms?,” or “What if all customers were always extremely satisfied?” Write down your spontaneous thoughts and discuss your conjectures with others. It’s possible that this could generate realistic new concepts – or maybe even utterly brilliant solutions.

Mind mapping
Where on earth to start? If you’re under pressure to be productive, what you need is space – and space in your own mind, first and foremost. Mind mapping can be an effective technique here, bringing order to a swarm of initial ideas on a subject and creating space for new thoughts. This simplified representation clarifies connections and generates new insights. Decide the topic of your mind map and write it in the middle – “Logistics,” for example. Then gather together all its associated concepts and link them to the central starting topic. Do the same with these newly added keywords. After this you can identify connections between the various ideas on your map, grouping or highlighting individual concepts. And by this stage you should have a better overview of the whole topic, which will take off some of the pressure.

Idea Marathon
Rather than being a constant state, creativity has its highs and lows, like physical fitness. And you can work on your creativity in just the same way as you work on your physical stamina – by using the Idea Marathon System, for example. Like a real-life marathon this system calls for staying power: applying seven general rules (“Note ideas down as concisely as possible,” for example, or “Always write ideas in the same format”) you write down at least one new idea in an ideas journal every day. This gets your brain used to receiving inspiration and trains it in mass production. Idea Marathon System inventor Takeo Higuchi has, by his own account, filled nearly 400 ideas journals in all, developing more than 300,000 ideas – one of which was presumably the Idea Marathon System itself.

6-3-5 Brainwriting
How can we think together, as a team? It isn’t always the case that more people means more ideas. But there are times when you simply can’t make progress with a problem on your own. This is when a col­laborative free-thinking approach can really help. Ideally the participants inspire each other and ultimately get to a place one person could not have reached alone. This method is based on a group writing session with six participants. Each person gets a sheet of paper with a table for jotting down three ideas on a given problem within a set timeframe – five minutes, at most. Then the sheets are passed on. In each round the participants draw new inspiration from the ideas in front of them and develop them. At the end, all the sheets are evaluated.

Disney Method
How can you protect inspiration? It often happens that what are actually very good ideas trigger instant objections. Rather than considering how a spontaneous flash of inspiration could be developed into something that really works, many work teams tend to prefer discussing why that idea might not work. This tendency can be overcome with a change in perspective that offers those tender intuitive thoughts some initial protection – after all, when it comes to ideas the dividing line between terrible and genius is frequently very slim. The Disney Method divides the process of generating ideas into three stages. In the first stage, the Dreamer stage, all ideas are initially accepted. Then in the Realist stage they are assessed for how they might be put into practice – and only in the Critic stage are their weak spots explored.