Want to have more creative concepts for your business, job or home life? Practicing can help, especially if it is with others. The first time you brainstorm with a group of creative people, you might feel like you are mentally slow, but soon you'll find that you are coming up with more and more new ideas. You will pick up the expectations and mental habits of the "thinkers" around you.



You can brainstorm or do other kinds of practice alone as well. Working with your creative abilities in almost any way will help strengthen them. But what else can you do besides just practicing? You can learn specific techniques for generating more creative concepts. Here is one to try.

Make Crazy Assumptions

This is a fun technique that can often lead to not only more creative concepts, but more useful ones too. You make silly or unexpected assumptions related to the subject or problem you are working on. Then you look for a way to make sense of them. Let's look at an example, using only ideas that I can come up with as I write this, to show that this process can really work.

Suppose you are brainstorming new ways to get volunteers for a series of projects your environmental organization is planning. Here are a few crazy assumptions: You can pay them a million dollars to volunteer; you can force people to participate, and aliens will come from outer space to do the work for you. By themselves, these are not useful ideas, of course, but now we go to work on them.

Using the first assumption, you might imagine an ad campaign which says, "Would you plant a tree or clean a river for a million dollars?" That would certainly get attention. Now how do you make sense of this? It occurs to you that you might get a wealthy patron to donate a bond that matures to be worth a million dollars in thirty years, which costs just $220,000 now. Then you could have a drawing to win the bond in a year. Anyone who volunteers a certain number of hours during the coming year is put into a drawing for the "million dollar bond." This could generate free publicity and many new recruits nationally.

Forcing people to participate sounds like an unlikely idea to start with, but what can you do to make this a more creative concept? One's mind might think about who is already "forced," or "enslaved." Prisoners come to mind. Perhaps you could make a deal with local jails to allow inmates incarcerated for non-violent offenses to volunteer on the various environmental projects planned? They may be happy to get outside, and it could look good on their record.

Aliens from outer space is a bit crazy, but working with it could make you think about aliens from other countries. What if they volunteered to help? How could you make that happen? Maybe get lawyers with immigration law experience to volunteer their time, and offer free "immigration workshops" to those who put in some hours with your organization. Illegal immigrants or just those with issues that need to be resolved could get the legal help they need, and the good press resulting from volunteering to help the environment might be good for their cause as well.

Now, these ideas are from five minutes mental work, and I have no idea how useful they could be, but you can see the process. The point is to initially create as many ideas as you can, perhaps spending an hour or more doing so. A hundred ideas in an evening is not impossible, especially if you know a dozen or more techniques like this one. Then you pick through what you have created, looking for the few creative concepts which may be useful.