Spark This! Four Ways to Stoke Your Creativity

Where do good ideas come from? Unexpected places, according to Steven Johnson, author of ten books about the history of technology and ideas (one of them, called, fittingly, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation).

In the first episode of my Changemakers Book Club last week, I talked to Steven about his latest book Wonderland, which chronicles how the search for fun and delight has led to some of the most serious discoveries of the last few hundred years, like programmable computers and the keyboards we use to interact with them.

I also got Steven to share some of the ways that he hits upon his own good ideas. Here are his top four:

1. Start a “Spark File”

Every time you come across something that sparks an idea, capture it—in the moment if possible. Snap a photo, record a snippet of sound, type it out, sketch it, or scribble it down.

Steven says his spark file is about 70,000 words long, which is longer than a lot of the books he’s written. Will every idea in it get turned into a book or an article? Will he even go back and reread them all? Probably not—but that’s not the point.

The Spark File comes in handy in those future moments when you need a store of good ideas to solve a problem or get your mind working.

The catch? Save all your “sparks” in one place. Don’t try to file them in separate categories or else you’ll lose them, says Steven. Or worse, you won’t see the unexpected connections between sparks emanating from seemingly unrelated areas.

2. Have patience with The Slow Hunch

Innovation is more like Edison’s lightbulb, not Newton’s apple. Useful new ideas don’t fall from the sky suddenly, they accumulate over time, often as the result of many iterations. Sometimes innovators have half an idea rattling around in their brain for years before they come across just the right connection or insight to bring it to life. Darwin’s journals reveal that key pieces of the Theory of Evolution occurred to him decades before he published On the Origin of Species, for example.

So have patience with that half-formed idea that keeps nagging at you. Just because it isn’t ready right now doesn’t mean that, with the proper attention and development, it won’t blossom in the future into something the world urgently needs.

3. Make room for play

When we’re playing, our minds are open. We’re not self-censoring, ignoring what’s not useful, or competing for one predefined goal. In pure play, we’re just out to explore and have a good time. Jazz musicians improvising together, kids making up their own rules to a new game, or actors joking around in an improv troupe are all in a state of play.

This unique state of mind, where we recombine what’s in front of us in unexpected ways, is extremely useful for the would be innovator or team of innovators.

You know you’re in a playful state of mind if your expectations are being challenged, if you’re open to surprises. If you already know the answer or the outcome, you’re not really playing yet. Play’s most important value proposition is that it’s a low stakes way for us to prepare for the unexpected.

4. Diversity is essential

There are two non-negotiables for innovation, according to Steven: playfulness and diversity. There are many different types of diversity: of ideas, areas of expertise, gender, race, sexual orientation, areas of interest, etc. But if you want your organization to develop consistently innovative ideas at a faster rate, a good bet is to make it more diverse wherever you can. I believe this is one of the essential elements of what makes a company innovative: diverse mindsets.

If you’re in the office, that means getting people together that wouldn’t normally tackle the same problem. It also means creating a safe space for people to open up about their backgrounds and hobbies. You never know when a bit of cultural knowledge or a weird skill might help solve a problem.

The pacemaker, for example, was invented because an electrical engineer and a cardiologist happened to sit next to each other at lunch in a University dining hall. They made unlikely connections between their two fields of expertise and tens of thousands of lives were saved as a result.

Let me know, how do you come up with your best ideas?