"Think Bigger" by Sheena Iyengar: An excellent book on creativity

The first part of Think Bigger by Sheena Iyengar debunks common preconceived notions. These notions include the right-brain/left-brain stereotype, the idea that certain places are more conducive to creativity, that “imagineering” works best in constraint-free environments, and that brainstorming can escape groupthink. According to the author, creativity is primarily about what goes on inside your head, even when working in a group. It starts with the ability to let your mind wander, provided that you understand that mind wandering only works because of work, learning, and memory. The book emphasizes that anyone can learn to be creative and apply creativity to any problem. Is it easy? No. But Iyengar’s methodology does help significantly.

The second part of the book presents the "Think Bigger" roadmap, which consists of six steps that structure the mental calisthenics, which may lead you to a big idea.

Step 1: You choose the problem you want to address, why you want to address it, which often allows you narrow it down into something that you can state and articulate in words. Don’t rush to solutions, thus falling victims of the “knowledge illusion effect,” which consists in underestimating the complexity of things. Also it’s during this step that thinking bigger doesn’t mean “think big,” but rather “identifying a problem that’s large enough to matter but small enough to be solved.”

Step 2: You to break down the problem into sub-problems, i.e. the components you believe are key to solving that problem. By doing so, you may discover that your top priority is not the problem you thought you had identified, but one of the sub-problems. Thinking bigger entails the ability to recompose the ideation process and change tack—and eventually go back to step 1. Think of sub-problems as prompts in AI. The choice of prompts has huge impact on outputs.

Step 3: You to identify for whom you want to solve the problem and “compare wants,” i.e. identify the wants of at least three stakeholders, you, your target, and other third parties in order to define your “big picture score.” Thinking bigger is about creating a perspectival system which helps to see “(1) how desirable each solution is overall, and (2) which parties you favor for each solution.”

Step 4: You “search in and out of the box,” i.e. you leverage knowledge not only from your space of expertise, but also from other domains. The author illustrates her point using the Trotter-Matrix that enabled Lloyd Trotter to considerably enhance GE’s Lighting business by identifying and borrowing best practices and knowledge from other unrelated business units. Cross-pollination is a formidable ideation mechanism.

Step 5: Choice mapping is constructive alternative to brainstorming that results from step 1, 2, 3 and 4. It operates as a combinatorial engine that allows you to generate the multiple solutions for you to select by measuring them against your Big Picture Score.

Step 6: The “Third Eye” test leads you through a series of exercises that help you understand how others perceive your idea and “expand the range of viewpoints you bring to your solution.” Thinking bigger is about opening your aperture and eventually rephrasing your value proposition.

Moving from one step to the other is not linear process, but a recursive one, each step you take feeding into both the previous and following steps.

Through a series of examples and relevant experiments, Iyengar offers a generative model that enables you to populate/disaggregate perspectives, continually re-stage, fine-tune and recombine them to either reinforce the validity of the problem or instead recompose it to conceive potentially better solutions. This book is one of the most comprehensive recent descriptions of why creativity is not about inspiration, but about the ability to use your brain as a combinatorial optimization engine.