This short article is about using the power of categories and hierarchical thinking to power up your generation of ideas.

OK, so you’ve been challenged to come up with ideas for brightening up your office and the first two suggestions are:

- Paint the walls (1)
- Fit brighter bulbs (2)

We are going to take each of these ideas and look for the ‘idea behind the idea’ or ask whether the idea could be considered as being part of something larger.

So, ‘paint the walls’ could be part of categories called ‘change the colour scheme’ or ‘use paint’. Taking each of these higher level categories we can then see if there are any other avenues to explore:

‘Change the colour scheme’ might prompt the following suggestions:
- Replace black chairs with primary colour chairs (3)
- Paint the desks (4)
- Use coloured uplights in the corners of the office (5)

‘Use paint’ might lead to:
- Buy paintings to put up around the office (6)
- Hire a local artist to paint a mural (7)

Using the same principle, ‘fit brighter bulbs’ could be seen as part of either, ‘bring more light into the office’ or ‘electric lighting’.

‘Bring more light into the office’ could prompt:
- Change the blinds so that they don’t block out light (8)
- Put mirrors outside so that they reflect more light into the office (9)

‘Electric lighting’ may, as well as the idea about brighter bulbs, also result in:
- Buy desk lamps so that individuals have more light where they need it (10)
- Fit wall lights (11)
- Fit spotlights to have ‘super bright’ areas of the office (12)

And so on – sorry, we got more than 10! Inevitably ideas will start to overlap and of course that’s ok. This phase is about idea creation – combining ideas, eliminating overlap and choosing from the alternatives that you’ve generated – is the next stage!

Find out more about our range of creativity courses and workshops at www.illumine.co.uk/innovate

Here is a video explaining the above article:

Tags: Creative thinking techniques, Creativity and Innovation, inn

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