- Following Tinkerbell
- The Perfect Brainstorm
- It Takes Two, Baby
- The Innovation Train
- Move One Space Forward to the Next Chapter ... or Roll the Dice
- Board Game: Idea Spaghetti
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Move One Space Forward to the Next Chapter ... or Roll the Dice
The more ideas we come up with, the more likely it is that one or two of them are going to be very good ones (now we know – size really does matter). So we need to do what we can to stimulate the creation of a ton of ideas, or what we call idea spaghetti, and that means thinking very divergently rather than trying to converge on one single answer. Brainstorms can be good ways to elicit divergent thinking, but they are a mixed blessing and can be counterproductive if not done right. The perfect brainstorm involves having clear parameters, including a mix of people from different backgrounds, encouraging a bit of healthy competition and setting high expectations for performance. So creativity isn’t about coming up with the one idea that will change the world, it’s an exhilarating journey – the innovation train that never really ends.
In the next chapter we go on a scavenger hunt for things to innovate.
I love bouncing ideas off inspiring people who also have spaghetti heads (or can cope with one). This could be anyone from a musician like Bono, The Edge and Bob Geldof, to film directors like Jim Sheridan or Shekhar Kapur, engineering or technology braniacs like Paul Allen or Nokia Exec Vice-President Tero Ojanperä. With people like these, it’s a kind of ongoing conversation that never ends and it could be face-to-face in the middle of Africa or on a helicopter over a volcano in Hawaii ... or in a fish and chip shop in Seattle. It could be via email or late-night phone calls, or in San Francisco sitting in Visa’s boardroom with the CEO and CTO and the next day walking around Greenwich Village in the rain with Lou Reed discussing the same thing.
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I’ve also been in floods and avalanches in Jamaica with the highly intelligent Shakira, and we never stopped the spaghetti-type discussions. In fact, Shakira and I carried on emails for a year afterwards in coded pasta conversations where she would sign off as Madame Tortellini and I would reply from the Linguini Brothers. My favourite to play ‘wonky speak’ with is Sam Roddick, with whom I have fast and furious iChats that usually leave us exhausted, ending in a brain orgasm. Sam is the creator of Coco de Mer (Erotic Emporiums) and I am fortunate enough to be a partner with Sam and her sister Justine in this sumptuous venture (never a bored meeting, I can tell you!). Sam and Justine are the daughters of Gordon and the late Anita Roddick, who founded the Body Shop, and Anita and I would often exhaust ourselves with brain-sparking sessions.
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- Each player (from one to four people) picks a fork.
- Agree on one topic that you want to come up with ideas for – choose from our list or make up your own.
- Take a prong on your fork and follow the spaghetti until you locate the ingredient at the other end.
- The number on the ingredient is the number of ideas you need to come up with in five minutes.
- You get a point for every additional one you come up with, but lose one for every idea you are short of the target.
- Play four rounds using different prongs and choosing different topics each time.
- The winner is the person at the end with the most points.