Don’t “Come Up With” Ideas

When NYU Marketing Professor Adam Alter asked Malcolm Gladwell, “If you were given a month to come up with an idea for a new story, and you had no constraints, what would you do? How do you approach the challenge of coming up with new material?” I was waiting on the edge of my seat with bated breath. Still, I was delighted by Gladwell’s response:

“This is something I learned back in my days at the Washington Post, and it applies to everything:

It’s not your responsibility to ‘come up with’ the idea. It’s your responsibility to find the idea.

This is a critical distinction. It’s deeply counterintuitive, but I don’t ‘come up with ideas’ on my own. I don’t create ideas. I find them.”

What a marvelous way to say “Look for connections.” The reality is, the framing of the task as “idea generation” puts the burden on the innovator to somehow come up with the idea from within, as it were. But ideas are rarely exclusively from within, so much as a connection to an unexpected input from beyond. So the key is to go on the hunt for fresh input.

Gladwell continued, “If you go out into the world and talk to people, you’ll uncover all sorts of things that provide creative direction.”

It’s exactly what innovation hero Kelly Garrett Zeigler did when she started visiting homes. It’s why we conduct empathy interviews as part of the design process: all sorts of ideas for fresh stories emerge when we stop trying to generate ideas, and start trying to find them.

Related: Look for Connections
Related: Make Connections
Related: Seek Unexpected Input
Related: How to Learn from Anyone
Related: Welcome Surprises

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