I liked this exercise...I've called it Movie Maker..

This exercise is courtesey of John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

"You can add to your repertoire of creative tools. It will help you increase your output of ideas whenever you’re doing any sort of brainstorming, or even just kicking a few thoughts around with colleagues.

Make a huge movie screen in your mind and start creating vivid mental imagery of things that have anything at all to do with the topic under discussion.

Let’s say you’re kicking around a few ideas to do with product improvement. Create a mental movie of a suitable situation you’re familiar with.

You might, for example, put yourself in your local supermarket where you’re walking around looking at all those products on the shelves, the point-of-sale material, the overhead posters and displays.

And, specifically, look at close-ups of the products and packaging.

Now, look at the wealth of ideas you can see as you mentally stroll around the aisles - create a six-pack, sell two-for-one, add a free bonus product, change the package shape, put a handle on it, group like products together, add a promotional coupon - and so on.

Then change the movie. Maybe you could put yourself in an art gallery, or a circus, or a toy factory, or your local Kwik-Fit - and notice how different situations can generate even more ideas.

Then try mixing a few movies together – a hospital operating room with an airport check-in queue, a day at the beach with a retail furniture store, a public library with a dog show.

The possibilities are endless. And obviously the more you do this, the better you’ll get.

Why this yields results

We have two main channels for generating ideas – ‘visual’, where we think in pictures, and ‘auditory’, where we think in words.

The visual channel is faster because we can have pictures coming and going in a flash. It’s the mind’s main source of information. The auditory channel, on the other hand, can be useful, but it’s painfully slow. In fact, we can’t ‘think’ language any faster than we can talk it in real life.

And because of the way the mind works, we can’t be in both channels at the same time. So if you’re doing most of your thinking in words, you won’t get nearly as many ideas."

Thanks John.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com