Jon Samsel

Solution sketching is a lot like brainstorming. (I happen to be the world’s foremost expert on solution sketching because I just made up the term three hours ago).

Solution sketching can help unleash your create energies to focus on solving a problem. It starts a lot like brainstorming—a process of releasing your thoughts as rapidly as they come into your mind and capturing them for consideration. By coming up with a wide variety of creative ideas, you greatly increase your change to solve a problem in a bold new way.

A related technique is visual mapping—which is a process of following your natural intuition and freely associating seemingly random concepts so that a patchwork of uncensored ideas begins to develop.

The key to solution sketching, brainstorming and visual mapping is allowing for the free flow of ideas—good and bad—and then sort, edit and prioritize at a later time. Find yourself short on ideas? Got creative writer’s block? Try this simple exercise I like to call Out of Body Visualization. It’s a fun way of placing your mind into unusual situations in order to stimulate creative solutions. It’s like batting practice for your brain!

Many creative artists tend to get hung up on the fine details…editing their creative thought process as they go. This can limit the number of creative possibilities you might consider, but switching your mind from ’solve it now’ mode to a more artistic mode (such as sketching) forces you to focus on an alternative activity, which may lead to capturing thoughts that might normally slip away from your mind.

So without further adieu, here are my five simple tips for solution sketching:

1. There are no bad ideas: Capture every idea no matter how silly, irrelevant or disconnected you think that idea is from what you are trying to solve. Bad ideas can stimulate alternative ideas that are more closely aligned to the task at hand.
2. Sketch your thoughts: By visualizing your ideas using pencil & paper, pen & easel, marker & whiteboard or your laptop text editor—you greatly increase your chance of recalling all of these wacky ideas that may have bounced though your head because your thoughts are right there on ‘paper.’
3. Map your ideas: Once you have an entire whiteboard stuffed with every last idea that can be squeezed out of your feeble noggin, it’s next to add a little pizaz to your solution sketching session. Try placing your ideas into bubbles and draw lines radiating out showing how each idea is related to the main idea or issue you are trying to solve.
4. Set a time limit: Research shows that having a goal for your solution sketching session, especially a goal with a time limit, will lead to a more productive session (especially in group settings). People tend to focus and contribute more when they know there is only a limit amount of time to make their ideas heard.
5. Let it stew: Your solution sketching exercise is over. But before setting out to solve your problem, take a little extra time to let your ideas simmer. Mull things around in your head. Sleep on them. The dreaming mind is forever voyaging and sometimes presents an unexpected solution. Sometimes the best solutions come when not actively working on a problem.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Creativity, E-Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.