- Creativity thrives on taking disparate ideas
and mashing them together into something new.
Visualizing what types of disparate ideas
will work together is difficult,
but disparity is rarely a goal
and is actually much harder to find than you would think.
To get to a place where you can start to see disparate ideas
and their potential together,
try creating an idea web.
Start by taking the central theme or subject of your problem
and writing it in the center of a whiteboard
or large piece of paper.
Circle the word and draw lines coming out of the circle.
At the end of each line,
write a word
that has something to do with the word in the center.
This can be a descriptive word
or it can be a supplementary term.
It just has to have a relationship
to the word it is connected to.
Do this a number of times
until you have a few words surrounding the center word.
Circle each of those and do the same thing to them.
As you're doing this,
you're building a giant web of words.
Somewhere in the relationship to one another,
but the further away you get from the center,
the more disparate the words.
Once you have filled the board or paper,
you can use the resulting idea web in a number of ways.
The easiest way to use the web
is to use the individual words
as inspiration for singular ideas.
Words spark ideas,
and you should have a board of paper
full of interesting words to use as inspiration.
But you can also challenge creativity
to find connective threads
between seemingly disparate ideas.
Try looking for two words
on the outside of the paper or board
that could have an interesting relationship
when put together.
Or better yet,
pull two words together that don't seem to belong together
and ask what the problem would look like
through the lens of those two ideas combined.
Idea webs provide a conceptual input exercise
to your brainstorm
and will give your stormers
a wealth of potential idea starters.