Suspend judgment to generate creative solutions

A group of managers meet with the agenda to discuss how to come up with new products or added-value customer service:
"Let's sell our products on our website."
"No,too risky. Imagine all the cost in setting it up and maintaining it. We don't have the expertise. Anyway, sales are good, we're doing fine the way we are."
"We could do a cost benefit analysis to justify the costs."
"Who's got the time to do that now? Not me."

"Let's try working with other companies."
"No, we've tried that before."
"Let's train our staff on new marketing techniques."
"No, the boss won't approve, so why bother."
"Let's hire a consultant."
"No, let's not rock the boat."
"Maybe we can reshuffle the groups. Mix people from different branches."
"No, we don't work like that here."

In this example, we see how the birth of ideas is immediately killed by judgments. The comments in the above dialogue may not even warrant the term "judgment". At best, they are a knee-jerk negativism that resides in most of us. Worse still, once we start on the track of such negativism, it's difficult to set ourselves back on the track of generating ideas again.

Have you ever tried coming up with an idea only to kill it yourself because your mind has quietly told you that your idea won't work? Ray and Myers, in their book Creativity in Business (1986) call this the VOJ -- the voice of judgment.

Let's go back in time. Who, during Leonardo da Vinci's time, would've thought that human flight could be possible? Da Vinci not only suspended his VOJ, but his ignorance of others' VOJ enabled him to proceed on his own to invent a flying contraption. It didn't work, but it laid the foundation for others to build on, and eventually resulted in what we now know as the airplane. Many people in da Vinci's time must have thought he was crazy. But most, if not all, new ideas will seem crazy at the time of their birth.

There are two types of thinking involved in creative thinking: generating ideas and evaluating ideas. It is our tendency to do both at the same time. The secret is to separate the generation and evaluation of ideas into two different stages of thinking.

First, generate as many ideas as you can without judging them in any way, then select the ideas that appeal to you. Then judge the ideas, think about ways to improve on the good ones and think about how to realize the impossible ones.
Of all the golden rules for generating ideas laid down by the inventor of brainstorming, Alex Osborn, the first and foremost one is known as "defer judgment" -- generate first, then evaluate.

In simple language, to defer judgment simply means to not judge an idea prematurely. It's all about exercising one's mental flexibility. Deferring judgment allows us to keep a new idea alive to ensure that the idea receives a fair evaluation.
Deferring or delaying our judgment may mean that we will find ourselves coming up with obvious, crazy or fantastical ideas that we will immediately consider worthy of discarding. But the moment we start thinking whether it's an idea worth getting out of our heads (because we are judging it silently in our minds), we will lose our flow of ideas.

After we learn to defer our own voice of judgment, then it's time for us to defer our judgment on other people' ideas.

From our experience in teaching people to think creatively, people who defer judgment while generating ideas generate on average 100 percent more ideas in the same amount of time than before the "defer judgment" rule is taught to them. Since getting many ideas will increase our chances of getting good ones, the "defer judgment" rule will ensure that we generate the quantity we need.

Once, we conducted a brainstorming session with children between 6-12 years old on how we might improve one of Jakarta's problems: the annual floods. They came up with ideas like blow-dry it, use a giant mop, stop the rain, shoot clouds, cover up the sky, etc. These may sound wildly imaginative, impractical or downright ridiculous.
But let's defer our judgment according to the rule of brainstorming and see what we do have.

Take, for example, the idea of using a giant mop. Although it sounds childlike, we liked the idea. After we played around with it, we thought, why not have the street become a giant mop? If we consider the hundreds of kilometers of asphalted roads that traverse Jakarta, and if the roads are water-absorbent, then this could be one possible solution to Jakarta's floods.

In fact, scientists are currently researching ways on how asphalt can be made water-absorbent. Prof. Bruce Ferguson, Associate Dean of the University of Georgia's Landscape Architecture Graduate School, is working on precisely this matter.
How would you react if someone raised an idea of using coconuts to make sportswear? If you defer your judgment long enough, you would hear out Greg Haggquist, who did just this to create cycling wear that absorbs odor and provides UV-ray protection. Haggquist used the carbon from coconuts and infused it into threads to create a new kind of polyester.

Well, now we know to stop ourselves from reacting negatively the moment someone shares a new idea. Listening doesn't mean approving, but when we hear an idea out, we know to first look for the good, then the bad or concerns we may have with the initial idea, and we can discuss with the idea-generator how might the concerns be overcome.

The next time you make a negative statement, turn it into a question and try to find possible solutions for it. We can turn "that client will never receive my call" into how can I get the client to return my calls?" and "we'll never get this done on time" into "how can we get this done on time?"

Just try it and see the difference it'll make.

Even when we seem to have found the ideas we like, try to push for more. Even when we think we have decided on one solution to a problem we're facing, don't think that we have found the best one. There will always be room for improvement, so don't forget to keep the doors open.

Deferring judgment ensures that we generate a broad range of ideas to increase our chances of finding elegant solutions to the problem or issue at hand. Deferring judgment also keeps new ideas alive until they've been given a fair evaluation.
Remember, most new ideas will seem crazy when they are first suggested. But next time you hear your negative inner voice nagging at you, you can tell it to come back later.

Published in The Jakarta Post May 21, 2006