Tapping into your subconscious for ideas

The Jakarta Post, Features, 30 September 2007
Dewi Susanti & Kayee Man

Have you ever woken up from a dream with a weird, but reassuring feeling that you'd solved a problem that has been bugging you for a while?

Unfortunately, we don't come up with solutions to our problems through dreams very often, as our dreams are often disjointed from reality. But through dreams, psychologists -- pioneered by Sigmund Freud -- have attempted to peek into humans' subconscious minds to reveal the troubled souls within.

But we could use our dreams to come up with unusual ideas and think outside of the box, so to speak. Unusual ideas are often what give us a competitive edge.

Suppose you want to open a restaurant because, well, great restaurants draw a lot of people in, and we all know that restaurants have potential for high profit margins. But what makes restaurants great?

People, services, and products come to mind when we think about great experiences we've had in restaurants. But many stores in developed countries have evolved beyond these basics to cater for many varieties of needs and to create experiences for their customers.

A good example is the REI store in Seattle that not only sells outdoor gear, but also boasts a 20-meter-high climbing "mountain", a 155-meter-long hiking trail, 30 pitched tents, a Rain Room to check whether the gear is truly waterproof -- even a dirty pool for campers to test water purifiers."

By the end of its first year, REI store was visited by 1.5 million people, and designated as a National Park Service information station (Kelley, 2001: 196, 203).

The REI not only sells products; they are selling experiences. Unusual experiences draw people in.

You may start wondering then, how one could come up with great ideas for restaurants? We could start with people, services, and products as the basic ingredients for great experiences we've had in restaurants.

But rather than thinking about these categories in our usual way, let's think about them independently from one another and see what great ideas we can come up with.

'Forced association' produces ideas

Let's start with the people. What kinds of people can you think of? You may want to brainstorm first, independent of your idea for a great restaurant. Our list includes: grandmothers, children, pilots, students, astronauts, rock climber, fisherman, soccer player, dancer, musicians, etc.

Then think of the kinds of people you want to attract and whom should you employ?

Next, brainstorm about services. Our list includes the obviously related dining services (restaurants, cafes, airplane food service, etc.) and other unrelated services such as postal services, the Internet, graphic design services, travel agents, call centers, real estate agents, brokers, florists, etc. What kind of services would you want to provide through this restaurant?

Finally, consider the products. Directly restaurant-related are types of food (Italian, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Spanish, etc.) and drinks (soft drinks, punches, coffees, teas, smoothies, alcoholic drinks, etc.).

But let's branch out a little to think of other products that are not related to restaurants. Here's what we come up with: art papers, books, clothing, camera, eyeglasses, bags, gadgets, shoes, golf clubs, and so on. What products could you sell in the restaurant?

Suppose we are open to any kind of ideas for this restaurant; we may want to go for the kinds of restaurants that do not already exist in Jakarta. How do we go about it?

One way to find ideas is through an idea finding tool known as "forced association", which is also a term introduced by Freud.

To engage in forced association, we simply pick randomly our separate ideas from each of the three categories above (people, services, and products). Let's say we get grandmothers, florists, and camera. What ideas could you get from these words?

Well, perhaps the restaurant is the place where grandmothers could come and learn making flower arrangements, which would be displayed in this restaurant for picture-taking moments with the whole family. So it's a fun and emotion-arousing restaurant full of families and flowers.

Let's try other random picks through the categories. Say we have rock climbers, graphic design services, and smoothies. Perhaps the restaurant could have a rock climbing wall and sell nutrient-filled smoothies for health conscious young entrepreneurs.

But where does that leave the graphic design services? We could think of it literally as a two-in-one lounge and graphic design house, or it could be a restaurant where everything is designed and packaged to make you become conscious of health and the environment.

Our family restaurant full of families and flowers, or a healthy lounge for entrepreneurs, or a fully-designed experience of good healthy food, fun and environmentally conscious experiences are unusual experiences (which by the way, we haven't seen in any restaurants here in Jakarta).

By forced associating three words from three categories, you could come up with your own ideas for restaurants with unusual experiences. And who knows, if you really have the motivation and start-up capital, you could actually implement one that you think would make a good business.

Delving into the subconscious

Now that we hope we have convinced you with why we should go for unusual ideas, it's time to persuade you into the idea of tapping into your subconscious mind.

But after having kept you attention throughout the entire article, we actually no longer need to persuade you, as forced association is one of the tools that help us gain subconscious-like ideas. So without realizing it, we have led you through the thinking process needed to trigger your own subconscious-like ideas.

If forced association is not to your liking, there are other ways of getting unusual, subconscious-like ideas too. In the 1920s, when Freud's ideas of psychoanalysis had gained some popularity, tapping into the subconscious mind was one of the main fascinations of art movements known as Dada.

Some of its exponents later founded Surrealism -- whose better-known artists include Rene Magritte (whose painting is featured in the film The Thomas Crown Affair, with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo) and Salvador Dali (whose painting of soft watches, better known in the art world known as The Persistence of Memory, is one of his most-remembered paintings).

The Surrealists created many devices to purposefully get non-logical ideas; one of them is forced association, which has been described at length by us above. The Surrealists also use another tool called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), which when applied in writing, is a form of idea-generating process that involves several people coming up with a story line without a set target (no, we didn't use this technique to write this article!)

If you are familiar with the discussion groups in Facebook, the social utility on the Internet, you would probably know this game: someone starts a post with a three-word sentence, then another posts additional three-word sentence, and so on until some kind of story line is gained through the process. This is one form of cadavre exquis.

A more visual method, collage, is also one of the tools widely used by the Surrealists. A collage is a picture that is created by cutting and pasting parts from different pictures, prints, photos, newspapers, magazines, clothes, found objects, and almost everything you could think of onto a common surface.

You can try this: think of a problem for a few minutes then put it out of your mind. Get some old magazines and/or objects, let your mind go and start cutting, arranging and pasting.

When you feel (note: not think) you are done, return to the problem you started off with and see if you can gain insights to how your visual piece relates to or give you ideas to solve your problem.

What you could get through these tools are unusual ideas or images that may be completely abstract or bizarre, but may reveal your subconscious mind and may give you ideas on how to solve the problem you are facing.

At the very least, going through this kind of thinking process will not only train your thinking and imagining capacity, but is a lot of fun and entertaining.

Ergo: Tap into your subconscious mind!

Thinking Languages

The Jakarta Post, Features, 16 September 2007
Published as "Use the most appropriate language to get through"
Kayee Man & Dewi Susanti

Ever experienced tearing your hair out over not being able to get through to someone?

We have. What's wrong with the people who just don't get it? With some afterthought, we conclude that most of the time, we're just not using the right language to communicate with people.

There are close to 7,000 languages around the world. One can never be certain about too many things, but we would bet our bottom dollar that it would be impossible to learn all the languages in the world in one's lifetime.

So what language or languages should we learn so that people understand us?

Should we strengthen our English, the language considered by many to be the lingua franca? Or learn Mandarin, the most widely spoken language in the world? Or Spanish, the third-most widely spoken language in the world?

Or, perhaps Bahasa Indonesia, the local language?

You might have read Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue (1990). In it, he wrote about a German engineer posted to China to work in a German business venture. We can only imagine what it's like for the German engineer to speak English to the Chinese plant manager who can't speak German.

Funnier perhaps is Bryson's story of some companies from four non-English speaking European countries that formed the joint venture called Iveco.

English was the chosen working language and one of the founders commented "it puts us all at an equal disadvantage."

Funny for observers, perhaps. But if you already have been in situations similar to the stories, you won't see this situation bringing much laughter to the poor souls who were probably tearing their hair out trying to be understood.

You most likely can relate to the fact that even being fluent in English does not provide a solution to communication problems in the era of globalization.

Think 'visually'

Before you rush out to sign up for Mandarin or English or Indonesian classes, consider signing up instead to learn a universal language that most of us are not fluent or fully trained in: the visual language.

J. A. Adams, in his book Conceptual Blockbusting (2001), suggested that there are three problem-solving languages or, if you prefer, languages we think with. The three are: verbal (which we are using to think and write for this article), mathematical, and visual.

In our training, we have worked with many people who automatically use their verbal or mathematical knowledge to solve problems.

This doesn't come as a surprise as we are well trained in using words and mathematics in school. The downside in doing this is that not all problems can be solved verbally or mathematically.

Consider this problem used as an example by Adams: "One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to climb a tall mountain. A narrow path, no more than 30 to 60 centimeters wide, spiraled around the mountain to a glittering temple at the summit.

The monk ascended at varying rates of speed, stopping many times along the way to rest and eat dried fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset.

After several days of fasting and meditation he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at variable speeds with many pauses along the way.

His average speed on the descent was, of course, greater than on the ascent. Prove that there is a spot along the path that the monk will occupy at both trips at precisely the same time of day." (Adams, 2001, p. 4)

We won't give you the answer just yet. To heighten your chances of solving this problem, remember that one big hint has already been given (consider using something other than words or math to solve this problem).

If you did make an attempt to solve this problem, did you use words or math? How easy or hard was it for you to not use numbers and equations?

Kayee likes to think mathematically and logically (she even reduced a new organizational structure into a mathematical equation). When she tried this and other problems, even knowing that she should not be thinking mathematically, the symbols and equations kept popping into her head.

She couldn't get away from them. What made it hard for Kayee to get away from the math was partly habit, but also, at the time, the lack of an alternative language at her disposal.

Dewi, trained in the visual arts and as an architect, is a visual thinker. If you too are a visual thinker, you may have the answer to the problem by now.

Try to produce the following two images in your mind: a person ascending a mountain on a spiral path (hold this image), a person descending a mountain on a spiral path (hold this image). Now, overlap these two images and you will have one person ascending and one person descending the same mountain. Where the two people meet is the point where their paths coincide.

The mathematically inclined among you may ask: so where exactly is the meeting point? How far in kilometers from the base of the mountain? What are the bearings? But did the problem ask for a specific spot, or just a spot? The point is that with some problems, we can only answer them without the exactness that some of us are accustomed to.

Use props

Recently, when working with some high school students on the problem, we found that knowing that it was necessary to think in images was not enough. For these students, it was a challenge to retain the above images in their heads.

As a helping tool, Dewi offered them a mosquito repellent that was lying around the room, with a shape like a cone to represent the mountain. We also gave them two toothpicks to represent the monk: one going up, and one going down. The students saw the solution at once. Having a concrete object to handle helped their thinking.

Using props is a very common teaching strategy for young children but less common for adults.

In our view, using props as teaching or communication tools should not be determined based on age but on (you can probably guess by now) the language in which a learner or listener feels most comfortable thinking.

Some of us may not only think more effectively visually but also concretely and kinesthetically, meaning, we need to be handling concrete objects to understand and problem solve.

Next time you are faced with a problem, think first: which is the best language to solve the problem with? Is it with words, math, or images? It may be one of these or a combination of them.

Effective use of language

Returning to our question of which is the best language to learn: In our opinion there is no one best or universal language.

Know your problem; figure out which language (verbal, mathematical or visual) is the most appropriate for the problem. Be aware of your own language preferences so you know when it becomes a hindrance to your thinking.

When communicating to others, gauge your listener's thinking language preference and design your message as much as possible using this preferred language.

If your listener doesn't seem to understand your chain of words, describe an image for him to see in his head and ask, "do you see it now?"

If your listener can't see what you are describing, can you put your message across using mathematical symbols and equations?

If you are not sure in which language your listener thinks best, package your message in a way that will tap into the use of all three thinking languages!

Even if you are multilingual in several languages, you strengthen your thinking and communication abilities only verbally.

If you broaden your repertoire of languages to include the more universal mathematical and visual languages, not only will this help you in thinking about and solving problems, they may also be your bullets in getting through to people.