Creativity Now, 2nd Edition

Force a word association

THE PRINCIPLE

Forcing a connection between your challenge and an unrelated word yields new ideas

This method is one of the most popular brainstorming tools, for a very good reason: it’s simple, you can do it alone or in a group and it works.

You begin with a list of random words. You can pick them out of a newspaper or magazine, and the words can be anything: an object, a place, a type of person, an emotion, an action. Write down at least 20 of them in a vertical column on the left side of a page. For our example, my list includes:

Bedlam

Fish

Soloist

Door

Kidnapper

Joke

Then pick one creative challenge where you need some fresh ideas. Next, write a summary of the issue across the top of the page. For example, let’s ...