How do you come up with good ideas?

I’ve never had a good idea sitting at a desk. Ever. All of my ideas have arrived apparently unbidden, usually while I’m doing something totally unrelated, like standing in the shower, drifting off to sleep, or strolling aimlessly around Sandton City.

Driving is especially productive, I’ve found. For some reason, perhaps because my mind is focused at least in part on paying attention to road conditions and what other motorists are doing, it is prevented from interfering with that mysterious mental process that produces eureka moments.

Scientific research bears out my experience. The kind of thinking processes that most of us associate with our jobs — sitting at desks, in airless meeting rooms, writing up notes on whiteboards — seldom results in new solutions to old, vexing problems. University of British Columbia psychology professor Kalina Christoff argues that daydreaming rather than focused, goal-orientated thinking is more likely to produce creative responses to problems. Letting your mind wander is crucial to creativity. Citing research by UCLA, this blogger describes the “focus and drift” method as a more structured way of daydreaming in order to generate good ideas.

Finding different ways of thinking about an issue or challenge — or, in the words of that horribly overused cliche, thinking out the box — can be phenomenally difficult, as this article in Wired argues —

“In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorisation. As Mark Twain said, ‘Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned’. For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become.”

To come up with new ideas, it seems — the kind of ideas that change companies, or lives, or industries — the brain must not be able to predict what will happen next. In my own experience, the best way to come up with ideas is what I call the “percolator” approach: feed the mind with information from a wide range of sources (some of them immediately and obviously relevant and others not) and then allow time for processing. Just as a percolator turns beans into coffee, so the mind, given the space and time to mull over a challenge, will invariably come back with some kind of solution.

What all of this research suggests is that the way we work might actually impede instead of catalyse the generation of good ideas. How many of us sit in offices or brainstorm around boardroom tables, usually with the same people we work with day after day after day? How many of us make sure we’re seen sitting at our desks in order to put in the hours, rather than actually accomplishing anything of value? I work in an industry that depends on creativity for its very survival — and yet the way in which we try to generate new ways of doing things is fundamentally uncreative.

So next time I feel the urge to leave my desk, walk around, perhaps take a drive or visit the shops down the road, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. After all, I’m being more productive than if I stayed in the office and stared at this screen.