Name: Thinkertoys
ISBN: 9781580087735

Michael Michalko

A guide designed to encourage creative thinking in business offers techniques, hints, and tricks for generating ideas and offers dozens of success stories.

A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

Thinkertoys

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           Love he mentioned brain bank, nowadays called as second brain.

Okay seems I've been pretty aware of few named techniques. Like slice dices, blue roses, theee bs, rattlesnakes, chilling out and think bubbles seems pretty popular to my w second brain.

I sense great summary of usual creative methods with names with brief onboarding to idea generation.


≥No one chooses their parents or siblings, and no one knows how or when they will die. What we can choose is how we live between birth and death.

≥You will find yourself looking at the same information everyone else is looking at yet seeing something different. This new and different way of seeing things will lead you to new ideas and unique insights.

≥Tinker with existing ideas until you develop a more effective and efficient version.

≥Become invaluable to the people in your personal and professional life.
• Bring new life to existing industries.
• Increase productivity.

≥You are capable of change.
• You are not less than anyone else in the world in talent and ability.

≥Self-affirmation focuses on your past successes to breed future success and identifies and appreciates your good personal qualities. Creative affirmation is believing that you are creative. When you conceive yourself as a winner, a genius, and a solutionist, you will take steps that confirm the profession.

≥Write your affirmations about being creative every day for five days. During this period, the negatives will almost certainly stop; at that point, just continue writing positive affirmations until you no longer feel the need.

≥An idea quota is a mind exercise that involves tasking yourself to come up with a predetermined number of ideas daily.

≥Feed your mind by reading and analyzing what you’ve read. Create a brainbank — a place where you store ideas for later use. Travel helps you gain new insights and see the world through the eyes of other people. When an idea comes to mind, record it immediately. You increase your thinking fluency by listing ideas as they come to mind. Flexible thinking comes from seeing more than just conventional ideas.

≥Single perspectives often arise from a failure to include the less dominant part of the brain when thinking about problems.

≥Left-brained people are procedural and tend to stick with what is available, while right-brained people come up with holistic, fresh ideas that defy the norm.

≥Statisticians, researchers, and writers are primarily left-brained people; musicians, composers, and other creatives are right-brained. The use of thinkertoys helps to synchronize both sides of the brain to solve problems. Linear thinkertoys work for analytical or sequential information, while intuitive thinkertoys apply to big-picture thinking or developing new lines of thought.

≥• False Faces
• Slice and Dice
• Cherry Split
• Think Bubbles
• Scamper

≥False Faces refer to assumptions that present as truth. When presented with a challenge, write out all your conjectures about it. Then, write the opposite of each of these presuppositions. Ask yourself how to achieve these reversals and choose the one to implement.

≥Slice and Dice is a thinkertoy that lists the components of an item to improve the item. Car manufacturers use Slice and Dice to design new car brand models. A new model is born by listing the parts of a car and investigating how each feature can be made better.

Cherry Split breaks the challenge into two major parts and considers each unit separately until a new idea hidden in a part of the problem appears. Start by splitting the challenge into two. Pick each part and list its attributes. Analyze each detail until you find something you can alter to create a new form.

Think Bubbles is about creating a mind-map that allows you to see how different parts of a challenge are connected. What mapping does is generate a blueprint of how your mind combines information. It is easier to move items around when they are on your map until you find what works than trying to do it in your mind.

Scamper is a technique for generating alternative solutions through questioning. If you want to be better at public speaking, you can use Scamper to discover new ways. Ask yourself the following questions:
• What new strategy can I substitute for the way I speak currently?
• How can I combine my existing manner of speaking with another style?
• What are the things I can draw from a successful speaker?
• In what ways can I modify how I speak now?
• In what ways can I magnify my current strategy?
• What mannerisms do I need to eliminate from my adopted style?
• How can I rearrange my speaking method to make it better?


≥• Chilling Out
• Blue Roses
• The Three Bs
• Rattlesnakes and Roses
• Stone Soup

Chilling Out is a technique that involves relaxation of your mind and body to fall into a deep meditative state. You can bring ideas lodged in your subconscious mind to the conscious arena in this mode.

The Blue Roses thinkertoy is about intuition. Intuition means listening to how you feel about a situation to determine your response.

≥The Three Bs are the bus, bed, and bath. This technique channels the power of incubation. Ideas flow when you’re not thinking about the problem. So, instead of focusing on the challenge, do something unrelated to it. In that diffuse mode of thinking, a brilliant idea may emerge from your subconscious mind. First, clarify the problem you want to solve. Gather information on the challenge. Let your brain register the need to solve the problem. Walk away from it for a set time, and you’ll be surprised that the next time you sit down with it may produce outstanding results.

Rattlesnakes and Roses address the fluidity of your thoughts. Ideas come from comparing concepts from totally unrelated fields to find their similarities. This tool enables you to connect your thoughts until you stir a hidden idea into action, find a keyword in a challenge you have in mind, choose an unrelated field of knowledge you’re versed in, make a list of the images connected with the field and try to find connections between your keyword and the list you made.

≥Stone Soup is a thinkertoy that requires you to ask: “What if?” In this mode, you are not to judge any idea that comes to mind. Simply explore what the world would be like if the concept were the reality. Making imaginative leaps can lead to finding radical solutions to old problems.

≥You deploy linear thinkertoys when you want to make a better version of an existing concept or theory. Intuitive thinkertoys will help you create value where none existed

≥Do not assume a good thing cannot be better. Progress depends on people who invent and reinvent. You have to be in a state of dissatisfaction with the best proposal to be able to create more efficient paths.

≥There are no good or bad events; events take on the meanings we give them.

≥Therefore, train your mind to see multiple interpretations of events and never box yourself to a single perspective. You will not be perturbed by fleeting circumstances when you let your mind see possibilities.

Thinkertoys A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

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