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Anticonventional Thinking (ACT) introduction Download the complete booklet: 20 pages: PDF (760kb) Have you ever participated in a brainstorming session only to be left yawning at the results? Have you ever engaged in an ideas campaign and found yourself thoroughly underwhelmed by the level of creativity in the ideas generated? Have you ever managed a crowdsourcing event – and still find yourself waking in the middle of the night screaming about having to review thousands of painfully mediocre ideas? If so, you are not alone. The sad truth is that idea generation events are designed to generate lots of ideas rather than creative ideas. Worse, their success tends to be measured by the number of ideas rather than the creativity of the results.

But don’t panic! There is a better approach to creativity and it is called anticonventional thinking (ACT). Rather than attempting to generate ideas by the sack full in hopes that one or two of them may be brilliant, ACT aims to generate a few brilliant ideas. It’s based on how people’s brains respond to problems and emulates the way many artists, writers, scientists and other creative geniuses think.

As the name implies, ACT is about taking a purposely unconventional approach to problem solving and idea generation. But it’s not just about the ideas. ACT is also about being anticonventional in framing the problem or issue for which you are looking for ideas, the insights you seek and how you respond to them.

Think about it. In a typical company, brainstorming tends to be around issues, or challenges, such as “In what ways might we improve product X?” or “How might we make better use of social media in our marketing communications?” Challenges such as these beg for mediocre and predictable ideas.

But this is not how highly creative people solve problems. People, like Pablo Picasso for instance, did not ask “In what ways might I improve my portraits?” or “How might I make better use of acrylic paints?” Rather he posed big, game-changing challenges like “How might an artist present multiple three dimensional view points on a two dimensional canvas?” The result to this challenge was cubism, one of the major innovative art movements of the 20th century.

Albert Einstein did not ask himself “How might I improve the world’s understanding of mechanics?” Rather, he asked, “How might I reconcile Maxwell’s electromagnetism equations with Newton’s laws of mechanics?” This issue concerned many physicists in the early 1900s, but no one dared address it head-on as the two disciplines seemed irreconcilable. Einstein’s very unconventional (at the time) challenge, combined with some then mind-blowingly unconventional ideas about how matter behaves in extreme situations (such as approaching the speed of light or in a gravity well), resulted in his Theories of Relativity – one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

While most of us can never be as creative as Picasso or Einstein, we can learn to emulate their approach to creative thinking and follow it as individuals or groups. That’s what ACT is all about. So, let’s see how it works.

Download the complete booklet: 20 pages: PDF (760kb)