Provocation The Best Bait for Your Ideas
The good fisherman of “ideas” differs from the others because focuses on those preys that are mostly priced, those that cannot be achieved by the rest
If ideas were fish and us fishermen would have, as in other facets of life, better and worse fishermen. And this would depend not only on how many fish someone could catch but fundamentally on the quality of the fish they catch. We could understand that quality as the kind of fish that are caught if they’re more or less frequent, exotic, hard to catch, heavyweight, etc.
That’s why a good fisherman is always known and recognized in his guild as a special person, who does things well, in an excellent way, and makes his company grow and improve continuously.
But how can we fish that kind of fish, how do we get the best ideas?
Every fisherman knows that the secret is in the bait. A good bait is the one that makes the difference between fishing for common fish and more unusual and therefore special fish.
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.” — Henry David Thoreau
The bait of the good creative is called provocation What is provocation? It is a state of mind different from the usual one caused by accident, chance, or chance, which leads us to contemplate, process, and think from a different perspective than normal. The madness that many of the best-known creatives seem to suffer is at the root of their provocation, and thus of their particular vision.
The good thing about provocation is that you can self-induce without having to go mad or have to wait for a chance. When we use provocation, we deform the problem, and consequently, we begin to look at it from unprecedented points of view to date. That makes the solutions or ideas provided different as well.
Tips for provocation
Our brain, without extra help or good training, is not used to deforming reality, so here are some keys to making the process easier for you:
Exaggeration: it’s the biggest of the provocations. When we want to get something out of this method, it’s best to exaggerate it to the fullest, to see our idea differently. It’s not the same to start thinking about “how to give more visibility to our store” as it is to “how to make the only thing people see be our store.” There’s a big difference.
Emotional provocation: including emotions and feelings, such as falling in love, hating, or getting excited in our creative challenge will make it different. Incorporating those words will make provocation effective. Apple might have used it thinking, “How do you make my customers fall in love with my products and don’t want to get rid of even the wrappers?” It worked for them.
Use the minds of others: if you’re a computer scientist and have a problem, you’ll probably talk to colleagues with similar training to yours. They won’t tell you anything you wouldn’t tell yourself. But if you tell someone completely different about your problem, your vision may help you distance yourself from your mental position. Children and the elderly are the best to consult, although it can always be tested with any professional in another sector.
Forced relationship: another technique that helps provocation is to include a word that has nothing to do with the problem we’re dealing with. For example, if we are concerned about the lack of space in the company’s parking lot, we can force a new relationship with a concept at random. Let’s say that word is a penguin. So we will have to force a relationship between the lack of parking space and the penguin concept. At first, it will cost, because what does a penguin have to do with parking?, but if we get carried away, this will lead to creative new ideas like enabling “hot” and “cold” zones in the parking lot, to manage it better (derived from the cold concept) or grouping cars of equal size to save space (derived from the idea that penguins are always clustered). They are just some of the first ideas, that is, high frequency, that can come to mind, but if we continue with it, the results will be amazing.
Revolutionize: modesty can us in the search for new ideas. Very few people break the mold when it comes to thinking. Most think small. Thanks to the concept of revolutionizing, we can learn to think big. When we think about some problem, we need to ask ourselves the following question: what would it take to revolutionize this concept? The simple operation of including the term revolution makes our minds expand much more than usual.
These are some keys to provoking our minds. The more we provoke it, the better bait we’ll be preparing and therefore better fish will come to us. The good idea fisherman knows this and that is why doesn’t hesitate to invest time and effort in it.
“Most of the world is covered by water. A fisherman’s job is simple: Pick out the best parts.” — Charles Waterman
