Creativity is knowing how to add or modify something that already exists. Take your subject and TURN it into something else. At Creative Focus, we’re using THINK PAK – a powerful process devised by Michael Michalko involving idea-triggering cards to help people brainstorm and shift their focus. This is a great opportunity for small businesses looking for a new way through a problem.

The first step is to help people clarify their plan, problem, or challenge they face and to write it as a specific problem statement. Then we go to town!

There are 7-stages to a THINKPAK brainstorming sessions as well as an evaluation stage where the ideas generated are put through tests. We work with well-known idea generating strategies. For example, the Lotus Blossom is an exercise that starts with a central theme and works outward. Central themes lead to ideas that themselves become central themes. The unfolding is like unfolding petals that trigger new ideas and themes.

Einstein imagined he was a beam of light hurtling through space, which led him to the theory of relatively. Antoine Feutchwanger tried to sell sausages: first on a plate, then with gloves (the hotdogs were hot!), and finally his brother-in-law suggested “What if I bake a long roll and slit it down the middle to hold the sausage: You sell the sausage and I’ll sell the bread. Who knows, it might catch on?” The post-it note was created when Arthur Fry, a 3M chemist, dropped his bookmark from his hymnal and understood that the purpose of the glue should be in attaching paper to paper.

The 7-stage brainstorming process is named SCAMPER:

Substitute something.

Combine it with something else.

Adapt something to it.

Modify it or Magnify it.

Put it to some other use.

Eliminate something.

Reverse or Rearrange it.

THINK PAK helps you to generate a quantity of ideas quickly. The process of applying THINK PAK can be done randomly or sequentially. There are lots of opportunities to see the problem from different perspectives. We work with individuals and in group sessions. Group sessions are fun: especially when participants start to piggy-back on each other’s ideas.

Get introduced to THINKPAK.