The Touchwood Project

Have you taken Strengthsfinder and had “Ideation” as one of your top 5? Know someone who has?

Today I’m writing about something pretty specific: how to develop Ideation as a strength. If you don’t know about Strengthsfinder, it’s a fantastic personal development tool I’ve written about before.

Strengthsfinder has fundamentally changed how I live and work, helping me see what’s unique and wonderful about what I can do. In the past, I dismissed the very things the test identifies as my biggest gifts, and I see a lot of other people do that too, which means we work with a fraction of the enjoyment we could have if we do what we love doing — and are best at — every day.

My top 5 strengths

But just taking the test isn’t enough. It’s about figuring out how to continue develop your abilities day after day, and understanding how to work with other people’s talents.

So, today I’m talking about Ideation and how to develop it.

Strengthsfinder strength: Ideation

Ideation is about loving ideas and making connections between often very different ones.

For me, that’s expressed in loving to read, and in discussing philosophical or social issues. I love to look at what other people are doing and then see how I can apply that idea to my own life to make it better.

For example, with the eco lodge idea for Touchwood, I’m taking inspiration from sources ranging from Tribe Wanted, which is the island in Fiji where if you pay £200, you can volunteer for a week to help build the eco resort there, to Frontier House, where modern families go back in time to 1850s Montana to live as frontierspeople did.

Frontier House: modern day families go back in time

I’m pulling key concepts from those sources and reshaping them for Touchwood.

I grab many other ideas and, thanks to Ideation, it all sits in my head, comfortably connected and making perfect sense.

Now to the downside of Ideation.

Ideation: The drawbacks

The problem with easily being able to link disparate ideas is that most people don’t see your connections. They don’t understand what you’re talking about, and can be very skeptical when you present your ideas. Instead of the enthusiasm and praise you were expecting, you can get blank stares or even withering criticism.

I’ve had all of those experiences, and it was partly the skepticism from one or two people I faced early on with Touchwood that caused me to retreat from my bolder plans last year. I thought maybe the ideas were the problem. They weren’t; it was how I was expressing my ideas that was the problem.

How to make your ideas work

Strengthsfinder warns you of this gap between you and other people and what you need to do about it.

In Strengths-based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams and Why People Follow, the sequel to Strengthsfinder 2.0, Tom Rath talks about how to lead with Ideation, saying:

Make things simple. All your ideas, possibilities, and tangents can be confusing to some people. You see the simplicity of the underlying principles; articulate that to others so that they can see it too.

The clearer things seem to people, the more certain they can be that you are doing what is right and makes sense. Help people make connections between what is and what can be.

You need to connect the dots of your ideas

Tip: Pick just one idea

One way to keep things easy to understand is to pick the one idea you want to focus on and exclude everything else.

This blog post is just such an example. I started out wanting to talk about other strengths, what’s going on with Touchwood, but realised that, while all those ideas are interconnected and clear in my head, it would be just too overwhelming to talk about them all here. So I tried to pick one idea: how to develop Ideation as a strength.

Tip 2: Use pictures

There’s a reason I have a photo in almost every single blog post I do. It helps you understand what I’m talking about right away. It’s faster and more enjoyable than reading a whole bunch of words, so if possible, spend the time to find a picture to illustrate what you’re talking about.

Bonus tool: Made to Stick

Finally, it’s what I think of as the Bible for ideas people: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Fail and Others Win. It’s a book designed to help ideas people get their message across.

Made to Stick -- an ideas person's Bible

I have it as an audio book and months on, I’m still listening to it and trying to learn everything it recommends and incorporate it into how I write about my ideas (thanks to Darcy Prince for telling me about it).

Made to Stick comes from two experts who spent a lot of time investigating why some ideas persist and become popular, like urban legends, while others disappear. It’s not as simple as only the good ideas survive and the bad ones go — urban legends prove that point. I mean, where’s the good idea in the man found in the bathroom on ice with his kidney missing? Or that Kentucky Friend Chicken accidentally used rats in its chicken buckets?

Instead, they identify that there are actually principles at work that tend to make one idea fail and another thrive.

Six principles of a good idea

I won’t go into too much detail, but in essence, the principles that you need to follow if you want your idea to have a maximum chance of being understood and embraced are:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

Full chart available on Made to Stick website

One example they give of this is JFK’s one-sentence mission of “To send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.”

It’s simple, it was unexpected at the time in that it was considered highly ambitious, it was concrete in that you get it and it’s time-defined (end of the decade). It’s also emotional in appealing at that time to national pride over the space race with the Soviet Union, and to some extent it tells a story of a man going to the moon and back.

So I highly recommend investing in this book to help you with your ideas.

Putting my own advice into action

That’s enough from me for now. Earlier I waved Malcolm goodbye as he goes for 4 days to teach firemaking down in Aviemore, and I’ll be spending the time working on my own Ideation project: a presentation about the Touchwood eco lodge project.

I realised that even Malcolm needs me to explain my ideas more clearly, so this is a good opportunity to put the advice I’ve just given into action and really work hard at getting my ideas in top shape.

I’ll share that with you as soon as it’s ready, but now, breaktime for more Olympics!

Tags: Strengthsfinder

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