Opening practice

- Creativity is problem solving with relevance and novelty. And that's where ideas come in. You need ideas to solve the problem. The more relevant and novel the ideas are, the more creative the solution will be. And it's not hard to generate a single idea to solve a problem, but it gets more difficult when you're looking for multiple solutions to that problem. You need those solutions fast, and you want those solutions to have high degrees of relevance and novelty. The more you practice doing just that, the better and faster you get. So let's practice it right now. I'm going to give you a problem to solve, but I'm only going to give you three minutes to solve it. And I'm going to challenge you to come up with as many creative solutions as you can in that time. We're going to do it here with this team, but you do it on your own, too. For the team here, I want the two of you to work together, and I want you to work solo. For you, if you have a partner, awesome, but if not, you can do it alone, too. Here's the exercise. It's called Pirate Care Package. Pirates are away from home for long periods of time, away from the people and things they love. They get lonely from home, just like kids going away to college or military stationed abroad, so you're going to help them with a care package. Get something to write on and something to write with. You're generating ideas of items to fill a care package for a pirate. Generate as many ideas for the care package contents as can in only three minutes. Are you ready? Are you ready? Go. (upbeat music) - Okay, good idea. - Salt and pepper. - Okay, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, dried fruit, socks, - Playing cards. - Good, yeah. - Yeah, this is why they have their iPods. - And time. All right, how many ideas did you guys come up with? Count up how many ideas you came up with, okay? You too. Count up how many ideas you came up with as well. All right, now which one do you think is your best idea? Which one is do you think is your best idea? Oh, you got, you definitely know your best idea. What do you think your best idea is? - Dry shampoo. - [Instructor] Dry shampoo. - We came up with 18, and our best idea is oranges. - Oranges, oranges. Well, of course, you know, obviously you need a little bit of nutrition in there. How about you? How many ideas did you come up with? What was your most creative idea? You can now see the benefit of generating a lot of ideas quickly, can't you? You had to go through many ideas before generating your best one. You've just experienced rapid ideation. If you did a good job and you generated a bunch of creative ideas like they did, I can show you how you did it. But if you didn't, I can show you how you can get better at understanding what leads to faster, better ideation.