what happens when you're trying to brainstorm but you get stuck. What if you're trying to think of new ideas but there's nothing coming to you. We've got a solution for that and I'll explain it through a short exercise. Please grab your design journal and something to write with. I'd like you to make a list of all the things you can use a paperclip for. Got it. You're going for as many ideas as you can in three minutes. Please set a timer and write down as many ideas as you possibly can. Again, these are all the things you can use a paper clip for. Great. How did that go? I'm going to ask a few questions and feel free to write down some notes for yourself as I talk First of all, how many ideas did you come up with? Was it 10 ideas? 20 ideas. More than 30 ideas. What was it like to make this list? Did you ever get stuck or frustrated if you did? What did it feel like? What happened? And where did you feel it in your body? Were there any moments when you got unstuck? Did you ever run out of ideas and then all of a sudden have a light bulb go off And a slew of new ideas came pouring in the human brain is a magnificent organ. It's capable of making trillions of calculations per second. But it's also presented with vast amounts of information every minute and it manages all of that information. Using something psychologists call schemas a schema is any cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information and they're helpful because they allow us to take shortcuts when interpreting the huge amount of information in our environment. When I presented the prompt for the paper clip activity, you just did. I primed you for a certain schema or category of ideas by showing you this image of a paperclip holding paper. So it's likely you started out with some ideas that fit into that category of paper clips to hold things. Paper clips can be used to hold paper, hold the bag closed, hold wrapping paper in a role or even hold a smartphone. So perhaps you started out with some of these ideas that fit with the initial schema. But then maybe you got stuck. No ideas until you thought I could use a paper clip to replace the pull tab on my jacket zipper if it broke and fell off. So maybe you wrote that down and then you thought or I could use it to repair a necklace and suddenly you've opened up a new schema or a set of ideas for a paperclip for repair and that leads to a few new ideas and maybe repair made. You think of an adjacent schema paperclip as tools and you thought I could repair my smartphone using a paper clip, you know to help take things apart. So this goes on and on as ideas come to you in different schemas. Each schema gives you access to a new set of creative ideas or solutions, but until you think of the new category of ideas, you feel stuck if you've been thinking okay, paperclips can hold things, you're only searching for that part of your brain. That imagines ways paperclips can hold things. But as soon as you start thinking, paperclips can be art, you've accessed a whole new set of possibilities. Schemas aren't good or bad, they're simply part of our psychology. We apply them to everything. We think about people, plans, solutions, objects. But when we're problem solving or designing these mental frameworks can cause us to exclude pertinent information and instead focus only on things that confirm our pre existing beliefs and ideas. There's an old saying that goes when all you have is a hammer. Every problem looks like a nail. This nicely captures the challenge of schemas, which is that they filter what we pay attention to. You've probably heard the expression thinking outside the box. Well, to idee eight, effectively, that's exactly what you want to do. You could think of the box as the set of schemas you're currently working with those schemas are structured around assumptions that constrain the scope of what's possible. An assumption is anything we accept as true or certain to happen. Typically without proof in career design, our assumptions can be beliefs about our work that we've received from our family or society, they can be ideas about ourselves and our skills or abilities or any other schemas, for example, maybe you've assumed until now that your career needs to be based in new york because that's where you live. Or maybe you think I'm not a math person. So you've ruled out jobs that involve working with quantitative data, Maybe you're passionate about sustainable food and you assume that means you have to work with food directly in a restaurant or on a farm. These assumptions limit the scope of ideas you have access to when we I. D eight. Our goal is to expand the box to make it bigger so we can consider more ideas and to do that. We have to question our assumptions by considering possibilities that seem absurd given our current framing designers often do this through brainstorming. One of the rules of brainstorming is to encourage wild ideas because really weird far out ideas often disrupt our current schemas and expose our assumptions. They break open the box designers have realized that it's hard to be truly creative if we immediately filter out our our ideas for what's realistic or unreasonable. So let's use an example I just mentioned, say you're passionate about sustainable food and you're considering whether to keep managing the restaurant, you work out in new york or trying to change directions and get involved with farm to school efforts to get healthier food into local schools and educate kids about our food system. A good brainstorming session might produce new crazy options, like doing a work exchange on an organic farm in South Africa or going to work for a space company, creating hydroponic growing solutions for the international space station. These might not be ideas you use, but they're so outside the box that they expose your assumptions and expand what's possible. You might begin to think, I guess I could leave new york if I really wanted to or maybe I like working with data and numbers, even if I don't think of this as one of my strengths. Suddenly the box you're thinking in gets a little bigger and you start considering new options like joining a think tank that's having a big impact doing food system, supply chain analysis whenever you feel stuck or limited in your thinking, remember that all the ideas available to you right now are inside this imaginary box. It doesn't mean there aren't any more ideas, it just means your assumptions and beliefs are limiting the schemas you're thinking with and the ideas you have access to. There's a book called The Art of possibility that talks about this exact subject at length and the authors say this every problem. Every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view, enlarge the box or create another frame around the data and problems vanish. While new opportunities appear, there are lots of ways to enlarge the box or reframe the problem. Honestly, it's often enough to go for a walk and have a snack and you'll find new ideas creep in on their own. Designers typically think outside the box by assembling a group to brainstorm, brainstorming involves quickly thinking of lots of ideas, especially wild ones that seem absurd. You can do this on your own by writing down five absurd solutions. You would never actually use the wilder the better. Then notice the reasons your brain gives you for why those ideas will never work. Those reasons are your assumptions or beliefs. I could never leave you in new york. I'm not a math person. Your assumptions aren't bad, but they're worth exposing because they aren't always true. This will let you access more ideas and give you more options to choose from increasing the likelihood of a great solution in your case, a great career design. In addition to being effective ideation can be fun when you're stuck in a particular set of schemas and you have that aha moment and you think of a new idea, it feels great, your brain releases a bunch of endorphins and it gets your gears turning. So let's do it. We're going to put everything you just learned into practice to expand your career options that you're considering
