If your [or your org's/team's] thinking tends to feel stuck and uninspired lately, here are two methods to shift things, for your consideration.
The first is Divergent thinking.
This is where imagination - yes you still have one, no it's not childish - comes up to breathe and roam freely. It's open, playful, wild, curious. It welcomes and explores unlikely combinations. It says "what if" for a long while before it says "how much".
Divergence needs the space and patience to play. Because as cliché as it may sound, every breakthrough once began as something that made no sense. Like Independence. Or Netflix.
The second is Convergent Thinking.
This is where you bring the adult back into the room and focus returns. You test all of the interesting thought patterns and ideas, evaluate, interrogate, refine them, and make the hard calls. Here's where you can ask "how much" and "how long". You introduce your realities, pressure, timing, supply chain, and allied consequences, all that good stuff. You choose what deserves to live and kill what doesn't. But the difference is, that because you've allowed yourself to play, to reach into the farthest realms of what's possible, to connect dots and patterns that you otherwise wouldn't have, to have weirder converstions, whatever you choose to live, will maintain a good measure of the remarkable.
The issue is, most people [and by people I mean organisations and brands too, in case that was somehow lost in translation] get to convergence waaay too early. They shut down curiosity before it has a chance to show its bright eyes.
Innovation has never been linear.
It expands before it sharpens.
Have you ever cut down an idea while you're thinking it because you're blessed with the curse of overconfident logic and arrogant experience? What's that thing the Bible says about taking heed lest you fall?
Next time, give your mind the freedom to play just a little more. Crawl, put things in your mouth, daydream. Let your imagination live a little. You can be a rational adult again soon enough.