Hi guys and welcome to Brain-Friendly Thinking!
If you want to come up with great ideas, one way to do this is to have loads of ideas and
then weed out all the ideas which are rubbish.
You can do this by asking lots of people.
That’s the idea behind brainstorming.
But that doesn’t work if you’re on your own or in a small team.
In that case ABC-envelope and CaWa-envelope are great tools to come up with more ideas.
If you’ve seen several videos on this channel, you know I’m a really great fan of ABCs
and CaWas.
Because they’re great for activating your knowledge.
They’re great for coming up with association and ideas.
And the reason for that is because you have letters.
You either have the complete alphabet in case of an ABC-list, or you have a sub-set of the
letters of the alphabet for a CaWa.
This triggers the so called cross-word puzzle effect.
If I say “tell me a fruit with P” you’re much more likely to come up with an answer
and even with answers you normally don’t think about than if I just say “tell me
a fruit”.
And it’s the same idea here with ABC-list and CaWa.
If you do ABCs and CaWas more often for the same topic, however, you will notice that
you don’t come up with exactly the same words every time.
Sure there’s some which are almost guaranteed to show up.
But there’re others which only show up very infrequently.
Why is this?
Well, there’s several reasons.
Firstly, our associations we come up with today are coloured by what has recently happened
to us, what we have heard, talked about or read about.
Secondly, there’s certain associations for a given topic or in general which are very
important to us.
Or certain connections which we have done so often in the past, that they’re very
easy for us to reproduce.
And thirdly, we know much more than what we need on a day to day basis about any given
topic.
And if this knowledge was constantly floating in our mind, we could basically not do anything.
So it is usually kept locked away in our memory until we need it.
But because it’s been locked away so well, we usually need to think about a certain topic
several times before it is really opened.
And before more and more of the knowledge that we have inside can float to the surface.
And it’s exactly this effect that we utilise with ABC-envelope and CaWa-envelope.
To do ABC-envelope you start with a topic and then you create a normal ABC-list.
Immediately after you’ve done that, you put this ABC-list away, for instance into
an envelope.
Then, a couple of hours later or one to two days later, you create the next ABC-list for
the next topic and so on.
For at least 15, 20, 30 times.
And only then, after you’ve done that, you take all of the ABCs and you put them in front
of you.
You take the words and you put them onto one big ABC-list.
And once you’ve done that this is when you can really start to work with the ideas you
had.
There’re certain words that will show up almost every time.
And there’re other words that only show up once in one of the ABC-lists.
So if you write everything together, you have a much richer picture than if you just do
one ABC-list once.
So if you’re goal was to come up with great ideas, you now have a great number of them
in front of you.
And even after you’ve gone through all of them and you sorted those out which you can’t
use the chances that there‘re one or two or maybe even three great ideas is very large.
Secondly, maybe you’re not so much interested in great ideas; maybe you’re more interested
in getting a better overview about the topic in general.
Then you can now go and you can group the words into categories.
This gives you a better picture of the landscape of the topic.
But you can also go and you can use this exercise to learn more about yourself.
To do this you need to keep a tally as you copy the words from the individual ABCs to
the big ABC.
How many times does every word occur?
The ones that occur very often are either the ones which hare very important to you
or the ones which are very easy for you to reproduce.
So if you find out which of them they are you can then go and ask questions.
You can ask “why”?
Why is that so important to me?
What do I associate with these words?
Is it a good or a bad thing that this is so important?
And if so, do I want to change anything about it?
So this exercise cannot only help you to come up with great ideas and to learn more what
you know about a topic, but also to get to know yourself better.
And once you get to know yourself better you can then decide on whether you want to change
something and where you should to start if you want to change something.
Well, that was just a very brief video about a technique I find very useful.
I know it’s been a long time since I published my last video, apologies for that if you’ve
been waiting, but the last couple of months have been really stressful for me.
As some of you may know, I’m currently also doing my PhD.
And after being delayed for almost one year due to the pandemic suddenly everything started
to happen at the same time.
So, I was just running around trying to get everything together.
And that didn’t leave me enough time and energy to produce another video for this channel.
But I’m now slowly getting through it, I’m not yet completely at the end, but I can see
the silver lining, so hopefully soon I’ll be able to put out videos at least once a
month again.
Meanwhile if you want to know another technique that builds great ideas from normal ones you
can watch my video on zettelkasten right here.
Or if you want to get an overview about all of the thinking tools which I’ve talked
about so far, you can click the link here.
Otherwise, if you found the video useful, please don’t forget to give the like button
a high-five.
Consider subscribing, if you haven’t already.
And until next time: keep thinking!