Evolving Ideas #49 #cong18

The world moves inexorably on its own course with or without our cooperation. Through constant change it can dash our best made plans. The only solution is to use our imagination to have the ideas that counter balance this effect and allow us to thrive and flourish.

1. New, original ideas are hard to come by but good ideas aren’t.
2. If we didn’t have good ideas we would have been done away by evolution.
3. Good ideas come from correctly identifying the problem.
4. All you need is a modicum of imagination to have ideas.

Ex-Journalist and occasional writer.

You can contact Tom by email.

By Tom Murphy

Ideas are the very lifeblood of the technological and creative industries. As the cultural environment changes structures have to adapt or die. This is a fundamental law of nature. Another fundamental law is that change is constant whether we like it or not. To adapt to new ways of doing things we have to have ideas about how we are going to map and execute the changes. We have to have good ideas that we can implement occur to us at a faster rate (if only marginally faster) than the pace of evolution.

So, ideas are more than nice things to have they are necessary for our survival and our salvation. In the economic arena a good idea, executed properly, can mean all the difference between success and failure. It is a good thing if ideas are ten a penny and that most of them are worthless. You only need a handful of good ideas to last a life time.

Most good ideas come in the shape of a solution to a problem. So that is probably the best place to look for them. To be inspired by the muses is probably best left to the poets and fiction novelists. You can tell that inspiration in the creative writing fields is rare as so few writers are worth reading.

Technologists, especially those running small businesses, are constantly obliged to address the friction involved in their everyday affairs. The solutions to the challenges with which they are posed are the very source of their ideas.  Time will inevitably tell whether the idea or ideas were any good or not.

But if we want to survive in the world we have to face up to the problems and challenges that the world presents us with we will have to dig deep to find the right ideas that will provide the right solutions.

For sure, ideas are fickle things. There seems to be no sure fire way generating them. The good ones anyway. But still any creative process is better than none at all which is a good thing. Although, being genuinely creative – that is, coming up with new, original ideas – is extremely difficult for most mortals. There are still lots of ways that we can come up with good ideas without having to reinvent the wheel.  One has to only check out the other submissions to this publication for that to be evident.

On one level we are constantly having ideas; about what to have for supper, about what to wear, where to go on holiday, how the back bedroom should be decorated and so on. So maybe it is not our ability to have ideas that should be questioned but our ability to correctly identify the problem. Providing we face up to the problem in the first place.

Identifying the point of pain is an art form in itself. It is not at all obvious that what you think is the problem is the real problem at all. Very often the perceived or imagined problem is symptomatic of something that lies a lot deeper. But the very fact that it is an art form means that as a craft it can be mastered. Which is good news.

Even if we think we are bad at having ideas and that we are not creative at all we will always have the wheels of evolution, the market of constant change, to prompt us into action. But in conclusion we don’t have a choice about it. We have been given the gift of imagination to counter balance the relentlessness of change. And with a strong enough imagination we can do almost anything.