- Strategy 01: Enhanced Optimism
- Strategy 02: The Waking Dreamlike State
- Strategy 03: Take and Twist
- Strategy 04: Beyond Visualisation
- Strategy 05: Crowdsourcing
- Strategy 06: Perspective Shifting
- Strategy 07: Divergent Thinking
- Strategy 08: Cross-Pollination
- Strategy 09: Constraints
- Strategy 10: Unconscious Solutions
- Strategy 11: Seasoning
- Strategy 12: Fanaticism
- Strategy 13: Rituals
- Strategy 14: Chaos and Randomness
- Strategy 15: Inverted Hierarchies
- Strategy 16: Seed Blooming
- Strategy 17: Levels Thinking
- Strategy 18: Time
- Strategy 19: Clean Language
- Strategy 20: Act Now
- Strategy 21: Ecology
- Strategy 22: Speak Your Brain’s Language
- Strategy 23: Unconscious Dealmaking
- Strategy 24: Playfulness
- Strategy 25: Timeless Thinking
- Strategy 26: Curiosity
- Strategy 27: “Great” Thinking
- Strategy 28: The Oracle
- Strategy 29: The Muses
Innovation.
It barely matters what the question is – that’s the answer. The right idea at the right time can change everything.
Each business is just one great idea away from unlocking incredible profits, outwitting your competitors and defining the future of your industry.
But there’s no innovation button. You can intend to be creative, visionary and out of the box, only to be stuck in your usual thinking. And you can’t order people to be creative.
Sometimes it’s as if innovative thinking comes and goes on its own schedule. But thinking creatively isn’t randomly distributed. Certain people and organisations develop well-earned reputations as having one eye on the future.
If others can operate like this, then so can you.
Innovation is a skill – a skill you can foster, cultivate, learn and train.
And you can begin immediately.
Choose one of the innovative thinking styles below – and how you choose is a creative process in itself.
Note that this page is still evolving. Check back often.
Last updated: July 2025
Strategy 01: Enhanced Optimism
Innovation is great.
You don’t need me to tell you it’s brilliant for business. The most incredible profits are just one innovative idea away from being unlocked.
It goes better than that, though. The best employees love working for innovative companies. When employees get to try new ideas, develop their skills and create the products of the future, they love it.
A big part of early Google’s appeal was their policy on Google Time. The best engineers loved the thought of working on projects that could reshape the internet.
To a creative, innovative mind, that freedom is better than a pay raise.
Having a reputation for innovation appeals to investors, too. If you’re slow to change, outdated, obsolete already, then the smart money will go to your nimble competitors.
But innovation is more than just coming up with clever ideas.
If you think of clever ideas but never act on them, then you’ll keep stagnating.
If you chase every rabbit down every hole, though, you’ll never achieve anything.
You need a system for turning great ideas into solid plans of action.
The Google Time concept worked because of the weight of numbers. Enough clever people working on their passion projects will lead to a few great outcomes. I can’t imagine how many plans were rejected or abandoned, though, never to see the light.
You might not have that luxury.
You, instead, might need to focus on a few ideas – and get them done right.
In cases like these, you need optimism.
Yeah, there’s something about confidence and belief in a plan that makes the plan more likely to work. Maybe the universe bends to accommodate the will of the optimist. Perhaps the optimist keeps hustling, keeps thinking and keeps talking about it.
But optimism alone can get you into trouble.
It can lead you to overplay your hand, stumbling into traps that a more cynical person would have spotted.
You need optimism, with a few enhancements.
Common Approach
An approach I’ve heard from a few people involves asking a simple hypothetical question:
“Assume you already succeeded. Knowing that, what did you do to succeed?”
I love this sort of thing. It forces you to get out of your own way. When part of you wants to scream that it’s impossible, this question tells you that you already achieved it.
A simple shift in perspective like this can open up your thinking.
This isn’t perfect though. This approach can lead you to overlook the risks or issues with a plan. Even if you succeed, maybe that was through dumb luck – the one winning outcome out of ten, or a hundred.
A lottery winner will tell you that buying a lotto ticket led to their wealth. That doesn’t make buying lotto tickets a good idea.
Uncommon Approach
For this approach, you’ll need three hats.
They can be literal hats, three different spots on the floor or you can just do this in your head.
The first hat is the Optimist. When you’re the Optimist, think big picture. Think grand plans. Pretend that you believe that anything is possible. If you could guarantee success in any one project, what would you choose?
After you think of a goal, put on the Pragmatist hat. With this hat, be really practical and sensible. Assume you must achieve the Optimist’s plan – what will you do? What do you need? What are the steps you’ll need to follow?
Once you have a plan, shift to the Cynic hat. With this hat, think of all the problems and all the ways this could go wrong. What are the biggest risks to this plan? The most likely places it will fail?
After that, return to the Optimist hat. You have a list of issues, true, but the Optimist knows that no obstacle is insurmountable. Develop some bright ideas to solve these issues.
Repeat this, running through these three positions on a loop until you have a reasonably robust strategy.
Strategy 02: The Waking Dreamlike State
“I can’t think creatively!”
People tell me that often – and it’s nonsense. You can slip into a creative state of mind so easily, you do it every day.
In fact, often it’s a struggle not to.
Twilight consciousness – that enchanted state of mind between waking and dreaming, where your attention dissolves and your thoughts drift – isn’t the only state of mind where you can think of new ideas. But it’s a familiar one, so let’s explore it.
We still don’t know what sleep is and what dreams are, but they have something to do with thinking. Go without sleep and your ability to solve problems declines. Memory struggles and fades. Your ability to take in new information declines.
That suggests sleep matters for innovative thinking.
Anecdotes back this up. You’ve probably experienced going to sleep with a problem and waking up with a solution. Kekulé famously discovered the ringed shape of benzene – a problem plaguing chemists of that era – in a dream where he saw a snake eating its own tail.
Dreams are pure innovation, unbound by logic or reality. If you want a new thought, literally dream one up.
Now, this is interesting but not useful. Sleep is chaotic and unguided by your intentions. Most dreams seem to be the meaningless churn of memories and imagination, unrelated to any of your problems.
Your sleeping brain can solve problems, but tends not to.
But there’s good news. Sleeping and dreaming are simply an extreme form of another common state of mind – one you can easily enter and control.
This is also something you do often.
There’s a decent chance this is what comes to mind when you think about innovative thinking.
Just because some advice is common, that doesn’t make it bad. There’s much wisdom in sticking with the basics.
The basics are incomplete though.
So let’s go through common and uncommon ways of using this.
Common Approach
Certain activities relax your mind and allow you to think in new ways. Sleep is one of them, but far from the only one. Going for a walk, driving and showering are all great ways of getting into this state of mind.
I came up with the idea for this series in the shower.
Being away from your workstation helps your brain relax, think creatively and make connections. There’s also something about keeping your brain engaged just enough – these are easy actions but you can’t sleep your way through them.
This is a fine approach – one I use often. However, there are limits. Like dreaming, it suffers from a lack of control. You can intend to have a breakthrough, only for your mind to wander on other topics.
At least you get some nice downtime out of it.
Uncommon Approach
There’s an underused psychological tool in business.
This tool has a reputation of being “unscientific”, despite scientists filling journals with all the incredible things it can do.
Some people see it as weird. Pity them, I say – if you want to innovate but reject unconventional ideas that work, you’ve lost before you start.
It’s real, it works – and it’s great at getting you into a creative state of mind.
Anyone who’s been hypnotised before won’t be surprised by my answer. Hypnosis is fantastic for getting your creative juices flowing. Like having a nap or going for a drive, hypnosis puts you into a loosened and creative mental state – the sort of state you naturally enter often.
What separates hypnosis from simple daydreaming is the depth and control you can achieve. Being hypnotised puts you in an even more creative state than going for a walk will. You can also give yourself or receive suggestions to direct your creative energies.
Don’t sleep on hypnosis as a tool for innovation. While other folks get caught up with misconceptions, you are free to use it to explore your creative potential.
Strategy 03: Take and Twist
“Creativity” is misnamed.
Many people struggle to come up with creative ideas because they believe – reasonably so, thanks to the name – that it requires them to create something completely new, out of nothing.
Creation is a grand act, on par with what God did when He spoke the cosmos into being.
Most creativity is far simpler than that.
Take the pressure off yourself. No one expects you to develop something entirely original out of nothing. Few artistic achievements or novel inventions meet that standard. Instead, most innovation is simply taking something that already exists and tweaking it slightly.
Facebook was innovative when it first launched, but it was basically MySpace for Harvard students. And MySpace was basically a revamp of the early blogging and Web 1.0 sites. Which were bulletin boards and diaries, but online.
Twitter took the idea of social media and made the posts small enough to send by text message.
This goes right back to the dawn of technology. Steel swords are just iron swords with carbon worked into the blade, and iron swords were just bronze swords with a stronger material.
So much progress has come on the back of taking something that works and modifying it slightly. It sounds easy, maybe even like I’m cheapening the process, but I’m not. Most of these alterations are either insignificant or harmful, working against what people like about it.
That’s the harsh law of genetics: most mutations are harmful or irrelevant.
But the great news is this makes things easier for you. Consider a longstanding problem you’d love to solve. Most of the work has been done for you already. There are solutions for similar problems that almost – but don’t quite – work for your problem.
That’s okay. You’re just a good idea or two, plus some elbow grease, away from making something incredible.
The harvest of humanity’s genius is rich. Over millennia, we’ve accumulated countless excellent ideas. In that vast trove of wisdom and experience lie the pieces to the solution you need.
So go forth and find something that might work.
The right answer is mostly there already. It just needs the right set of eyes to find what it’s missing.
Common Approach
A simple way to find answers like this is to fill in the blanks:
“The solution is like X, only Y.”
If you know the problem intimately, then you also know what some of the near-solutions are – answers that almost but don’t quite fit. This approach invites you to consider those near-solutions, then what you’d need to change about them to make them work.
It’s a simple approach, which is a virtue. The answers it yields tend to be unique because everyone else has overthought the issue.
That said, sometimes this is too simple. Even two minor changes to the solution can overwhelm this approach.
Uncommon Approach
Many fields have the concept of gap analysis.
Gap analysis is determining how you want something to be, how it currently is and what the gap between those two are. In my career in learning & development, this is the first step in creating a course or learning resource: measure the gap between where people’s skills are and where you want them to be.
Many fields using gap analysis means there are many approaches to gap analysis. Choose your preferred option, then apply it with these parameters:
What the solution should be, and
What you can currently do.
This requires being thorough and precise as you break these down to fine detail. This makes it a great style of innovation for those with strong analytical thinking skills.
Strategy 04: Beyond Visualisation
There’s something about being able to see things in your mind that helps with innovation.
You’ve probably heard of the fantastic visualisation skills of legendary thinkers like Einstein and Tesla – who could see things in their heads with clarity, adjusting them as needed and seeing how they behave.
Such abilities would obviously help you innovate. The next big idea can come to your mind and you can see how it plays out from the comfort of your couch.
But you don’t need to be that skilled to get value from visualising well.
Your internal vision improves your ability to think. That could be from the way the human brain works – so much of our neurology goes towards processing vision that using your visual senses might bring more of that power to the task. Or maybe it’s as simple as more data and different data means better ideas.
Either way, visualisation seems to help. It takes abstract words and turns them into concrete images, giving extra richness to your mental experience.
We even reflect this in our language. We talk about being able to see a situation clearly. Confusing problems can be fuzzy, murky or dim. A good idea is a bright idea, just as a clever person is a bright person.
And if someone is exceptionally brilliant, we call them visionary.
To see the problem makes it easier to see the solution.
All that remains is how we go about that.
Common Approach
If you want to be able to see a situation, a mind map is a great approach. Putting everything on paper or a screen allows you to see patterns, draw connections and engage with the variables more deeply.
A few nodes and lines in front of you can convey things clearer than a few written paragraphs. That’s because when we see, we take in all the information at once. To hear or to read means taking in information one word or syllable at a time. At a glance, though, you can take in much more information at once.
This technique is simple and it works. There are limits to how far this will stretch your mind, though. For true innovation, you might need more.
Uncommon Approach
Synesthesia – where your senses get lightly jumbled – is common among creative types.
Among musicians, it’s common to find people who can “see” music. They automatically associate certain notes with certain colours, turning symphonies into brilliant rainbows. This helps them remember, understand, relate to and appreciate music more.
Among other creatives, another common combination is seeing and feeling.
Visualisation is only so useful. To come up with new ideas and quickly get a sense of their potential, being able to feel what you visualise is useful. It gives you more information to work with, bringing in things like your gut instincts and your felt senses to add to what you imagine.
It’s difficult to describe the inner workings of your brain. It took me decades to realise not everyone thinks this way.
If you personally don’t have this seeing/feeling synesthesia, you have two options. First, hire people who do and listen to their ideas. Second, learn to cultivate it. It’s possible to learn this with the right training. If that intrigues you, let me know.
Strategy 05: Crowdsourcing
Crowds are fascinating things.
Individual people are difficult to predict. We’re chaotic and difficult to anticipate. A group of people, though, is almost like an entity in itself – an entity with its own personality and goals. One who’s easier to predict.
Everyone from urban planners to crisis managers know how strange the behaviour of groups can be. Where people are like solids, bouncing around the world, crowds flow like liquids.
Crowds can also solve problems. They’re great at perceiving and measuring. Ask a group to estimate the age of a person, the weight of a cow or the price of an object, and each individual guess will be different. Some will be wildly off. Average them all out, though, and you get a precise answer.
The bigger the crowd, the more precise it will be.
But can a group of people come up with new, innovative ideas – even better than an individual?
Often, the answer is no. A lone genius chasing a singular vision can create something brilliant and unique, whether that’s an invention, a business or a piece of art. Meanwhile, there’s the joke about how a cow is a racehorse designed by committee. Overlapping voices can lead to compromise, to a regression towards the mean.
And yet…
The book Wikinomics is a fascinating exploration of how creative, innovative and brilliant crowds can be. It explores examples of how organisations have achieved goals by outsourcing some of the thinking to the world.
A case study that lingers in my mind is a mining company with troves of geological survey data, more than they could ever process on their own. So they released it, offering a reward to anyone who could find a new gold mine in all of this. Someone quickly found one, spotting something in the data that all the company’s experts had missed.
So groups can either be brilliant innovators or the most mediocre of thinkers.
What we need are ways of guiding them towards the former.
Common Approach
We’ve probably all been involved with a brainstorming session. Someone asks a room of people for their thoughts, assuring them there are no bad ideas. These ideas get written down on a whiteboard.
Brainstorming can be great. People can have different experiences and thinking styles. One person might be more visionary, able to see the wilder and more ambitious ideas, while someone else might be pragmatic enough to create a plan for them.
This approach can falter in the usual ways that groups falter. For one thing, the success here depends on the culture of the group. Every brainstorming leader says that there are no bad ideas, but sometimes ideas get judged anyway. Also, there’s the issue with loud voices dominating and quiet voices being ignored.
Uncommon Approach
Brainstorming is fine. It can even be great. What leads to greatness is the quality of the group facilitation.
Group facilitation is as much art as science. It involves not just stating the rules (like all suggestions are welcome) but enforcing them. The right facilitator can coax, guide and shape the thinking of the group towards the most productive directions.
My style of facilitation involves listening to what’s unsaid, not just what’s said. Even idle comments can reveal gaps in thinking, hidden assumptions and other barriers to innovative thinking. Spotting those and gently challenging them can help the group use their expertise to find new ways of approaching things.
Strategy 06: Perspective Shifting
A fresh perspective:
There’s nothing like it for innovative thinking. Seeing things differently, as others see them, is so obviously useful for thinking in new ways that I don’t need to explain it.
If your normal perspective were enough to solve this problem, it would have done so already.
But it can be difficult to see things as others do, because the first step is to get out of your own perspective. That’s not easy or simple. Your perspective is like water to a fish – difficult to see what it is from within it.
People often overestimate their abilities here because it’s difficult to imagine. If someone else confuses or frustrates you often, then you probably struggle to see things as they do.
This is a skill that talented marketers develop. It’s essential for their trade – you can’t sell to someone unless you can see the world as they do. See their hopes and pains. See what they ignore and what motivates them to buy with an irresistible burning desire.
Marketing is one of the few fields that gives you harsh and constant feedback on your ability to shift perspectives. If you bring any of your own thinking to the task of marketing, you’ll find yourself selling to you, not them.
But even marketers aren’t perfect with this. Exceptional marketers might be, but most still keep their usual perspective even while designing ads. They introduce fragments of how potential customers see the world and that can be enough to generate sales.
If you want to innovate and think creatively, though…?
Again, exceptional marketers are some of the most creative people out there. Many marketers operate by formulas though. That’s no criticism – they use the formulas well and create great value for their clients and employers, but this isn’t a series on how to add value. It’s a series on how to think innovatively.
That means breaking free from not just the formulas but your own habits – habits of thought and perception.
Common Approach
Something used in marketing departments across the world are customer avatars.
These are simple descriptions of who the typical or ideal customer is – their age, their sex, their occupation, their hobbies, things like that. It might include a portrait or some details of their lives.
This is a useful approach. It pays to keep in mind who you’re doing things for. By really considering who will use the results of your thinking, it can spurn you to think in different ways. Considering the avatar’s desires, problems and habits allows you to see the situation from a different perspective.
An issue is that an avatar like this might capture what they are, not who they are. Demographic details are relevant for the design, the language, the price point, but knowing these doesn’t mean you understand how they think. You can appeal to their thinking without seeing the world as they do.
Uncommon Approach
There’s a technique from the field of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) that’s perfect for this. It’s a short process that, with some practice, is incredibly powerful.
It’s as simple as this:
Imagine yourself interacting with someone whose perspective you want. This could be a specific person or some imaginary, hypothetical figure.
Now imagine someone watching the two of you. This observer isn’t involved in the conversation and isn’t invested in either of you. They’re curious and paying attention, but are content to pay attention to what happens, whatever that may be.
By shifting from your perspective to the observer’s, then to the other person’s, you free yourself to see things as the other person does. Then when you move back to the observer and back into your perspective, you now can see things differently.
There are some subtleties with this technique. If you want to use it, find a qualified instructor or facilitator.
Strategy 07: Divergent Thinking
This is a common style of innovative thinking – one that comes to mind when people talk about creative thinking techniques. It emphasises non-linearity, with ideas branching out from a single starting point.
This is related to brainstorming, but with a tighter focus. It keeps all attention on a specific and tightly defined question, problem or situation. But from this tight focus, anything that emerges is valid and welcomed.
Divergent thinking emphasises flow over structure.
A nice example of this is the story of how CS Lewis came up with Narnia: the started with the scene of a deer beneath a lamp post in the snow, and grew from there. He added details from his dreams and favourite landscapes until he had a full suite of stories.
Divergent thinking takes a seed and lets it grow.
Common Approach
It’s called the Alternate Use Exercise.
To get in the flow of divergent thinking, take a common object (classically, a brick) and list 50 uses for it. This supposedly loosens you up and gets you better at divergent thinking towards your real challenges.
It might. Then again, sometimes these things don’t transfer well. Many brain training exercises simply make you better at the exercise, not anything else.
Uncommon Approach
A better idea is to go straight for your opportunities.
Note I say “opportunities” and not “problems”. It’s a mistake to use divergent thinking on your problems first.
Instead, focus on the fundamentals of your business:
What could you offer?
What do your customers need?
Anything else is a distraction.
Strategy 08: Cross-Pollination
If creativity and innovative thinking seem difficult for you, you’re likely overthinking it.
That’s not your fault. “Creativity” is misnamed. You don’t need to “create” anything as if you’re a deity bringing forth substance from nothing. Most innovation comes from taking two things that already exist and combining them.
Cross-pollination is much simpler than trying to be wholly original – and just as effective.
Besides, what you come up with will be unique in its own way.
Let’s take some examples from fiction. If you combine space-faring scifi with the Wild West, what do you get?
Well, you get Star Wars.
Or Firefly.
Or Cowboy Bebop.
Or Starcraft.
And there are many other examples, each distinct from the others. This is the mystery to cross-pollination: combining two things will create something new every time.
This applies to more than just art. Browse the history of science and you’ll read tales of cross-disciplinary thinkers bringing insights from one field into another.
Humanity already knows so much. Combining and recontextualising what we already know can yield tremendous innovations.
Common Advice
The advice to consume widely is solid. Not only does studying and reading outside your field offer new ideas, it makes you a more well-rounded person.
Profitable and good for the soul.
The trick is that this takes time. Of course it does – enriching your character is never quick and easy. But tell that to your customers or stakeholders when they need a radical idea from you.
Follow the common advice here, but also learn something faster.
Uncommon Advice
Cross-pollination is a skill. You can learn and develop it with practice.
Here’s how.
Different things can have the same shape or vibe. This is how metaphors work – one thing is enough like another that you can treat them the same.
You can do this with your challenges and opportunities.
It’s easy to compare things that are superficially similar, like how your retention crisis is similar to another organisation’s retention crisis. The key here is to go beneath the surface level and find the shape of things.
Then, find some other solution or opportunity with the same shape.
This is easier for some people and it’ll take practice, but it’s beyond valuable.
Strategy 09: Constraints
(coming soon)
Strategy 10: Unconscious Solutions
(coming soon)
Strategy 11: Seasoning
(coming soon)
Strategy 12: Fanaticism
(coming soon)
Strategy 13: Rituals
(coming soon)
Strategy 14: Chaos and Randomness
(coming soon)
Strategy 15: Inverted Hierarchies
(coming soon)
Strategy 16: Seed Blooming
(coming soon)
Strategy 17: Levels Thinking
(coming soon)
Strategy 18: Time
(coming soon)
Strategy 19: Clean Language
(coming soon)
Strategy 20: Act Now
(coming soon)
Strategy 21: Ecology
(coming soon)
Strategy 22: Speak Your Brain’s Language
(coming soon)
Strategy 23: Unconscious Dealmaking
(coming soon)
Strategy 24: Playfulness
(coming soon)
Strategy 25: Timeless Thinking
(coming soon)
Strategy 26: Curiosity
(coming soon)
Strategy 27: “Great” Thinking
(coming soon)
Strategy 28: The Oracle
(coming soon)
Strategy 29: The Muses
(coming soon)
William T Batten 