This fall I have been thrown into a new role. One that has me doing a lot more high level communicating than I have ever had to do in my career. To do that I have had to tighten up my creative process quite a bit. For anyone who’s interested I am going to put together a series of posts that work through my process top to bottom (ie. from before ideation to finished product).

I’m going to start in the middle of my process today though. This is how I move from concept to outline. Specifically how I take an idea for a message and create a map for my writing. It’s certainly not for everyone, so I’m not trying to prescribe it, just throwing it out there as a discussion point.

I start with a bank canvass. Literally. I stand in front of my white board with a marker and nothing but the idea in my head. That idea could be a scripture I want to speak from, or a topical concept that I want to explore. I write that idea in the middle of the board and circle it. Then I begin to “mind map” every connected idea that comes into my head. If it’s a primary connection I draw a line to the central circle. If it’s a divergent thought, sparked by another entry on the board I connect it to the point.

Now a lot of people have gone through exercises like this before. The problem is most people start editing as they go. That’s a disaster. This stage has to be completely blue sky. If you are a pragmatic minded person, an engineer mind, then you will need to discipline yourself to turn those skills off for the moment. (don’t worry you’ll need them later) In this stage you are putting anything that is remotely connected to your central idea on the board and drawing lines to show where those ideas where sparked from. This is important because often times the bad ideas we have become the genesis of better ideas and if we edit them too early they don’t serve their purpose in sparking divergent thoughts.

In this stage I am adding personal stories that could be used as illustrations, quotes I have heard, books I have read, scriptures that may be relevant, concepts, visual images, metaphors, anything that is sparked gets written on the board.

After I’m done this is what my board looks like.

BTW I photograph all my white boards and put them in an archive folder. I highly recommend this. It helps because often times I will go back to ideas that came in one session but were deemed impractical for that purpose and discarded. Just because a idea doesn’t get used today doesn’t mean it won’t be valuable tomorrow. Sometimes I will use software like FreeMind to do this type of exercise on my notebook computer but I prefer the physicality of working with the white board. I have found that for me physical activity (writing large on the board, waking around the room, talking to myself out loud, bouncing a ball, etc) helps to occupy my right brain and allow my left brain more freedom to create.

I decide when I am finished stage one completely arbitrarily. Generally it is just when the ideas begin to slow considerably. If I am spending more than a couple minutes between idea entries then it is probably over the session. Creativity is hard work but banging your head against the wall is counter productive. Set things aside and come back if necessary.

After this stage is completed I take a break. Often I wait until another day but I would suggest at least engaging in some different mental exercise before moving to stage two.

In stage two I begin to circle key ideas. These are any ideas that particularly resonate with me. They tend to be strong divergence points where lots of new ideas branch off from. These become anchor points in my outline. Once they are identified I label them in my thought process by numbering (or lettering) them off to reflect how I could move through the points (ie. A, B, C). Once those anchors are identified I start to erase all of the lines on the board and draw new lines that move through the anchor points and important sub points. This usually means I end up with a bit of a spaghetti noodle through my thoughts but it allows me to take all of the creative thoughts I have spewed out and begin to create some order from that output.

This is a simplified before and after image of this step. The first image is a fairly simply mind map from stage one. The second is after stage two. If you look at the entries you notice that very little has changed other than that I have been able to trace a logical thought progression through my ideas.

Generally as I move to stage two a lot of the more impractical ideas have to be discarded but often times the divergent entries from those discarded thoughts become part of the progression line.

Again, this may or may not help you in any way. It works for me because my mind is a fairly strong combination of visual and logical. Anyway try it out or let me know about your ideation process.