Bringing Dead Ideas Back to Life

This Halloween, you won’t be surprised if you look out the window and see a bunch of zombies, vampires and ghouls wandering through the streets. 

But, are you doing enough to revive the dead inside your office?

We’re talking about dead ideas—those old moments of inspiration that quietly passed away while you were working on something else, those sudden brainwaves that were brutally murdered by your otherwise well-meaning teammates, those little flashes of The Next Big Thing that ended up in a fatal collision with a deadline.

For many nonprofit managers working on several projects in a fast-paced team, ideas flutter and flit out of your mind like just so many bats flying through the windows of a haunted house. 

Here’s some ideas for you on how to zap life back into old notions, and turn that Frankenstein’s monster into a Disney princess of an idea.

Keep a Bag of Tricks

One of the hardest things about good ideas is how fleetingly they can pass through your mind. Keeping a journal handy to scribble down stray thoughts, or a note on your smartphone for inputting random ideas, may be quick solutions to gather a scrapbook of sorts that will let you reconstruct old ideas later, or use snippets of your past thought processes as a springboard for brainstorming with your team. 

Speaking of your team, ask them to contribute with their own “bags of tricks” or keep a shared file—paper or digital—of things they think may be interesting for the others to read. This can be a good way to crowdsource your inspiration when coming up with new outreach programs, ways to approach funders or partnership opportunities in your community.

Offer a Bag of Treats

If the communal “bag of tricks” is hard for your team to embrace—or they’re not confident that their contributions will be helpful—gamify the idea-collection process by offering treats. From treat-sized chocolate bars to baked goods to cold, hard cash or a silly certificate, giving prizes to team members who make an effort to gather good ideas through the year and come up with useable applications for those ideas is a fun way to get your team playing together in the creative zone.

Have a Zombie Jamboree

Why go to all this trouble to pull in old ideas?

Well, we are convinced by experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. He believes that a (monster) mash of ideas is key to creative breakthrough—in business as well as in artistic endeavors:

“I think any kind of creative discovery depends on having first been immersed in a huge sea of motifs, and elements, and ideas and then recombining them in some way. I think the idea of a lighting bolt of inspiration hitting you out of the blue, and a fully formed idea emerging is very rare or non-existent. I’ve been impressed by how much people in all kinds of fields have to do an apprentice of exposure to a huge number of ideas before they can accomplish anything original.” (From interview on BigThink.com.)

Do Some Mental Alchemy

But, once you’ve got all the detritus of past mental flashes in front of you, how do you and your team go about turning stony old ideas into shiny new gold?

Use the brainstorming tips we’ve discussed previously [link]. Regular brainstorming sessions with your team help you dust off the cobwebs from your intuition and help you recommit to innovation. 

What old ideas have you revamped into new inspiration? Let us know on social media.

Happy Halloween!