Imagination is sparked by surprises. So if we want to stimulate fresh thinking, we ought to be seeking out surprises. Customer insights leader Kelly Garrett Zeigler tells a story that highlights the importance of welcoming an unexpected direction.

Today’s post comes from Josh Ruff, consummate craftsman, coach, and innovation leader. Josh draws parallels between a creative team leveraging diverse perspectives, and a rowing team reaching the ever-elusive state of “swing.”

It is the things that never occur to us that often cause the biggest problems. There are entire schools of thought dedicated to unearthing assumptions, rooting out bias, etc. Here are two simple bias checks worth regularly revisiting.

When all of our time is spoken for, we dramatically reduce the odds of surprises, not to mention shortchanging the longer-duration gestation required for insight formation and creative thinking. How one great leader preserves time for serendipity.

A simple ritual powers Jeff Bezos’ effectiveness as a leader of innovation at Amazon. Every quarter, he conducts a simple audit — two simple tactics that every innovation-oriented-professional ought to leverage with regularity.

Mergers and acquisitions aren’t exactly an arena most folks associate with creative thinking. And yet, Michael Dell describes the creative conditions that led to “The Idea” that enabled history’s largest.

Trying to figure out whether you have a good idea? Don’t ask people what they think! A better way to assess a new concept is to give folks the opportunity to vote without realizing it.

In the last 12 years, I’ve helped some 10,000 new innovators in training come up with new ideas and quickly assess if any are worth pursuing. I have never seen a new product with too few features.

Senior leaders unwittingly eliminate insights and ideas by insulating themselves from the pain their users experience. By removing insulation, orgs can feel the pain they should be solving!

It’s easy to dismiss tools like mood boards as “designer speak,” but the truth is, they’ve been indispensable to great thinkers seeking to capture inspiration throughout the generations.

Martin Luther King was singularly inventive in his oratory. This too-little-known story offers a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of one of the most famous public expressions in U.S. history.

The origin story of Taco Bell’s acclaimed Doritos Loco Taco illuminates one simple principle: most folks’ job is to find flaws in new ideas! Sometimes you need to bypass bureaucracy entirely…

Actively soliciting contributions from others is a great way to reveal assumptions, challenge bias, and see new possibilities. It hurts, but it’s worth it.

There’s immense power in the knowledge of a network. And while Charles Darwin had to wait months for letters to travel the globe, we can log on and instantaneously exchange knowledge.

I have been consistently disappointed at how few stories are widely-told about remarkable women in the history of innovation. Yet even so, I was shocked to see research on how broad a phenomenon the underrepresentation truly is.

To describe Fenty Beauty as having revolutionized the beauty industry is an understatement: by obliterating the “acceptable spectrum” of color, they literally changed the definition of beauty. Such “experience gaps” are an incredible opportunity for innovation.

The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones. Pat Brown is delighted by the fact that many vegetarians refuse to try the Impossible Burger because it disgusts them — but that’s ok: they’re not his target customer!

If connection is the basis of creativity, anyone who wants to be more creative should ask: what fuels new connections? Michael Dell’s early experiments give us a glimpse at a very unexpected answer…

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both employed a government-developed mindset and toolkit for identifying strategic organizational vulnerabilities and unlocking growth opportunities.

What do Elon Musk and Albert Einstein have in common? Both of them were willing to examine things that other people dismissed as too trivial to warrant their attention.