This essay describes the ideas of Alex Osborn, who coined two tools of problem solving that we take for granted today: “brainstorming” and “what-if” questions. It's fun to see that in this article brainstorming is in quotations but it's now in the spellcheck for Word.

“For 40 years I have been cracked on the idea that all of us can learn how to think our way out of the booby traps of life,” says Alex Osborn, advertising expert and author of a fascinating brain-dusting book, Your Creative Power. (Published at $3 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 17, N.Y.)

“Imagination can be developed like a muscle and you can learn how to get ideas just as you learn how to swim.” He had made his credo work successfully not only for himself but for thousands of others.

A chance remark started him on his career—that and being fired from a newspaper job in Buffalo. “I took a scrapbook of clippings around to another paper,” he recalls. “The editor said, ‘These are pretty amateurish but I’m going to give you a trial because each piece seems to have an idea.’

“The remark set me thinking! ‘If ideas are so valuable, why don’t I have more of them?’ But soon I realized that while a good idea may come like an unexpected but welcome guest, most ideas must be trailed and trapped. They are around you all the time, disguised as the obvious and commonplace.

“Each of us has a creative mind that thinks up ideas,” Osborn points out, “and a judicial mind that criticizes them. The first trick is to keep these two minds from interfering with each other. This means you mustn’t start pulling a new idea to pieces, trying to find all the reasons why it may not work. Use your energy to have another idea. And another. The more ideas you pile up, the more chances you have of getting good ones. Pay no attention to how wild they sound. It’s easier to tone down than to think up. Ideas have a way of setting off other ideas if you don’t interrupt the chain reaction with criticism. Later you can look over the litter with a critical eye, pick the most promising and drown the rest.

 “The next-best trick is to pile up alternatives. Look at everything with a fresh eye. Ask questions like: What else? How else? Could it be longer? (King-sized cigarettes.) Smaller? (The wrist watch.) A different color? Household-appliance manufacturers asked that one, and white kitchens and drab cooking utensils turned overnight into Technicolor profits. How about vice versa? The sewing machine was made possible when the inventor asked himself: ‘Suppose I put the eye in the point of the needle instead of the conventional end?’ That did it! How about ‘more so’? Westclox gave Big Ben two alarms instead of one: a brief soft ringing to wake you gently, plus a loud alarm to blast you if your try to dog it.

 “All of us don’t want to be inventors, but we all want to be inventive. Someone suggested that telephone companies could give out the correct time and the latest weather report and charge for it. Result: The New York Telephone Company added two million dollars a year to its revenue.”

Why not “let George do it”? Result: The cafeteria and self-help groceries, and the new self-help gasoline stations where the customer can save four cents a gallon by gassing up his own car, while girls on roller skates make change.

Osborn is a fanatic about what he calls brainstorming.

“The conventional conference,” he says, “puts a premium on criticizing ideas that come up—judicial thinking. It almost completely ignores creative thinking. When someone suggests an idea, he is usually pounced upon with all the reasons why it won’t work. After that he just sits back and waits his turn to pin someone else’s ears back. Instead of destroying an idea, suggest how it can be combined with a better one.”

Osborn’s technique is to bring a group of his bright young men and women together and throw a problem to them.

“Come up with ideas,” he says. “Never mind how impractical they sound. Think high, wild and handsome, everything goes — except criticism.” A stenographer takes down the suggestions. The brainstorm group should be small — from five to ten people is ideal; they can be all men, all women, or mixed. All work equally well if there are a couple of self-starters in the group and the chairman keeps the ball in the air.

“Incurable critics of ideas will inevitably creep into these brainstorm sessions. When this happened in one of ours the leader blasted him with: ‘No opinions, please! Think up or shut up!’

“Our Minneapolis office held seven ‘brainstorms’ in a single month. One meeting developed 45 suggestions for a home-appliance client; another produced 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign; a third 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets. For a New York client we organized 150 of our people into 15 separate groups to brainstorm the same problem. Result: Over 800 ideas, 177 of which were submitted as concrete suggestions.”

Osborn is proud that some of his most successful business “brain-stormers” go home and apply what they have learned to their family problems. One who lives with his parents and five unmarried brothers says: “I have an explosive family but since I organized them into a discussion group we ‘brainstorm’ one family problem at a time. You’d be surprised how many of these ideas have worked out and improved the harmony of our home. Instead of getting mad at each other we have a lot of fun at these sessions.”

Neighbors could get along better if they used their minds instead of their emotions to solve everyday problems. Osborn told me of a young couple whose three-year-old daughter was chased and knocked down by a neighbor’s police dog. The mother frantically phoned her lawyer husband demanding he notify the police. Her husband argued that such a move would make it impossible for the two families to live side by side. The he asked Osborn, “How do I think my way out of this one?”

Exactly as if it were a case a client brought you,” Osborn told him. “Write your problem down, mull over the facts. Then ask yourself, ‘What can I do to make my neighbor realize that his dog might have killed my child?’”

Out of many alternatives he selected one. In the files of the local newspaper he found the story of a child attacked and bitten by a dog of the same breed. He had a Photostat made and sent it with a friendly letter to his neighbor. Soon afterward the neighbor was asked where his dog was. “Oh, Rex was too good to keep in the city. I sold him to my brother who has a big farm.”

Osborn believes that parents are tragically guilty of not using their creative minds in bringing up youngsters. The parents’ emotional reactions too often paralyze the resourcefulness they need. He tells the story of an old friend whose 16-year-old son sneaked the family’s car out of the garage and crashed into a telephone pole. Luckily the lad wasn’t hurt, but his father and mother agreed that something drastic was in order. They boys was on his summer vacation, and the scheme his parents thought up was that he work in the local garage without pay in return for fixing the car. Day after day the lad helped tow in wrecks. By the time the kid had finished his six weeks of hard labor his teen-age pals were avoiding him for being such a bore on the subject of traffic safety.

Many of our civic problems could be solved if groups of citizens met regularly and “brainstormed” instead of sitting back individually and criticizing. Just for the fun of it Osborn showed one group of women how to “brainstorm” a big charity affair. He organized ten squads of five women each and gave each squad a definite assignment. One was to come up with ten ideas on decorations; another, ten ideas on entertainment; another, ten ideas on refreshments, and so on. When they were through brainstorming, they had a hundred ideas to choose from and the affair was a rousing success.

In solving our personal problems, Osborn says, the basic rule is the Golden Rule itself. Only he rephrases it: “Put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes.” For example: Do you want a raise? Put yourself in the boss’s shoes. Have you become more valuable to the company? Have you brought it any new ideas? Are you asking for a raise just because you need it? If you were the boss would you consider that a good enough reason?

A lot of labor troubles have been solved by bosses who asked themselves: “What would make me more satisfied if I were an employee?” Management has come up with such answers as recreation and rest rooms, safety engineering, rest periods, cafeterias providing food at cost, group health insurance, paid vacations, music while you work. Even so, management has done less fresh, original and dynamic thinking than the unions. Result: Management too often finds itself on the defensive, forced to make concessions which could have been anticipated by creative thinking in the other fellow’s shoes.

“Jumping to conclusions,” says Osborn, “is the only exercise some minds get, and that’s not thinking. Yet creative thinking is not only good exercise but good fun. I like the story of the white-bearded New Hampshire native who sat with his cronies in front of the general store night after night, the silence broken only by the occasional splatter of tobacco juice. One day he was asked what they did, and he replied, ‘We just think.’

“ ‘But how can you possibly think that much?’

“The old codger replied: ‘I’ll tell you, son, thinkin’ is like sin. Them as don’t do it is ascairt of it. But them as do it enough gets to like it.’

“Exercising one’s imagination is fun. And few of us make it the asset it should be in our lives.”



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Why Were They Fired?

To learn what errors youngsters starting on their first jobs should be warned about, a group of vocational teachers wrote to several thousand employers asking them to look up the last three persons dismissed and tell why they had been let go.

The teachers had expected a long catalogue of reasons. They were amazed that more than two thirds of the persons losing jobs had been fired for one reason.

It was the same in every sort of business, for workers of all ages and both sexes. It amounted to this:

"They couldn't get along with other people."

---Gwen Bristow in This Week