CREATIVELY STUCK? TRY THIS.
Here’s a 10-minute exercise I use to break the deadlock.
Every creative hits a wall eventually.
DON’T PANIC.
—Try this quick, playful technique, and it just might help your creativity get going in unexpected directions.
We will call this exercise :
The Random Collision Sprint
The point is simple: force your brain to connect your current project to something that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Your brain hates this. Which is exactly why it works.
1. The Extraction
Grab a physical book and open it to a random page. Or just look around the room and pick the most irrelevant object you can find. A stapler. A dead leaf. A kitchen whisk.
Now write down three attributes of that object.
Not poetic descriptions. Physical qualities.
Hinged.
Metallic.
Tension-based.
2. The Forced Marriage
Now take your creative problem—logo, brand story, campaign concept, spatial design, whatever you’re working on—and force it to adopt those three attributes.
No logic required.
Example:
You’re designing a high-end lounge. Your random object is a whisk.
So now your concept somehow needs to become:
Aerated.
Stainless.
Wire-framed.
It sounds ridiculous. - - - Perfect.
3. The Sketch
Set a five-minute timer.
Produce three executions of this hybrid idea as quickly as possible. Sketch them. Write them. Map them out.
They will be ugly. They should be ugly.
The goal is not elegance. The goal is collision.
Because somewhere inside that forced connection is usually a doorway your brain wouldn’t have found on its own.
Where This Comes From
This approach borrows from the Random Input technique developed by Edward de Bono as part of his work on Lateral Thinking.
De Bono’s premise is simple:
The brain works through established patterns.Once you’re inside one of those patterns, trying to “think harder” rarely produces anything new.
You just get a slightly better version of the same idea.
To break the pattern, you introduce a completely unrelated stimulus. A random starting point. From there, the brain is forced to build a new path back to the problem.
That detour is where originality tends to live.
Not in brilliance.
In disruption.
This is why I like to interrupt my work when I feel stuck and move around, experience something unrelated, but keeping my work open, which might be how I create random connections and move it again while I'm walking down the street or sweating in the sauna, or talking with a friend about something totally different, or whatever. Would you say it's the same thing at play?
"It sounds ridiculous. - - - Perfect."