Why You Get Your Best Ideas in the Shower (and Why Matters)
name of that person you couldn’t come up with, while taking a shower?
I’ll bet it is more than once.
In fact, one survey of highly creative people found that 19% of those people get their best ideas in the shower. That same survey said 13% get their best ideas while exercising, and only 4% got them while brainstorming or sitting at their desk (2% each). (If you are wondering, the highest percentages were for late at night – 29% – and early morning – 20%.)
What gives?
Apparently it isn’t just the warm soapy water, but if a shower is nearly ten times better at creating great ideas than being in a brainstorming session, we should learn more!
A bird patiently sits on her egg or eggs, providing the needed time and environment to turn embryos into chicks. We call this process incubation.
An important part of the creative process shares the same term – incubation.
Incubation is part of the reason why we get those great ideas while in the shower, exercising, walking the dog, or in similar situations. And like the bird – there are two important parts to the incubation process:
Time
Proper environment
dessinateur
permis de construire
architecte
plans de maison
plan de masse
plan de coup
plan de façade
insertion graphique
déclaration préalable
architecte ou dessinateur
faire des plans de maison
plans de villa
permis de construire mairie
architecture
And far too often we don’t do either of these correctly if we want to create the best possible ideas for our teams and organizations. Since we probably won’t be taking breaks from problem solving meetings for everyone to go take a shower, we need to learn a bit more about this phenomenon and how we can use it to our advantage.
What We Usually Do
We are sitting in a meeting, and after identifying a problem, we are tasked with brainstorming solutions to a problem we have just clarified. To make it worse, sometimes this task comes to us in the late afternoon in a beige, cramped, nondescript conference room.
And we are expected to find highly creative solutions on demand.
Is it any wonder that brainstorming tied for the bottom as a time people found their most creative ideas?
To be clear, this isn’t really an indictment of brainstorming as an approach, just on how it is usually done.
How We Can Do It Better…