Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas by James L. Adams

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Conceptual Blockbusting A Guide to Better
Ideasby James L. Adams

• Review by David E. Goldberg
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• deg_at_uiuc.edu

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Text

• Adams, J. L. (1986). Conceptual blockbusting A
  guide to better ideas (3rd ed.). Reading, MA
  Addison-Wesley.

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Premise Organization

• Premise Creativity thwarted by creative blocks.
• Organization
• Types of blocks
• Perceptual
• Emotional
• Cultural/environmental
• Intellectual/expressive
• Techniques thinking languages, blockbusters,
  groups organizations.

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Perceptual Blocks

• Types of blocks
• Stereotypes seeing what is familiar.
• Isolating the problem.
• Delimit problem to closely.
• Inability to see problem from multiple vantage
  points.
• Saturation.
• Failure to use all senses.

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Emotional Blocks

• Freud
• Humanistic psychologists
• Types of blocks
• Fear of mistakes
• Inability to tolerate ambiguity
• Premature judgment
• Inability to incubate
• Lack of change or too much
• Inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

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Freud

• Ego socially aware
• Id instinctive animal part
• Superego moral arbiter
• Repression or neurosis of

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Cultural Blocks

• Taboos
• Fantasy and reflections as waste
• Playfulness for children
• Problem solving is serious
• Reason, logic, numbers, utility, practicality
  good.
• Feelings, intuition, qualitative judgment bad
• Tradition preferable to change
• Problems solved with mucho dinero

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Environmental Blocks

• Lack of trust and cooperation among colleagues.
• Autocratic boss
• Distractions
• Lack of support

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Intellectual Blocks

• Using improper language
• Inflexible or inadequate strategies
• Lack of or incorrect information
• Inadequate language skill

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Expressive Blocks

• Inability to express ideas with language or in
  pictures.
• Inability to write or draw.
• Foreign language, convey technical thought to
  nontechnical audience.

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Alternate Thinking Languages

• Visual thinking
• Other sensory thoughts

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Blockbusters

• Role of questions
• Fluency and flexibility quantity and diversity.
• Aids
• Morphologically forced connections
• Bug list
• Check list
• Unconscious blockbusting

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Morphologically Forced Connection

• Make attribute list
• Make alternatives attribute by attribute
• Select interesting combinations.

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Bug List

• Establish a specific need
• Make a list of things that arent quite right in
  the world.
• Fluency and flexibility important in list
  generation.

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Osborns Check List

• Put to other uses?
• Adapt?
• Modify?
• Magnify?
• Minimize?
• Substitute?

• Rearrange?
• Reverse?
• Combine?

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Unconscious Blockbusting

• Postpone judgment (VoJ).
• Let id-ego interact to solve problems.
• Synectics analogy
• Personal analogy
• Direct analogy
• Symbolic analogy
• Fantasy analogy