Jump Start Your App: Sometimes Creativity Comes from Chaos

The article entitled "Appsurd: In Silicon Valley, It's Hard to Make a Joke" published in the Wall Street Journal this past week (June 5, 2012) immediately reminded me of the book "Jump Start Your Brain", by Doug Hall, that I read after receiving it as a gift shortly following its release date back in 1995.

Hall opens up Chapter 205, "Jumping the Tracks" by commenting that "All your life, you've been told to organize your thoughts. You've been taught to make your thoughts march like prisoners of war in tidy little regiments through your brain. Maybe it's time to disorganize."

"Organized thought leads to formula thinking. Corporations are very big on organized thought. In most large blue-blood corporations, it seems as if everything is based on precedent. All recommendations are couched in terms of how they compare to previous corporate experience."

"I have deep respect for tradition when it comes to proms, weddings, and world history. But tradition doesn't count for much when you're searching for wicked good ideas. Wicked good ideas happen when you break free from established channels of thought. They come from drawing outside the lines and going the wrong way down one-way streets."

"The brain naturally tends to operate in neat patterns and tracks. But creativity comes from chaos. Wicked good ideas don't surface through logical conscious process. They emerge through the ragged edge of the subconscious, like thieves in the night."

"The Jumping the Tracks programs are designed to force associations between seemingly unrelated aspects of a task. They offer practical steps for shedding the shackles of linear thinking. Some exercises rely on stimuli related to the problem at hand. Others use stimuli with little or no connection."

"The more a stimulus is related to the problem, the greater the chances of ending up with a great quantity of ideas. When the stimulus is unrelated to the subject matter, the ideas may be fewer but the potential for a major breakthrough is enhanced dramatically."

As I mentioned in my earlier review of this book, of the dozens of exercises that Hall presents, one of the simplest, Chapter 205's Brain Program #12, is one of my favorites. Essentially, using some dice, the objective of the exercise is to force-associate related elements of a problem in random sequence, increasing the number of connections that would not have been forged otherwise.

The Wall Street Journal article last week opens by stating that digital designer Alex Cornell's idea to create a spoof on Silicon Valley – "the most ridiculous possible app that no one would ever consider a real thing" – succeeded because even though he meant it as a joke, Silicon Valley took it seriously.

The app, called Jotley, is a rate-everything app that has attracted tens of thousands of users. Other apps sited in the article include:

• WhoDat.biz – "the Facebook of websites", "an innovative way to see who created any website"
• TacoCopter – "a service for delivering tacos with drone-like miniature helicopters"
• itsthisforthat.com – "generates often absurd capsule descriptions of internet start-ups by mashing up existing business concepts and buzzwords"
• Cloo – "lets urbanites market their bathrooms to nearby smartphone users in need"
• iPoo – "a social networking app that connects people sitting on toilets"

Although many of these apps have turned a profit – the article mentions that iPoo made enough money to put one of its creators through Harvard Business School – in discussing the history of Jotley, Cornell comments on perhaps one of the best reasons to make such apps: "One of our programmers said it would be fun to make, so we decided to crush it out."