Question your basic assumptions and given constraints. Try to consciously break your and your team’s rigid ideas and deadlocked assumptions. Bring movement into solidified structures of thought, for example by considering how to further aggravate the situation rather than to improve it, or by deliberately putting your favorite conviction in question (e.g. "The client always wants to pay as little as possible").

Change your perspective and look at the problem and solution from a completely different perspective. Consider your position from the perspective of an outsider or your role model or idol. Change the time horizon or the level of the solution in order to free your creative potential. Albert Einstein recognized this principle in the following aphorism: "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset by which they were created." So, change the ways of looking at your problem or issue to build a creative tension. An impressive way to do this is the use of analogies, metaphors or other transferrals. For such transformations, give coincidence a chance and take advantage of serendipity (accidental discoveries).

Connect information and ideas in novel ways, because we know that a lot of innovations have emerged from existing ideas that have been cleverly combined in new ways. Think about the success of the iPhone. Here you can also give coincidence a chance and firstly combine things on a trial basis and see what results. In order to combine ideas, it is advisable to visualize these first, e.g. on cards that can be re-grouped without any difficulty.

Enhance your ideas by examining possible weaknesses and trying out various application scenarios. The refinement of ideas can also mean that they are enriched using further ideas or improvement points; or adapted to different application contexts. Idea refinement benefits from various forms of expression and visualization. By presenting your idea in a different manner, you discover different points of improvement on your idea. Therefore, draw your idea as a sketch, comic story, diagram or metaphor. Tell various different people you trust about your idea and pay close attention to their reactions and feedback. One way to apply this principle in concrete terms, is prototyping, a method we also describe in this book.