It was the late 1870s and Harley Proctor was stuck. His company had invented a white, floating soap, but Proctor couldn’t think of a name good enough for this new product. He consulted Roget’s Thesaurus. No luck. He pored over lists of soaps manufactured in foreign markets but still nothing came to him. Then one Sunday sitting in church, Proctor listened as the minister read the verse:

“All their garments smell of myrrh and aloes, out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.”

Proctor had his name: Ivory.

One would expect inspiration to strike in a house of worship, though not quite in that manner.

The story of Ivory soap illustrates how when a single, unexpected element is introduced into the thinking process, suddenly everything clicks. “Creativity consultant” Doug Hall calls this the “Eureka Stimulus Response.”

“When familiar people try to solve familiar problems they tend to develop familiar solutions,” he says in his book, Jump Start Your Brain.

Often this happens during brainstorming, that freewheeling activity where people bounce ideas off one another. But just as often, these exercises can lead nowhere.

“Typically, these sessions revolve around a dozen or so humans seated around a table in a locked room, each of them trying to squeeze, suck, and otherwise siphon ideas from their heads. It’s a draining experience. The result is often they’re so close to the roots, they can’t see the tree,” Hall says.

Hall helps people see the tree through a sort of creativity boot camp at his Eureka! Mansion located outside of Cincinnati. There he hosts executives from top companies including Nike, Compaq, Coors and Walt Disney, who spend up to $120,000 to spend a weekend thinking big. When guests arrive, they’re greeted by the sound of blaring banjos and a carnival. Hall himself is on the scene, perhaps barefoot and firing a Nerf gun as he leads the groups through a series of exercises designed to help them have a breakthrough. It was from one of these weekends that the idea for Lipton’s flavored ice teas was first thought up.

What Hall has found is that brainstorming is easier and more effective when external stimuli is introduced to help stimulate thinking. For example, say you want to go on a vacation but don’t know where. The normal brainstorming approach would be to sit around a table with family or friends to talk about the different places where you could travel. Hall’s approach would be to bring in maps, globes, brochures and other items. These get the mind thinking in what Hall terms, a “lateral” rather than “sequential” way. Lateral thinking generates more possibilities than sequential, which is basically moving from idea number one to idea number two, and so on.

In the world of creativity, diversity is a huge benefit. When you have a dilemma, enlist the help of people who think differently than you do. And bring in anything that can spark a thought because when external stimuli enter your senses, they set off a chain reaction so that one thought provokes new thoughts.

In today’s economy where intellectual capital has become the currency of choice, feeding your creative mind is the surest way to fuel your dreams.

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Copyright Copyright© 2005, Nancy Michaels. All right reserved. Nancy Michaels, of Impression Impact, works with companies that want to reach the small business community and with small business owners who want to sell more products and services. For information, contact the FrogPond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it