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When Dogs Spark Big Ideas
You never know what it will take to open up the mind
During the past 35 years I have facilitated more than 1,500 brainstorming sessions for a wide variety of heavy hitting organizations — everyone from MTV to GE to government think thanks. I’ve worked with left-brained people, right-brained people, and reptilian-brained people.
As you might imagine, I’ve developed quite a few techniques to get people out of their heads and into a more robust realm of possibility. But the biggest breakthroughs I’ve experienced have had less to do with my methods than they did with spontaneous occurrences.
Like the time a Porcelain Hotel Dog became the catalyst for a game changing product idea.
Here’s what happened:
I was leading a daylong ideation session for a large telecommunications company when it was time for lunch. Everyone left the room, visions of tuna wraps in their head, when I noticed a peculiar looking porcelain dog, next to a plastic fern, in the corner of the room — the kind of kitschy piece of Americana you’d walk by at a yard sale, mumbling under your breath that this was absolutely the last time you’d ever attend a yard sale.
