MINDRAMP’s Creative Cycle (described in an earlier podcast) suggests that the full creative process has four major phases, Imagination, Idea Generation, Implementation and Evaluation. You start by imagining some kind of new condition that will make things better. Then you produce ideas about how to make that condition come into being.
The purpose of idea generation is to produce a wealth of good ideas that can be implemented, tested and then evaluated. So first you generate as many ideas as possible. Then you select one of them to implement, test and evaluate.
The idea-selection technique offered in this podcast is relatively simple and straight-forward. Use this approach if you get bogged down with too many good options and need something to break the log jam.