The power of prompts

I'm a big fan of creative prompts and related tools, such as random text generators.  On my phone, I have an app I often open before falling asleep called The Fiction Idea Generator. The app delivers random characters, random plots, and random words. When I first encountered the Idea Box in this class, I thought of it as an ever-changing community prompt. Prompts often provide restraints, making it the perfect opportunity to bring out what Tom Kelley calls The Hurdler persona, as The Hurdler excels at working around and against limitations.

 I have never, however, considered that prompts may be useful tools in organizations, as suggested by R. Toby Greenwalt in It's All Around You: Creating A Culture of Innovation. Greenwalt believes that library staff can use prompts to jump start innovation. It makes sense that a method often used for creativity would have a similar place in an organization or business, where issues that arise often require creative solutions. Prompts, however, aren't only approached in search of a solution. Prompts and random generators can activate past thoughts or spark entirely new ones.

Prompts have power because of their randomness. Online generators are third party, unbiased sources with no agenda and often no focus. When an organization is creating their own prompts, this won't be the case--and it shouldn't be. An organization needs prompts at least somewhat applicable to that organization or to the profession, otherwise the prompts will probably be of little use. (I don't think the text generators I linked to would be of much help to a library staff with terms produced such as "stained glass metronome" and "river gold daze"...but there's always the possibility.) Prompts, then, most likely have to come from within the organization. Greenwalt suggests allowing staff members to contribute to the stack of prompts an organization might use. I would go a step further and say that it is absolutely necessary to have all members, from all departments of an organization contribute and use the prompts. If one person produces all the prompts, they will probably only address the questions or concerns that they have or the topics that they are familiar with. Allowing everyone to produce a couple of prompts increases the randomness of the topic (and so the thinking that it will inspire) when a prompt is selected from the pile. Prompts originating from other departments can increase awareness across the organization, and can even encourage collaboration among members with different responsibilities.

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And some random, final thoughts on The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization:  

Even though at the beginning and end of the book Kelley is sure to emphasize the fact that people operate under many personas, I think that this was lost in other parts of the book. I think that instead of titling people with "The Caregiver" or "The Set Designer," it would have been useful to say that someone was acting in the mode of caregiving or set designing. In other words, I would have preferred the action be emphasized instead of the person.

Many of the personas seemed like they needed other personas in order to function. For example, wouldn't an Experience Architect need to also be, or at least work with, an Anthropologist in order to understand what kind of experience people want? It was rarely ever mentioned what other personas were necessary to achieve the results discussed in the examples.

I did enjoy many of the examples in the book, though, and that I was able to assign the personas to people I have heard of or know.