1. Gather friends and ideate:

It can be about anything and don’t judge anyone just have fun and let it flow.

2. Ask the 5 Why’s:

Essentially you think of a problem and you ask why 5 different times to get to the root of the problem. It’s trying to break that problem down into it’s lowest principle.

3. Think of some fun ideas to boost creativity:

Take 5 minutes and just think of a bunch of odd ideas. Then from their transition into 5 minutes of serious ideas.

4. Visualize the problem:

Think of yourself as someone in that situation (eg. Garbage Man) from their visualize what that person would do (eg. Drive Truck/Pickup garbage cans each day) then think to yourself can you make that better? fast? smarter?

5. Use matrices and numbers to look at all combinations of a problem:

First you will need to write down exactly what you want to figure out. Assign it attributes that you care about then prioritize (how much each means to you) them assigning each attribute a number between 1 and 5 (this will be your multiplier). Then giving each category (Start/Buy in the example) a rating between 1-10. Lastly you will take your priority and rating and multiply them (PriorityxStart and PriorityxBuy)getting your totals. Once that’s done you will total your totals to see which idea won.

Example: Should I start a business? or should I buy a business?

Attributes	Priority	Start	Buy	Start Total	Buy Total
Risk	5	8	4	40	32
Reward	3	10	6	30	18
Difficulty	1	1	5	1	5
Cost	4	6	4	24	16
				———	———
				95	71