Cracking creativity #3

Ok, more thoughts from Michael Michalko’s Cracking Creativity. Like I have written (see here, and here), the book contains techniques to break the conventional thinking patterns to spawn new ideas. Today, I thought about this in the context of programming and XP.

In XP, the idea is that you shouldn’t spend too much time deciding which design or solution is the best, but to start with the first or one of the first things you can think of, and see whether it works; learning by doing. If I understood correctly Richard Gabriel’s Triggers and Practice (see here), he sees this as a “trigger” (in writing, or any creative practice, there’s always one or a few things that trigger the ideas you build upon; in XP, this would be the first ideas that come to mind, and that seem simple and plausible).

Anyway, what I thought about is that many of the techniques Michalko suggests to trigger ideas can be used for programmers. But now I have to go. I’ll continue this at a later time, I hope.