Where Do Good Ideas Come From?
The Agitator, of course!
Seriously, I heartily recommend a great book I just read over the Thanksgiving holiday … Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson.
This is no 10-point checklist for winning the Nobel Prize in fundraising; however, it contains numerous insights into the personal, organizational and societal circumstances that seem to correlate to innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. And dozens of fascinating stories about how key innovations have emerged.
For example, have you ever heard of the Enlightenment-era practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book? According to Johnson — mentioning Milton, Bacon, Locke — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was likely to keep one. Essentially it involved transcribing (today, obviously, we would tag, bookmark, or cut & paste) interesting or inspiring passages from one’s reading. Johnson cites the practice to make a point about how innovators manage to keep alive “the slow hunch” … the germ of an idea that might take literally decades to come to full articulation and practical fruition.
Hopefully your new fundraising ideas won’t take decades to blossom! But do you in fact have some kind of “system” for recording your nascent hunches and ideas? And further, how regularly do you browse through your collection?! This revisiting is crucial to making forward leaps of insight.
Fundraiser Ken Burnett’s article that I’ve cited the past two days, includes this recommendation amongst his “7 different but practical things you should be doing, now”:
“My colleagues and I will all take time out from our daily chores to learn how to think differently. Our donors are in for some surprises. Well, it’ll be better than boring them, we think. We’ll read a lot, meet surprising new people and become as learned about our craft and its art and science as we possibly can be. That alone will give us a substantial edge.”
What better way to win a fundraising edge?
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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