为什么您的第一个想法可能是您最糟糕的主意

在提出想法时，年轻专业人士和专家贡献者都有一个普遍的错误。它被称为Einstellung效应 - 当一个人默认为已知解决方案而不是解决问题的新颖或最佳方法时。

For young creatives, the problem may be that they don’t have the context to know what’s new and what’s a tried-and-true solution.

在经验丰富的专业人员的情况下，问题是人们倾向于依靠历史上经过证明的解决方案（他们过去可能使用过的解决方案，并且知道解决的步骤），并对这一事实视而不见解决问题的方法。研究人员研究了国际象棋参与者的Einstellung效应，发现当玩家意识到这个问题时，他忽略了一个更有效的解决方案，而是通过熟悉的动作序列来实现检查员。

人们认为他们的倾向我最初的想法s their best idea and to rely on a supply or previour solutions is also known as “design fixation,” and it’s an extremely easy problem for marketers and creatives to fall victim to, resulting in low quality work for clients, a lack of inventiveness, and the stagnation of growth.

超越你的第一个good想法是一个真正的好主意，您需要认识到固定的迹象，并将过程放置在推动“开箱即用”思维和创造性进步的地方。

What Is Design Fixation?

1942年，亚伯拉罕·卢钦斯（Abraham Luchins）在所谓的water jar experiment. In the first part of the experiment, participants were asked to transfer water between jars of varying capacity to get to a certain measurement with the restriction that although they could transfer water between the containers, when doing so, they had to fill the container being used to capacity. Jar A held 21 units, Jar B held 127, and Jar C held 3 units. To get to 100 units, you would fill Jar B to 127, and then empty this into Jar A, leaving you with 106 units in Jar B. Then you fill Jar C two times to reduce Jar B by 6 units.

The next test was given to participants from this previous experiment and a control group. The goal was get to 18 units. Jar A held 15 units, Jar B held 39 units, and Jar C held 3 units. The most simple and clearest solution is to fill both Jar A and Jar C. But for people who participated in the first test, they defaulted to emptying Jar B into Jar A and then filling up Jar C twice (similar to how they solved the problem in the first experiment), while most of the control group found the simpler solution.

第一组认识到解决问题的模式并依靠这一点，而第二组则认为是实现预期结果的最佳方法。

Blindness to possible alternatives is literal in this case. Astudy by Merim Bilalić and Peter McLeodon chess players that used eye-tracking found that even though participants believed they were looking for faster solutions to achieve checkmate, they did not shift their gaze away from the part of the board where the familiar solution would occur. This blindness actually weakened the skills of experts to the level of novices.

The good news is that the more advanced an expert becomes, theless susceptible to the Einstellung effect她是。但是，这首先要求专家意识到设计固定以及这种偏见对创意输出的负面影响。

如何克服你的第一个想法

Being aware of your inherent bias toward your first idea or a previously known solution will prompt you to reconsider your approach. But you also need a strategy to counteract its effects.

Due to the time and budget constraints placed on agencies by clients and the inclination to rely on previously successful methods to reduce risk and the chance of losing a client relationship, it can be easy to default to what’s work in the past or the most promising of good, not great, ideas from a brainstorm.

In fact, Luchins found in another subsequent experiment that stress imposed by time limits and negative future consequences, such as being graded on the results, further reduced cognitive flexibility.

Agency teams are under near constant pressure to produce highly creative outputs under these conditions.

为了防止停滞的思维和Einstellung, try these approaches:

1) Create Opportunities for Exposure to New Ideas

A great idea is not typically the result of some magic, rather it is the synthesis of multiple ideas into one idea, what’s known as combinatorial creativity. Maria Popova, the author behind Brain Pickings,描述it as, “Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks -- knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas -- that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something ‘new.’”

By introducing your team to new ideas -- outside of the world of marketing and advertising -- you are creating more of these building blocks, which may one day collide in new ways and result in a truly great idea.

One way to implement this in your company is to offer a program such as tuition reimbursement. With this benefit, people could be encouraged to either advance a skill relevant to their profession or try out something completely new.通过代理商有一个休假计划where those who have been with the agency for 10 years are given six-weeks of paid vacation time.

Giving employees the time and resources to find inspiration and challenge their existing ideas is essential for creative output and growth.

2) Don’t Work Alone

In a study byDaniel Frings on if fatigue increased the Einstellung effect, he found those working in teams were less susceptible. While individuals suffering from sleep deprivation took more steps to solve problems, teams were unaffected. Both groups solved the same number of problems, but the quality of the solutions produced by teams were much higher.

Building diverse teams with people of different backgrounds and experiences, cultures, expertise levels, and knowledge can help your agency produce more insightful and new ideas. When people are in groups, they challenge one another to achieve high quality outputs.

3）审查以前的项目和决策

Having a peer review of projects is another way to make sure your team members don’t rely on known solutions. This is also a good opportunity to check for confirmation bias, where people fail to objectively evaluate a solution because they believe they know the answer. Any evidence that doesn’t support the initial answer is avoided or ignored, and evidence to support their theory is supported.

At Phelps agency, individuals are required to submit theirwork for peer review. Each week at a lunch, a team will present to the entire agency the objective of a project, the intended audience, and drafts of the campaign. This acts as a large critique and brainstorming session. While it’s up to the group to accept or reject the feedback, it forces individuals to ask questions of the project they may not have before, to prepare and defend their choices (spurring self-reflection), and to become more expert in the process.

4) Break Down the Problem

According to Nathan Crilly's概念发展中的固定和创造力,设计师关注固定依赖on Morphological charts (also known as concept combination tables) to help them “detach themselves from their initial ideas.” This is a matrix where design parameters -- the essential elements of a project or functions of a product -- are listed in the left-hand column. To the right of this, the designer outlines various different ways of including that requirement or meeting that specification.

这是一个简单的例子：

More diverse initial ideas increase the likelihood that you will come up with an innovative solution to a problem. Usetoolsand methods, such as疾走and the横向思考激发新方法的新方法的方法。

5) Test Your Ideas

另一个解决方案Crilly发现对设计人员减少设计固定的有益是创建原型或测试该想法。

One study participant said:

“Typically, in a brainstorm, people fire off the immediate ideas in their head. I can imagine they would be biased by things they have seen recently or whatever, but I think when you actually come to build things, then the physics of the world kicks in, and you can’t really cheat that stuff. You can try your best but it’s something that either will work or won’t.”

Investing inuser testing, gathering feedback from focus groups, or A/B experiments will provide you with facts about which is the optimal solution -- or the best idea, and it will reveal if your initial assumptions about the solution were correct or incorrect, resulting in more experience and more possible solutions to draw from for future projects.