One of my favorite activities when completing the Spelling Bee is to compare my list of words with my wife’s list at the end of the day. In ideation, then, plan for breaks to maximize thinking. Psychologists report that breaks not only help relieve mental fatigue, they also help spark more creative thinking-and this is especially true when the breaks involve physical activity like walking (see this study by Stanford’s Marily Oppezzo for one such example). The dynamic illustrates that breaks really do pay off, especially in generative work like ideation. When tackling a given day’s Spelling Bee puzzle, I’ve often experienced the dynamic of hitting a wall, convinced I’ve thought of every possible word, only to come back to the puzzle hours later to almost immediately find multiple words I’d missed the first time. Those bad ideas may not have merit themselves, but they spark other, more promising ideas you may not have considered. It’s the reason you’ll sometimes hear workshop facilitators claim there are no bad ideas, or even explicitly call for bad ideas as part of the brainstorming process. It’s the same in ideation “bad ideas” often lead to better ones. In today’s puzzle, for example, typing “pillet” (not a real word) led me to realize I’d missed the real word “pellet.” Similarly, when I get stuck in Spelling Bee, I’ll try letter combinations that I don’t expect to form real words simply because doing so helps me think of words I hadn’t seen. If I’m thinking about how to meet a particular user need, for example, in order to spark ideas, I might intentionally think about solving the need for a user who never touches technology, then shift to solving the same need for someone on a mobile phone eight or more hours a day. What does that have to do with ideation? In ideation, as in Spelling Bee, changing your perspective can help you generate ideas you hadn’t thought of previously. Simply changing the order in which letters appear can help your brain see new patterns and identify words not previously seen. In Spelling Bee, one of the most helpful ways to find new words is to shuffle the placement of letters in the game’s honeycomb grid. CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE TO FIND NEW IDEAS It forces you to scrape the proverbial bottom of the barrel-and more often than not, that leads to ideas you hadn’t thought of yet. The exercise calls for you to take one idea and, over eight minutes, sketch out eight different variations of the idea. It’s the reason I like the Crazy 8s ideation exercise in Jake Knapp’s book Sprint. It’s a valuable lesson that has implications for innovation, though: When you think you’ve thought of everything, you haven’t. It’s mildly infuriating to hit a point where you think you’ve exhausted every possible word, only to check your score and discover you’re far short of what’s possible. One of the unique aspects of Spelling Bee is that you can constantly see how your score stacks up to the total possible points in the puzzle.
WHEN YOU THINK YOU’RE OUT OF IDEAS, YOU’RE NOT Given that, below are five ideation lessons you can learn from the NYT Spelling Bee. “Queen Bee,” for example, refers to someone who finds all possible words for a given day’s puzzle “Queen Bee All By Myself” refers to someone who does that without help or hints.Īs someone who spends my days helping companies think about innovation, I can’t help but see similarities between the word game and best practices around the process of ideation. There’s a whole community called the Hivemind built around the game, and an entire vernacular to discuss the puzzles. My wife and I play almost daily, competing to see who can score higher (she can), and we’re not alone. The more (and longer) words you form, the more points you’re awarded the highest points are reserved for words that use all seven letters. Your task is to see how many words you can form using those letters, with the catch that each word you form must include the letter at the center of the honeycomb. For the uninitiated, the game is simple: You’re given seven letters arranged in a honeycomb shape.
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