Before Session 7 · Getting Unstuck
Read this before class — 15 to 20 minutes. Come-ready is at the end, and this week there are two things: your finished CollegeView, and one new sentence.
The big idea: you don't need the RIGHT idea — you need LOTS of ideas
Most people get stuck the same way: they sit still and try to think their way straight to the one correct next step. Designers do the opposite. Before they judge any idea, they generate a lot of them — far more than they'll ever use — because the good ones are almost never the first ones on the page. This session is about building that muscle on purpose, with a real tool, using material you already have from your own week.
Burnett and Evans tell the story of Grant, who worked at a car-rental agency and hated almost everything about his days — the scripts, the upselling, feeling like a replaceable part of a machine. He couldn't think his way to a different career no matter how long he sat with the question. What actually got him unstuck wasn't more thinking. It was a specific technique for generating options faster than his inner critic could shoot them down.
Before you mind-map anything, you'll warm up with a two-person game. One person makes a small statement, the other responds with “yes, and…” and adds to it — never shutting it down, never redirecting. Then you switch. It sounds simple, and it is: the point is to notice how different it feels from the instinct to say “no, but…” instead. Most of us default to “no, but” without realizing it — in conversations, and especially inside our own heads, evaluating an idea before we've even finished having it. “Yes, and” is the mindset the rest of the session runs on: generate first, judge later.
“Yes, and…”
What a mind map actually is
A mind map follows one idea into the ones hiding behind it. You start with a single word or moment — something from your Good Time Journal or your AEIOU breakdown from last week — in the center of a page. Around it, you write five or six words that come to mind, fast, without judging them. Then you take each of those words and do it again: five or six more words branching off each one. You keep going, three or four rings out, until the page is full.
This is exactly what got Grant unstuck. His Good Time Journal kept pointing to the same thing: hiking in the redwoods, pickup basketball, helping his niece and nephew with homework. He put BEING OUTDOORS at the center of a mind map and let it branch — hiking led to mountains, mountains led to explorers; travel led to Hawaii, Hawaii led to tropical beaches. Most of it went nowhere. But three unrelated words from an outer ring — combined in a way he never would have planned — became the seed of an idea he'd never have reached by sitting and thinking about “what career should I have.”
The first ring is usually predictable — the obvious associations. The interesting material tends to show up in the third or fourth ring, after your safest ideas are already on the page and your brain starts reaching further.
Why quantity beats quality here
You're not trying to find the right answer on this page. You're trying to generate enough raw material that a few unexpected combinations show up — two or three words from the outer rings that don't obviously belong together, but that spark something when you put them side by side. That's what this session is building toward: not a conclusion, just more to work with than you had walking in.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “If I can't think of a good idea, that means I don't have one.”
The designer's reframe: You don't think your way to good ideas — you generate your way there. Quantity first, judgment later.
Your journal
One entry before class: pick a single word or short phrase for a moment from your Good Time Journal or AEIOU notes — not a sentence, just the essence of it (Grant's was BEING OUTDOORS). Write down the first five or six things that come to mind when you think about it, fast, without judging any of them. That list is your starting ring — bring it with you; class picks up exactly where this leaves off.
Come Ready
Bring your Good Time Journal, last week's AEIOU notes, and the starting ring you wrote in your journal entry above. Bring a blank sheet of paper too. You don't need any ideas ready — just the raw material and an open page. This week's Reading & Watching List (Handout 8, posted to Canvas) has more on how designers use ideation techniques like this one, if you want to go further before class.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · The line: Conscious Leadership Group; vulnerability research: Brené Brown, Daring Greatly (2012); gravity problems: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Worksheets and submissions on Canvas