Alex Osborn was born in the late nineteenth century, and became a big cheese in the world of advertising. Intensely curious about the different aspects of creativity he saw writers and designers at his agency tapping into, he looked for patterns in what they were doing and came up with a model that I was introduced to by NLP trainers Michael Breen and Eric Robbie in an excellent workshop on Creativity and Innovation.

Like any good model, Osborn’s is an example of clarity and elegance. What it boils down to is simplicity itself: take your input, whether that be a raw idea, or a fairly finished one that needs an injection of fresh energy, and apply one or more of the following processes to it:

Put it to other uses

Adapt

Modify

Magnify

Minify

Substitute

Rearrange

Reverse

Combine

Easy, huh? So much so that I’ve seen people dismiss it as shallow. It isn’t. As ever, you get out of working this way what you put into it. And it’s helped me come up with novel concepts that I continue to be proud of, some of which I’ve gone on to develop into full treatments or scripts. At other times, I’ve found it helpful when faced with a technical challenge in a story to adopt one of Osborn’s strategies as a tool for problem solving. It works.

One way to play with this system is to start with something that’s often done in pitching: use two stories as a reference point for your new one. Let’s combine Donnie Darko with Witness (in one workshop I ran, somehow all but one pair of writers were working up mutant films that got half their DNA from Witness, so I want a go). Hmm. How about this…

A world-weary cop has to bring a troubled teenager to trial: the teen has predicted two plane crashes and that can only mean he’s a terrorist or at least has inside info. But – as the cop comes to realise - the teen really is having insights into the future; including the whereabouts of the cop’s daughter, who walked out on her family years ago. In standing up for the psychic teen, the cop reaches out to his alienated daughter, and the three of them embark on a high-risk strategy to stop a third plane crash.

Never mind whether it’s any good or not at this stage: all I’m pointing out is this works as an example of Osborn’s ‘combine’ strategy. Now, if desired, we can apply other processes too. Rearrange, for instance: make the psychic the cop’s daughter, removing some of the Witness elements but making for a story more based on a father and daughter with communication problems. Or magnify: make the third plane the setting for the bulk of the film, rather than just its third act.

Get the idea? Osborn’s strategies aren’t remotely precious or academic: they’re fast and practical methods to generate and evolve concepts. And given that any writer is in the business of merchandising the products of their imagination, the more tools you have at your disposal for coming up with ideas at a rapid rate, the better.

You may have already noticed that this approach can be used with any kind of input: raw concepts in word form, sounds, or images. I’m currently listening to a CD by jazz violinist Billy Bang inspired by his experiences in the Vietnam war, and somewhere along the line the feelings and images he associates with that period of his life and its aftermath will have been transformed through processes along the lines of Osborn’s to become the basis of his music.