One thing I think we can agree on is that creativity can’t be forced. In fact, sometimes the harder you try the more ideas seem to allude you. I heard a story once that John Lennon badly wanted to write a song for his new son, Sean. He tried and tried but couldn’t come up with anything he liked. John Lennon! So he gave up. And of course no sooner did he give up than the song “Beautiful Boy” came to him. Creativity isn’t linear or predictable. Its magic is clumsy. But if we know that going in we can increase the odds of ideas.

Ideas happen out there.

One way to allow creativity to be clumsy is to get away from your desk. If you believe Steven Johnson (and I do), a new idea is the result of two existing ideas colliding. That means the inspiration you hold in your mind from the creative brief (existing idea #1) needs to collide with something on the outside (existing idea #2) in order to form a new idea. Is that going to happen behind your desk? Maybe, but arguably less likely.

You don’t have to go out and engage with anything heavy like a museum or gallery, though both would be great. Ideas are waiting secretly behind everyday things, things people say, signs you walk by, songs you listen to, end-caps in grocery stores, menu items, anything. Convince yourself that ideas are embedded like Easter eggs in video games throughout the landscape of your life. You just need to live your life or your chocolate won’t ever land in my peanut butter.

Heck, even the act of walking increases the odds of ideas by 60%. Unless you have a treadmill that’ll be tough to do behind your desk.

Clumsy magic hates fire drills.

Because creativity is clumsy it’s laughable to try and force it with “fire drill creativity.” When ideas are needed, the convention is to hold a brainstorm with a roomful of people from 2:00-3:00 on a Wednesday, say. You may as well hold a gun to their heads and scream in their faces, “Now be creative, dammit!”

Creativity just doesn’t work that way. I mean, you will come up with ideas, sure, but will they be any good? Or will it be more of a show for the extroverts and politically savvy than a serious attempt to come up with ideas? Generating useful collisions takes a little time. Time for the inspiring brief to percolate in your mind. And then time for that inspiration to connect with something from the outside. It’s clumsy.

What’s most amazing about the creative process is that ideas happen when you least expect them. You may not even be consciously thinking about the brief when that song on the radio connects with you and forms a new idea against the brief. Sorta like John Lennon giving up on the song after trying so hard.

The pressure of artificially limited timeframes takes the magic out of clumsy.

Embrace chaos but within an arena.

Now you may follow the above two methods to a tee, but if you have no arena, or place of focus, for the ideas then there’s little point. A metaphor might help here. I’ve often believed that Tarot Cards work not because the cards themselves are magic, but because they provide an arena that forces us to pay attention. And with that attention to each card and each card’s meaning, we unearth meaningful connections (collisions?) in our lives. The “magic” of the cards, then, is that they force us to pay attention to outside concepts.

The same is true for creativity. The way we manage the chaos of creativity at Ideasicle X is to provide an online space where the creative brief can inspire the teams, the teams can then go live their lives and discover collisions, pull out their phones wherever they happen, and post the new ideas to the Ideasicle X platform. And when they do post an idea, each member of the team gets an email with a link to the idea and an invitation to click through and make it even better.

Our Idea Stream captures and organizes all of the ideas into manageable threads. The Idea Stream is like the spread of Tarot Cards on a table, only it’s not cards, it’s ideas, and it’s not a table, it’s a website. Better yet, every idea that is posted becomes newfound inspirational stimuli for the rest of the team. Ideas collide with ideas, ideas beget ideas. All because the team is given an arena within which they can pay attention.

I guess what I’m saying is we can increase the odds of ideas by letting the creative process happen naturally. Avoid forcing ideas within artificially short timeframes, live your life to make collisions, and provide an arena for ideas to focus attention.

In other words, let creativity be a little clumsy.

Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle X. You can email him at willb@ideasiclex.com.