What role does creativity play in your life? When we imagine creative people, we tend to imagine artists, writers and ad executives. The fact is, creativity plays a huge role in everyone’s life.

Coming up with a theme for a party? Generating ideas for your brother’s birthday gift? Trying to imagine a reward that will help you with your weight loss goals? Meeting or beating a deadline at work … without adequate time and resources? Mulling over new ways to promote your small business? These daily challenges require tremendous creativity … and these days, creativity is in very short supply.

That’s why I designed The Bright Idea Deck; it is a creative brainstorming partner disguised as a deck of cards. Within minutes, a single card from The Bright Idea Deck can help you generate dozens of great ideas for stories, gifts, dates and art projects. But that’s not all: you can also use the cards to analyze your challenges, set clear goals and identify the shortest path from A (where you Are) to B (where you want to Be).

A Peek under the Hood

The Bright Idea Deck consists of seventy-eight cards deliberately designed to get your creative juices flowing. Each time you draw a card, you’re presented with a brilliant, full-color illustration (beautifully executed by Canadian artist Eric Hotz). These pictures — featuring people just like you, in every day situations — beg to become stories: Who is that man? What is he doing? And why is he listening to a pair of binoculars?

Relating your challenge, question or situation to the image on the card forces you to see your dilemma from a new perspective. The result? You see options you didn’t see before, and come up with new ideas in record time.

More than Just a Pretty Face

There’s more to The Bright Idea Deck, though, than the pretty pictures. The deck includes twenty-two trump cards, each representing major themes, powerful influences and important factors in your situation. In addition, the deck’s four suits — Red, Green, Blue and Yellow — encourage you to examine your problem from four distinct perspectives: your intentions and goals, your resources, your feelings and emotions, and the logic that guides your decision-making process.

Within each suit are cards numbered from one to ten. The illustrations on these cards depict the process we all go through when confronting something new and unexpected, from initial interest (or lack of it) to a final decision about what to do.

These numbered suit cards encourage brainstormers to think in terms of how their situation changes and evolves over time. For example, if you draw one of the confrontational fives (the Red five, for example), you might be prompted to consider what actions disturbed the stability represented by the Red four … and what actions you could take to move from the angry energy of the Red five to the achievement of the Red six.

The deck also includes sixteen Approach Cards. The illustrations on these cards suggest strategies for Learning, Doing, Feeling and Controlling various aspects of your situation. Drawing the Green Feeling (Comfort) card, for example, might prompt you to consider the role comfort — or the lack of it — plays in perpetuating or solving the situation in question. Or it might remind you to ask others about their comfort levels before taking a project further.

Keywords on every card help beginners “get” what each card means — but these are printed in very pale colors, so advanced users (who usually prefer to come up with their own meanings for the cards) can easily ignore them. To help keep the cards fresh and to reward constant use, I’ve also hidden symbols, subtle inside jokes, visual clues and other surprises on each and every card.

And finally, the deck’s companion book, Creative Brainstorming with The Bright Idea Deck, serves as your personal “tour guide” to the cards. Instead of simply telling you outright what each card means, the brainstorming guide provides additional keywords, exploration questions and poetic passages designed to further stoke your inner creative genius. Stuck in a creative rut? No worries — the guide also provides fifty fun and practical applications for the deck.

Warning: Enhanced

Creativity Is Addictive!

In addition to using these cards to brainstorm ideas and solutions for myself, I’ve been carrying a prototype deck around the country for the last several months. All it takes to be surrounded by a crowd in minutes is opening the box and spreading them on the table.

Place these cards in the hands of students, colleagues, clients and customers, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly and easily the stories, ideas and solutions begin to flow. The images draw people in and the results have people asking, “When can I get one of these for myself?”

Thanks to Llewellyn, they’ll be in bookstores everywhere in March of 2005.