CHAPTER 2

THE THREE Gs METHOD

If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

TONI MORRISON

Sal Khan was a successful hedge fund analyst working in Boston when he learned that his tween cousin Nadia was struggling with unit conversion in math—a difficulty that was preventing her from being placed on a more advanced math track at school. “She lived in New Orleans, so I offered to do distance tutoring with her every day,” said Khan, who has degrees from MIT and Harvard. The tutoring worked. He explained,

Word soon spread in my family that free tutoring was available, and by 2006 I was working with 15 cousins and family friends in my limited spare time. I decided to make math practice software and videos to help even more. Before I knew it, people who were not my cousins started using those materials. Fast-forward to today and that family side project has become my life’s mission: to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.¹

Let’s reverse engineer Khan Academy’s origin story using the Three Gs:

Gain + Gap + Goal → Worthwhile Idea

Khan does something for Nadia that works. The consequent gain he sees unfolding for his family and others is obvious. He recognizes the gap—there is no free tutoring available; there is only expensive tutoring for kids with money and access. So Khan sets a goal: building Khan Academy, a tutoring, mentoring, and testing educational organization that offers its content free to anyone with Internet access.

Now he has a fully formed worthwhile idea. There are people who need what his idea has to offer and will absolutely benefit from it. Having difficulty with algebra? Head to Khan Academy. Art history? Chemistry? You know where to go. Anyone can sign up to view the many tutorials, which explain the subjects, and then take the interactive tests. This is the gain that Khan clearly saw when so many people wanted his tutoring.

Khan left his corporate career to devote himself to Khan Academy, and if that weren’t enough, Khan later set another goal: he partnered with his college friend, Shishir Mehrotra (co-founder and CEO of Coda), to create Schoolhouse.world to provide free, live peer-to-peer tutoring to any student to fill yet another gap in education. In an opinion piece in the New York Times about distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Khan wrote about averting an educational catastrophe by doing all we can to ensure that an entire generation of learners is not left with “insurmountable gaps in their education.”²

When people think of idea generation, they often imagine inventions or business ventures. But ideas are the bedrock of the arts, too. The work of contemporary North American artist Rose Gonnella is held in several major collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the Sara Roby Foundation Collection. Gonnella works in colored pencil on paper. Two of her works, Purple Interior with Window, which depicts a corner of a window and a partial view outside, and the second, Violet Interior with Lamp, which depicts a sparsely decorated room, were featured in a recent traveling exhibition, Modern American Realism: Highlights from the Sara Roby Foundation Collection.

Gonnella’s goal for these works was “to transform what we commonly see every day into something more precious.”³ She describes her work as realism with a touch of the surreal: “The drawings are of places I know. But they are not exact places or situations, they are ‘memories’ and composites.”⁴ Gonnella told me that one of her gallerists says she “weaves” the drawing with lines of color using pencil. With her distinct technique, she is filling a gap. Beyond the uniqueness of her technique, Gonnella’s ability to transform an idea into an original visual form transports viewers. Understanding how art fills a gap is somewhat different from perceiving a gap in product design or medicine. You must consider how the art communicates a vision, an idea—how it advances your thinking, unsettles you, challenges you, moves you, advocates, or inspires you. Art’s consequences are too great to assign to technique alone.

The gain? People who collect Gonnella’s work find it thought-provoking and sublime, as do I. Gonnella was the only living artist represented in the Modern American Realism exhibit, alongside such renowned artists as Edward Hopper, Isabel Bishop, Stuart Davis, Paul Cadmus, and others.

The Three Gs Method

Let’s examine the Three Gs framework when you start with a goal.

Set a Goal

Think about what you want to do. Big or small. Invent a new musical instrument. Pivot your business model to a hands-free point-of-sale system. Bake and sell savory spelt scones. (I volunteer to taste-test them.) Reinvent primary education. Generate an idea for the marketing launch of a new product. Design a brand identity. Write “a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet.” Essentially, a goal is something you are trying to achieve in any field.

In the realm of virtual reality (VR), Israeli fighter pilots Moty Avisar and Alon Geri had a goal—giving surgeons the chance to participate in simulated surgery through “a visualization platform that helps to illuminate complex procedures.”⁵

“We had an idea,” said Avisar, CEO and cofounder of Surgical Theater. “What if surgeons could train like fighter pilots, previewing their surgical procedure like a fighter pilot pre-flying their mission?”⁶ Surgical Theater fills a gap in surgical practice, and surgeons gain experience before they get to operate on people. I would certainly prefer that my surgeon train that way before operating on me.

In the business sphere, Royalty Exchange is a marketplace that allows musical artists to raise funds by selling their royalties to investors during online auctions. “Royalties are the tangible manifestation of these ideas. They are assets that can be bought, sold, and traded. Open markets make assets more valuable by providing transparency, price discovery, and competition needed to satisfy investor demand. . . . Creators can then leverage this demand to find investors for their catalog at the best price possible, raising money without giving up their rights or going into debt,” the firm’s website explains.⁷

Royalty Exchange’s goal was to hand some of the financial power of the artists’ own ideas back to the artists. The gap and the gain for artists? No other company provided this service for artists. Anthony Martini, Royalty Exchange’s CEO, said, “Royalty Exchange is disrupting the financial landscape of the music business in favor of those who actually create the value in this industry—the artists. That’s a mission I can get behind and take to the next level.”⁸

Historian Tiya Miles was inspired by an artifact—a photograph of Ashley’s sack, sent to her by journalist Ben Goggins—to write All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

Miles’s goal? “I hope All That She Carried offers readers many new ways to understand the history of slavery and the experiences of unfree women at that time,” she said.⁹

Writing for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain explains the gap:

Black women and their families have been omitted from the official histories of our country and its archives by many historians. Harvard professor Tiya Miles does wonders in filling those gaps with this sparkling tale of an embroidered bag from 1921. On its surface, Ashley’s sack is an intimate family heirloom. In Miles’s artful hands, though, the object is transformed—an embodied memoir of Black women traveling from slavery to freedom, South to North, carrying relics and hopes as they seek new lives.¹⁰

The gain? This book takes us on a journey of resilience that, as the publisher says, is an “extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.”¹¹

Again, please note: Some people might say your goal is your idea. But it’s only the start. Here’s why: Without knowing whether your goal fills a gap and provides an actual gain for individuals, communities, creatures, society, business, or our planet, there’s no point in pursuing it. That’s why you need the Three G’s.

Look for a Gap

Gather information about the subject, problem, or topic. Seek information with an eye toward discovering an insight—a void you can fill. Khan realized that there was no free tutoring available to kids in the United States. The insight was that kids needed free academic assistance, beyond the classroom, that they could return to again and again. Hite at Microsoft knew gaming wasn’t accessible to all. His insight was that gamers living with disabilities needed a ready-made adaptive controller they could use rather than having to hack a conventional controller. (More about insights to come.)

There are gaps in all fields, and other examples abound. For instance, many digital games are aimed at middle-school boys, but few are aimed at girls of that age; there’s a gap in what the gaming industry offers to that demographic audience. Until recently, New York City subway commuters didn’t have a live subway map that would show train arrivals and delays. New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the Transit Innovation Partnership, and Work & Co. came together to fill that gap, creating the MTA Live Subway Map. This game-changing map shows daily service in real time, so that riders will know about delays and construction and can manage work-arounds.¹²

Stay open to any enlightening tidbit that points to a potential gap you hadn’t anticipated.

When people write academic journal articles, they first do a literature search—a survey of what has been written to identify existing research and find a gap, the missing piece or pieces in the discipline, something in the area that has not yet been explored or is underexplored. You’re doing something similar (but not necessarily in a formal academic way) to see if your goal will fill a void or address a need that has not yet been met. For example, later in this chapter I’ll tell you about paper pill bottles that fill a gap in package design, preventing tons of nonrecyclable toxic waste.

Once you gather information and analyze your data, look for a gap that points to a gain. The gain provides a benefit to individuals, a community, society, or our planet in one or more of a whole range of areas. It may entertain, inform, educate, advance commerce, reduce waste, improve quality of life, increase sustainability, provide a utility, support and uplift people, advance a discipline, or do social good. Employing the Three Gs should allow you to generate many good ideas or better ideas.

Here’s a helpful tip: Most art directors and designers present more than one ad idea to their creative director or client, making each idea markedly different from the others in the hope that the client will be sold on at least one of the idea directions. There’s no point in showing variations on one idea to a creative director or client because it’s still only one idea, and if they don’t buy into it, you have no backup plan.

How Do You Begin?

If you paid attention to your elementary school science teacher, you might recall the surprising story of the discovery of penicillin—one that surprised Alexander Fleming himself.

When Fleming, a physician and scientist, returned from vacation to his untidy laboratory, he observed something that others might have missed—a mold (called Penicillium) had contaminated one of his petri dishes containing colonies of Staphylococcus aureus (a bacteria). Fleming examined the mold and set a goal—to determine why it prevented the normal growth of the staphylococci. He went on to experiment and research.

If you’ve taken an antibiotic to cure an infection, you have Fleming to thank for being alive. When he made his discovery, there was an enormous gap—there were no antibiotics. Fleming changed the world of medicine and our lives—an unmitigated gain for all. He wrote: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.”¹³

Goal

At times, it’s simple. Your boss assigns a goal to you, or your own business or project requires a new goal. That determines one G — the goal—of the Three Gs. It’s a ready-made goal and a problem to solve. If this is the case, first assess the goal. It may be the wrong goal or a result of asking the wrong question! Think critically about it.

Gap

Look for a gap. Consider whether to seek a gap in the business model, in the marketing strategy, in the product category, in the industry or sector, in the discipline, in the attention to the audience, and so on.

In some fields, to determine a gap, you must seek an insight into the audience. An insight is a realization or revelation about the target audience’s need or belief or about their true thoughts, feelings, or behavior—a human truth or finding no one has yet noticed. That insight or human truth ultimately should warrant responsiveness—a change in how you look at a behavior, situation, product, or service—and could be the catalyst for finding a gap. Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign, which has been running effectively in various iterations for almost twenty years, used an insight first pointed out by women on the team and later confirmed by extensive research—that “only two percent of women worldwide considered themselves beautiful.”¹⁴ That was a powerful sentiment among women that hadn’t been addressed before.

You can think of insights in two main ways: A fixed insight dominates what people say and how they behave over an extended period. A dynamic insight bends with small- or large-scale changes in the audience’s needs, behavior, or situation—think of a Black Swan event of staggering proportions, such as a pandemic or a hurricane of enormous size and scope.

Creative professionals often use target audiences to get answers to questions and to land on insights:

•Who are you aiming at? Who is the target audience?

•What do they do?

•What’s their experience? What influences their experience?

•What’s their context for your goal?

•What are their needs?

•What issue does your goal solve for them?

•What would they consider an effective outcome? An outstanding solution?

•What do they stand to gain from using the outcome of this goal?

•What do they think now?

•What are their concerns? Desires?

•What would work for them? What wouldn’t?

•What do they feel or think about existing solutions?

•What would you need to communicate to them?

•What actions do you want them to take?

•What would inspire them to act?

Think of an audience gap this way: What is missing from their lives? What are their pain points? What would motivate them? Which issues keep them up at night?

Gain

What is the gain? Will achieving the goal and filling the gap make life better, improve society, or improve conditions for individuals, society, business, creatures, or our planet? If you’re thinking of profits as the gain, aim toward improving the triple bottom line—profit, people, and the planet. Always keep the people you’re aiming at in mind. What can you do to make life better for them?

While worthwhile industrial design and responsible technological ideas move civilization forward, creative gains from art, music, dance, literature, poetry, and film can reveal truths, be vehicles of resistance, make the mundane seem new, and afford insights into ourselves and others. A great work of art reminds us of our humanity.

The following are four examples from my own disciplines, creative advertising and brand experience design, of how being handed a preset goal (a problem to solve) works.

Burger King’s goal in the United Kingdom market was to lead the move away from non-biodegradable plastic toys.

The company worked with creative agency JKR. Katie Evans, marketing director at Burger King UK, said,

Removing plastic toys from our kids’ meals represents a huge step for the brand in the UK and we knew we couldn’t do this quietly. The provocative idea that JKR presented demonstrated the engagement we were looking for; we knew it would capture the nation’s attention and change kids’ meals forever. This is an opportunity for us to lead radical change in our industry and we know we can positively contribute to finding new, more sustainable solutions, long term.¹⁵

Burger King set the goal for JKR: find a way to remove plastic toys.

Inspired by Burger King’s irreverent spirit, JKR realized the gain: Burger King is melting down plastic toys to upcycle them into something useful and fun for kids. “It’s brilliant that these toys will be transformed into play areas and playful experiences that last longer than a few minutes,” explained Stephen McDavid, creative director at JKR.¹⁶ The gap? Interactive play opportunities for families at Burger King restaurants.

What did they do? They asked parents and kids to bring their unwanted plastic toys to a BK restaurant for a “meltdown” so the toys could be recycled into interactive play opportunities. The Meltdown saved 320 tons of plastic and made recycling fun for BK’s youngest customers.

When Leland Maschmeyer was the chief creative officer at Chobani, he recruited Lisa Smith to join the in-house creative team to rebrand the visual identity. According to Fast Company, Maschmeyer “wanted the identity to have a sense of romance, nature, and the craftsmanship inspired by Northeastern American folk art.” And he focused on a phrase as a kind of brand essence: “Happily ever after.”¹⁷

Smith reworked the phrase to “Fighting for happily ever after” after reading a story about Chobani’s founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, in Fast Company, where Ulukaya talked about being a “shepherd of delicious, accessible, and nutritious food, and a warrior for ethical food practices.”

The gap? “We talked a lot about compassionate power, and those were words I could turn into design,” Smith says.

The gain? “Smith and her team weren’t branding a product; they were building a world. According to Maschmeyer, they overhauled the brand identity, website, café, and packaging, and expanded products like the Flip, a yogurt that has toppings consumers dump on top.”¹⁸

Armin Vit, critic at Brand New, called the new identity “literally and absolutely perfect.”¹⁹

Designers start with a design or creative brief, which might or might not state the goal. If the brief doesn’t include one, you need to determine the goal based on the information provided in the brief, as well as any additional research or information you can gather on your own.

Then it’s up to you and your colleagues on the creative team to figure out the gap and gain. At times, the brief will provide research on the marketplace and competition, which might inform you about a possible gap. The brief also might provide information about the target audience, which could help you come up with a possible desirable gain for the audience. Ask, What’s in it for them?

When you respond to a creative brief, the gap you identify needs to address the goal, of course, and the target audience’s needs and desires. What is missing from their lives? What are their pain points? This gap might not be that different from other gaps, but you must focus on the people the brief specifies.

The Three Gs work extremely well in concert with design briefs and creative briefs!

Here’s some Alexander Hamilton trivia: they say Aaron Burr wrote his duel challenge to Hamilton on paper made by Crane, a company that has been manufacturing paper in the United States for more than 250 years. Recently, the brand experience design company Collins revitalized the Crane brand. Collins’s goal was to reboot the brand’s digital presence, develop a more relevant brand voice, and enable new products, artist collaborations, and customization capabilities.

Collins sees Crane as filling a gap: “What will you make worth keeping?” In today’s digital world, Crane’s paper products enable you to express yourself with thoughtfulness and permanence. The designers also drew inspiration from Crane’s history, making the imagery and essence unique to the brand. “Human beings throughout history have found significance through connection. . . . When the world is burning, we look to nature to restore and repair our damages. When we’re searching for intimacy, we put our phones away and look at each other face to face. When we want to be heard and remembered, we write a letter,” notes Collins’ website.²⁰

The gain is a humanistic tool for expression and communication. “The idea was to create objects of desire,” Nick Ace, a creative director at Collins, said about the studio’s work on Crane’s products and its approach to the brand identity. “The Crane box should never be hidden in a drawer or tossed in a closet. It should be proudly displayed on your desk, your shelf or on your coffee table. Its tactile qualities should make you want to touch it—intrigue you to open it up to see what’s inside.”²¹

Before we move on to goals that are not preset, there’s something important to understand. A goal can be broken down into objectives. To see how, let’s go back to the Burger King (BK) brand and an award-winning marketing campaign by FCB New York, “The Whopper Detour.”

The BK goal for this marketing effort was to get people to use mobile ordering. FCB broke that goal into three main corporate objectives: (1) create top-of-mind awareness of Burger King’s app, (2) get people to download the app, and (3) get people to actually use the app. A case study write-up explains:

BK needed to generate excitement for its revamped mobile app with order-ahead functionality. Rather than using a typical coupon, we leveraged a powerful insight: With the new BK App, anywhere can be a place to order a Whopper—even a McDonald’s, turning their much larger footprint into ours. Rewarding customers with a $0.01 Whopper (when ordered from McD’s), we invited consumers to engage in the trolling fun, hitting #1 on both app stores, generating 1.5 million downloads in just 9 days, and an ROI of 37:1.²²

What was the gap? Well, it wasn’t the app, which was basic. Rather, the gap was giving young people an opportunity to participate in an outrageous troll against a rival. The gain? A $0.01 Whopper (when ordered within 600 feet of a McD’s) and trolling fun for the audience.

The worthwhile idea: Buy a Whopper for just one cent. The catch: Customers could order it only on the Burger King app “at” McDonald’s.

Ways into the Three Gs

When there are no preset goals, demands, or guidelines, let’s look at ways you can use the Three Gs to generate, crystallize, or amplify worthwhile ideas.

Build on an Observation

Keen observation is fundamental to scientific research, as it is to so many disciplines. Once Alexander Fleming observed the curious mold, he set a goal. For his discovery of Penicillium, he earned a Nobel Prize. As Aria Nouri points out in her article “Penicillium and the Importance of Observation,” Fleming observed with a prepared mind and a keen eye, he was deeply curious, and he translated observation into meaningful results.²³ There are many ways to set a goal. At times, you happen on it, as did Fleming and Khan. But they only happened on their goals because their minds were intellectually alert and prepared to notice possibilities.

We’re so used to grabbing an iced latte or a cup of coffee at Starbucks that people are surprised to learn that Starbucks originally did not sell individual cups of brewed coffee. In their first stores in Seattle, you could purchase fresh-roasted coffee beans, tea, and spices to take home. When the marketing director of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, first visited Milan, he observed the Italian café model. “The Italians had created the theater, romance, art and magic of experiencing espresso,” Schultz recalled. “I was overwhelmed with a gut instinct that this is what we should be doing.”²⁴

Schultz came back with an idea sparked by watching the Italian baristas in Milan’s coffee houses, which he presented to the owners of Starbucks Coffee Company. But the Starbucks founders disagreed with Schultz. When Schultz finally purchased Starbucks from them, he turned it into the café we know today. Schultz started with an observation. He knew the United States didn’t have the kind of coffee house he observed in Italy—there was a gap in the U.S. marketplace.

Schultz’s goal was to fill the gap with the Italian model he fell in love with. The gain is clear when you see how many people drink their brew and enjoy the café environment.

The Starbucks story offers a lesson: If you notice a gap, investigate. Find out if there is a need to fill that void. Determine what the gain would be and how many people it would serve.

An observation doesn’t have to be one that sets a goal in motion. You may observe a gap or a gain and start from there.

As a professor, I have noticed over the years that my students prefer to listen to my lectures and actively participate rather than take notes. At the same time, I would like to be able to hand over all I know about a subject to them. I thought it would benefit my students to have a reference—all my lessons in one handy resource—which would be the gain. So I searched to see if any book existed that provides all I provide on the subject. Sure enough, there were gaps—no books covered idea generation, design, and art direction. My goal: to write books about graphic design and creative advertising. The result is my books Graphic Design Solutions, now in its sixth edition, and Advertising by Design, in its fourth edition, both translated into Spanish and Chinese.

The lesson: I noticed a pattern of student behavior that led me to think of a gain, conducted research to see if a gap existed, and coupled it with my expertise, which helped me form a goal.

Spot a Problem That Needs Fixing

You’re in a unique position to see a problem that needs fixing.

When Sam Farber saw that his wife’s arthritis made it difficult for her to use an ordinary vegetable peeler for food preparation, he thought there must be a way to produce kitchen tools that work for everyone. Farber noticed a pain point—a problem that could be fixed through better design. By observing his wife’s struggle, Farber realized the gap in product design. With that, he saw an opportunity to improve a product—a gain for people, which became his goal.

“At OXO, we look at everyday objects and activities and we see ways to make things simpler, easier, more thoughtfully designed—better,” notes the OXO company website. “We notice things. We notice pain points and pains-in-the-neck. We notice problems people don’t realize are problems until we solve them. We see opportunities to improve a product or a process, or a part of everyday life, and we make things that make things better.”²⁵

Here’s another example from my own life that shows that anyone—a parent, a grandparent, a tinkerer—can effectively use the Three Gs to solve a problem. After my three-year-old daughter, Hayley, had two nights of bad dreams resulting in significant sleep disturbance and distress for her, my husband, and myself, I had a problem to solve—a goal. I conducted casual research about children’s nightmares. Johns Hopkins Medicine suggested, among other things, comforting, reassuring, and cuddling your child and leaving the child’s bedroom door open, all of which I did.²⁶ Easy enough.

Then I thought of my own experience: when I’m upset about something, I compartmentalize my emotions—put them away, as if in a drawer—in order to concentrate when I’m teaching, writing, or consulting. That sparked the Dream Box.

“This is a Dream Box,” I said to Hayley, as I opened a tea box I had covered with wrapping paper. “Tell your nightmare to this Dream Box. Then close the lid, and I’ll put the Dream Box away. You won’t have any more bad dreams.”

Hayley did as I asked. She then said, “How does it work?”

“It’s magic. It just does.”

At Hayley’s age, magical thinking works. Young children believe in magical notions such as the Tooth Fairy. The Dream Box idea worked for Hayley, so I wanted to turn it into a children’s book to help other families. To make sure I was on the right track, I spoke with a prominent psychologist, who said she advises her clients to write bad thoughts down and put them in a drawer or throw them away. (Years later, I read a paper with a similar thesis published in the journal Psychological Science.²⁷) Disguised as a picture book, The Dream Box helps solve a common real-life dilemma—what to do when a child has a bad dream.

My goal: Stop Hayley’s bad dreams. The gap: No device existed at the time. The gain: We all got some sleep.

Now my friend the psychologist uses The Dream Box in her practice. Many parents have written to thank me for this book and useful device. (The nicest part is that they send lovely photos of their children holding the book with their notes.)

We face so many neglected problems in so many sectors. There is always a need for new worthwhile ideas, and there’s always been a need for urgent ideas during times of war, famine, pandemic, typhoon, or other acts of nature or human-caused disasters.

You could think of a gap as a neglected problem. For instance, because they’re small, plastic pill bottles cannot be recycled—they become toxic waste.

Notice Pain Points

To ensure user-friendly design, product developers, web developers, and user-experience designers need to notice pain points. If you search social media to see what people are complaining about—what their pain points are on various topics, products, services, and brands—you might get an insight into setting a goal, filling a gap, or providing a gain.

One pain point for many in the LGBTQIA+ community is the extra scrutiny, risk, or embarrassment that can come with using a credit or debit card that shows their birth name or deadname rather than their preferred name—their true name. To fix this pain point, Mastercard took a step to empower transgender and nonbinary cardholders. Mastercard explains, “We worked to ease this pain point by creating True Name, a first-of-its-kind feature that makes secure payments truly safe for all.”²⁸

The goal of the True Name initiative was to allow people to use their chosen name on their Mastercard and to get banks on board—which they did. This filled a gap in the credit sector and alleviated a pain point in the LGBTQIA+ community. The gain? Mastercard’s allyship marks a significant, large-scale corporate commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community, one that will make people’s daily lives a little easier.

Another way to bring attention to a pain point is to ask, How can I make an existing product or service more accessible? For many people living with disabilities, lacing up athletic shoes is difficult. Sarah Reinertsen, who has set marathon records and represented the United States at the Paralympic Games, works at Nike. She set a goal of producing a hands-free shoe and was on the team that launched the Nike Go FlyEase.

Tobie Hatfield, senior director of athlete innovation at Nike, had designed a (provisional) shoe for a Nike colleague who had suffered a stroke, which made tying his shoes no longer possible. Then, a letter arrived. According to Bloomberg,

The focus on ease of use coalesced in 2012, when Hatfield read a letter from a teenager with cerebral palsy who wanted to be self-sufficient but couldn’t tie his shoes. Three years later the first FlyEase hit the market in the form of a LeBron James high-top that used a wraparound zipper to open up the rear of the shoe. The latest model took years to develop.²⁹

A hinge in the middle of the Nike Go FlyEase, launched in 2021, allows the shoe to bend open, allowing people to slip it on and off with no hands. A midsole tensioner band, made from surgical tubing, snaps the shoe back into place.

So, what do the Mastercard’s True Name initiative and Nike’s Go FlyEase shoe idea generation processes have in common?

What starts with thinking about a pain point for a specific audience accumulates into something much more when you ask probing questions, such as, What’s my goal? What needs fixing? Would the outcome of this goal fill a gap? Who will gain from the outcome? How can I make life better for this audience?

So many of people’s worthwhile goals stem from issues in their lives or the lives of people close to them, which leads them to investigate possible solutions.

Follow a Passion

Many worthwhile ideas stem from people’s passions—their interest in a subject, a hobby, something they do beyond their job, or something they just keep at until it works. When you’re thinking about something you love, it doesn’t seem like work. In fact, it is enthralling.

Brother and sister Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani had a goal—to bring the dried lime tea they enjoyed during their childhood in Baghdad, Iraq, to the United States. They believe in the healing power of tea. They named their company Numi (numi means “citrus” in Arabic); the tea symbolizes hospitality and community. With so many tea brands already available in the United States, what gap have this passionate duo filled? Not only have Rahim and Hassani introduced little-known herbs and teas to the United States, but they are advancing human rights around the globe. There are multiple gains from their business, which brings clean drinking water and sanitation to tea-farming communities, ensures fair wages and safe working conditions, benefits the communities of the farmers who grow the tea, and reduces plastic waste, among other sustainable outcomes. Their passion and vision drove their goal; they saw a gap and achieved several gains.

Go with What You Know Best

Sometimes you can apply the Three Gs to what’s right in front of you, to what you know best. Having worked for several leading financial institutions, Gaurav Sharma saw how hard it is for most people to understand their retirement accounts. He decided to build a company that makes it easier. With Chris Phillips, he cofounded Capitalize. When you change jobs, Capitalize will manage your 401(k) rollover for you so you don’t lose your money. Like Capitalize, your idea can be a straightforward solution.

Do What Makes Sense for Your Company’s Plan, Customers, and Our Planet

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers furniture municipal solid waste. Although some percentage of furniture and furnishings are combusted for energy recovery, most of these products are discarded and end up in landfill.³⁰ This means that millions of pieces of secondhand furniture go to waste each year.

Recognizing this gap in recycling, Ikea is giving new life to chairs, shelves, and chests of drawers with its buyback and resell service—from “pre-loved” to “re-loved.” To reach its goal of being a fully circular business, Ikea creates “products that can be used and re-used for many years to come, right up until it’s time to recycle them and start again.”³¹

The gain? Ikea wants to be “100% circular and have a positive impact on the environment. That means not only rethinking the materials we use and the design from the outset, but also providing services to extend the life of our products as much as possible.”³² Through reuse and recycling, Ikea and its customers reduce waste.

The gap? There are stores that sell refurbished or refinished furniture, but most companies that manufacture and sell new furniture don’t offer to buy back used furniture for reuse or recycling. Ikea filled both marketing and sustainability gaps.

Ask Yourself What You Wish Existed in the World (or “What’s Missing?”)

We have all seen and heard stories of people suffering from mental health issues, yet resources for help are scarce, especially in times of national or economic crisis. Ariela Safira started Real, a mental health care company with a new therapy model, when a close friend attempted suicide. Safira identified a glaring gap: many people believe mental health care is out of reach. It is for people with more money, better insurance, or perhaps worse symptoms. Her goal was to offer therapy at a reasonable rate, making it accessible to all. Real offers a digital membership for $28 a month, which gives members access to a suite of mental health products and services.

The gain? Safira is rethinking the mental health care system to create a model that meets people’s needs at all levels.

When plastic pill bottles tumbled out of his medicine cabinet one day, Scott Carlton, a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, wondered, What happens to these bottles when they’re tossed away? “After conducting research, his creative team learned that most plastic pill bottles cannot be properly disposed of because of their small size,” Lillianna Vazquez, group art supervisor, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, told me. “That sparked the idea: Create a 100% compostable and biodegradable alternative.”

This new bottle meets FDA requirements for water, light, and child resistance. Once emptied, it can be composted to enrich the soil, giving back to the earth. It is a reusable, sustainable container. No plastic. No artificial glue and coatings. No toxic dyes.

According to Carlton, “Made in partnership with TOM, Tikkun Olam Makers, the global maker group dedicated to creating affordable solutions for neglected problems, the paper pill bottle has an open-sourced design available to any pharmacy. And produced bottles have been distributed to local pharmacies for trial.”³³

I am particularly proud to write about this idea because Lillianna Vazquez, who was on the creative team for this project at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, was my student at Kean University. For this creative idea and solution, the agency won a Cannes Lions award.

We can reverse engineer their thinking to see it this way: The gain was a compostable and biodegradable pill bottle. The gap was an alternative to plastic for pill bottles. The goal was to manufacture a 100% compostable prescription pill bottle made of paper.

Ask, “What Else?”

When you’re observant, what you see, hear, notice, or investigate might trigger a goal. Take George de Mestral. You might not recognize his name, but you’ve heard of Velcro, a combination of “velvet” and “crochet” (which means “hook” in French). While walking in the woods, de Mestral noticed that his pants and his Irish Pointer’s hair were covered in burs from a burdock plant. Curious, he studied the burs under a microscope to realize that they bind themselves to almost any fabric, even to dog hair. “His idea was to take the hooks he had seen in the burs and combine them with simple loops of fabric. The tiny hooks would catch in the loops, and things would just, well, come together.”³⁴

De Mestral’s keen observational skills led him to the goal of creating a synthetic fabric that would offer a new way to fasten things.

If you work as a creative professional in an advertising agency, you must generate many ideas daily. If you work as a graphic designer, industrial designer, environmental designer, architect, or fashion designer, it is likely that you must do the same. And although you may have learned to ideate in college, it’s challenging to generate many quality ideas daily. That’s why it’s so important to be observant, to notice potential and possibilities.

Professionals in business, marketing, journalism, engineering, communications, entrepreneurship and innovation, media, TV and film, strategy, and many other fields must generate ideas on a regular basis. Sometimes they have preset goals, and other times they must set their own goals.

Some goal seekers are on the lookout for how they can alter an existing idea by adding a creative twist, such as with Schultz and Starbucks. Other goal-prone thinkers train themselves to be on the lookout for pain points—a persistent problem with a product or service that annoys people or is bad for the planet, such as plastic pill bottles. I’ll end this chapter with advice from a scientist I admire greatly, not only for his brilliance but for his humanity: Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian-born biochemist and anti-fascist activist who received the Nobel Prize in 1937 and a Lasker Award in 1954. “Think boldly,” Szent-Györgyi said, “don’t be afraid of making mistakes, don’t miss small details, keep your eyes open, and be modest in everything except your aims.”³⁵ This was Szent-Györgyi’s advice to his biographer, Ralph Moss.

After completing this chapter, here are your action steps:

Think about your goal, a gap you’ve noticed, or a gain you’d like to see in the world. Use the Three Gs to unlock your creativity:

•Do you have a goal in mind?

•Have you noticed or researched a gap in a field or discipline?

•Would your idea offer a benefit, a gain to individuals, society, or our planet?

More specifically related to this chapter:

•Has someone asked you to help them with something because of your expertise? (think Sal Khan and Khan Academy)

•Have you observed a promising business model that is missing in your neck of the woods? (think Howard Schultz and Starbucks)

•Have you noticed anything in your household and wondered what its lifecycle is? (think Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness and the paper pill bottle)

•Have you ever thought about a marketing solution that the target audience would find participatory and fun? (think FCB and Burger King’s “Whopper Detour”)

Being curious, as a matter of course, opens your mind to new knowledge and to questions that might unlock idea-producing insights or gaps. Think of how curious George de Mestral was about the burs from a plant sticking to his pants, which led to his idea for Velcro.

Curiosity compels you to learn all you can about your discipline and to keep learning about it. After all, to become an expert at something, you must keep learning and practicing. Curiosity also compels people to learn about different subjects. Just think of Lin-Manuel Miranda picking up a book about Alexander Hamilton to read while on vacation.

Curiosity is a form of information seeking to gain knowledge and improve cognition—thinking processes by which you accumulate knowledge that can help you recognize, perceive, and conceive ideas.

As Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

NOTES: YOUR IDEAS

Is there something you’ve always wanted to do, accomplish, or create–something that might genuinely make a difference in people’s lives?