Stuck for an idea? Try this 45-year old brainstorming technique.

As part of a full-day workshop for in-house designers and writers, The In-House Creatives’ Survival Guide, at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, workshop leaders Jerry Kopec, creative director of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, and Larry Asher, creative director of Worker Bees, Inc., shared this tried-and-trusted approach for coming up with ideas. With full credit given to James Webb Young, here’s a summary of the approach:

There’s a conceit about living in modern times that makes you think no one who worked in the fifties or sixties could possibly have ideas that would be meaningful today.

Not so fast. In 1960, James Webb Young, a long-retired copywriter from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, published a 62-page book called a Technique for Producing Ideas.

Anyone who’s ever been stuck for a solution or found brainstorming ideas lacking, will be amazed at how up-to-date this middle-aged book is. Here’s what Young advises:

Gather raw material.
Since new ideas are simply the recombination of old ideas, you need to fill up your brain with as much information and insight about the problem at hand. Talk to customers. Tour the factory. Read the web site. Try the product. Everything counts towards gathering raw data.

Look for connections.
Now that you’ve gathered a good supply of facts and insights about the problem you’re trying to solve (and, ideally, written them down), scan your brain to see if there are connections between these facts. Write down any thoughts that come into your head, no matter how crazy or incomplete they may seem.

Sleep on it.
Have you tried to remember the name of a movie you saw, but the harder you try to remember it, the more distant the thought becomes? So you drop it, and then in the middle of doing something completely unrelated, it comes to you: Dances With Wolves! It’s the same thing with producing an idea. Try not to think of it, and you’ll think of it.

Repeat as needed.
By cycling through periods of looking for connections and then giving them a rest, you’re letting your unconscious mind work on the problem while you’re off thinking about other things. Then, during the periods of more deliberate thought, keep writing down possible solutions.

Bring in the critics.
After you’ve narrowed down your list of possibilities to those that actually make some sense to you the morning after, put them up to some scrutiny. Share them with co-workers and complete strangers. You’ll find that best ideas are self-expanding, stimulating more ideas when people hear about them.

For less than six dollars you can go to amazon.com and then read Young’s technique in its original form. And if you’d like to give the process a try, SVC’s workshops–especially its Brainstorming For Creative People, are definitely worth checking out.