As Strunk and White’s Elements of Style classic manual conveys the principles of English style with wit and charm so that we all become better writers, so too Keith Sawyer’s new book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity, gives practical techniques to help everyone be more creative. With simplicity and warmth, Sawyer guides the reader through every possible way to expand thinking, completely reducing the apprehension someone might feel because he doesn’t even recognize what the problem is. To be referenced regularly, Zig Zag will have you brimming with a vast array of creative solutions to approach many different life situations.

Sawyer tapped into the back-stories of world-changing innovations and analyzed laboratory experiments and delved deeply into everyday creativity. As other experts, he realized creativity comes in tiny steps, bits of insight and incremental changes. Sawyer identified eight steps that anyone can follow to become more creative: ask; learn; look; play; think; fuse; choose; and make.

The first practice of asking: find the question. How you frame a question is often the biggest path to new ideas. Jay Walker, the creator of Priceline.com, could have created another aggregator traveler site that offers the best prices and schedules. Instead he turned the tables. He asked hotels and airlines what they might accept. Consumers now set prices and as a result a whole new business model was created. Instead of asking “How do I build a better mousetrap?” ask “How do I keep mice out of the house?” and you have a whole new way of tackling the problem, which leads to different types of solutions. When people are forced to change context from what they were originally thinking, they wind up being much more creative because they are forced out of first assumptions and have no choice but to look for surprising new connections and perspectives.

Look. Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at NYU School of Medicine, says that what we see is in large part, a projection created by the brain. He estimates that only 20% of our perceptions are based on information coming from the outside world; the other 80%, our mind fills in. While this is not fully understood, it is our brain, not the images received through our eyes that is constructing our image of the world. Without thinking, we put new perceptions into old categories – forcing the new information to fit our expectations rather than creating something new. Sawyer reveals how to smash that tunnel vision. As he says, “For greater creativity, you have to stop living on autopilot and start paying attention.”

Now we come to one of my favorite parts and something that will sound familiar to my readers. Sawyer says creative life is filled with lots of small ideas. The small ideas weave together as you travel along the zigzag path, and they can lead you to greatness. Time and again researchers have found that lifetime quantity of ideas turns out to be a pretty good predictor of creative quality; meaning the surest way to greater creativity is to come up with the most ideas possible.

Keep coming up with those ideas – make long lists and the longer, the better. It reminds me of an expression that I often employ – there’s always a Plan B. Sawyer shows all the techniques to keep going, and it’s fun too. He reveals how to take unrelated things and fuse them together, as well as how to look at the underlying structure of things rather than just the superficial to be more creative. An example is a saw. Instead of “sharp” and “made of metal”, “cuts by moving back and forth” is a structural characteristic, which requires “pressure downward to cut” and this makes you think of a whole different set of ideas.