IT’S ONE OF the most famous stories in science. A young Isaac Newton is sitting beneath an apple tree on a warm summer evening, contemplating the mystery of the universe when — thwack! — an apple lands on his head. Instantly he understands that the very same force that pulled the apple toward him also keeps the moon in Earth’s orbit and the Earth looping around the sun: gravity.

Doubt has since been cast on whether Newton was actually struck by an apple — the Englishman, it seems, knew the power of an engaging story to sell a bold new theory — but we do know from the account he gave his first biographer that he had been mulling what kept the planets in place as he wandered through the orchard. Why does it matter? Because it highlights something you probably already understand: that good ideas typically do not arrive as you sit at your desk or in the weekly staff meeting. Indeed, when we asked the PETS+ Brain Squad, a majority said their best ideas had come during moments when they weren’t even focused on work, be it walking the dog, driving home, lying in bed, in the shower or engaged in “mind-numbing tasks like cleaning.” Some even said they had to get away from their businesses for good ideas to start bubbling up. “Truly, I am an idea machine when I am away from the stores every now and then. I always write everything down that I think of right in that moment … even if I’m on a hike in the middle of nowhere,” Krista Schmidt of St. PetersBARK! in St. Petersburg, FL, says.

While the actual mechanism that sparks creative thoughts remains something of a mystery, the path to a Eureka moment follows a pattern most of us can recognize: saturation, incubation and illumination. It starts with a problem you dwell on — Maybe what holds the planets in place? Or more likely, how can I get Sally to show up for work on time? Or, what marketing campaign will excite my customers this month? — often followed by being stumped or frustrated, and then when you finally shift focus as you go for a walk or drive home, inspiration strikes.

And sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s a weird alchemy involving the subconscious that sometimes delivers Velcro and at other times automatic cat litter boxes. In their book Tomorrowmind, psychologists Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman argue that in a business setting, there are typically four types of creativity at work:

• Integration: Combining different elements into one (like the iPhone)
• Splitting: Differentiating similar things into useful parts (spinning off Slack into a stand-alone communication tool)
• Figure-ground reversal: Recognizing the importance of background elements (like Amazon’s web services, which make more money for the online giant than just about any other service)
• Distal thinking: Imagining concepts far removed from the present (the development of Bitcoin to replace flat currencies)

What all of these acts of creativity involve is seeing something in a way that it hadn’t been before. Hence the common advice for boosting creativity: Try to see the world in unfamiliar ways. Deliberately shifting your perspective can help you notice details and ideas that are often overlooked.

This is important not just because it suggests the solution to your problem might be at hand but that everyone can be creative with the right mindset.

It starts with the understanding that inspiration is not divine, it does not come from “outside” — there is no such thing as ex nihilo creation in human beings. Every idea is a combination of others.

The implications of this are manifold. The inputs — the people, books, movies, environments, social media content — you expose yourself to are important. Second, everyone on your staff has ideas to contribute. There is no such thing as a non-creative person. After all, what is Sally doing when she seems to get lost in her own world as she haphazardly stacks bags of pet food but engaging in day-dreaming and planning? To be creative, to imagine the future and possibilities, is to be human. As the owner of a business and/or manager of staff, you just need to find a way to harness this often latent potential. The good news is it often doesn’t require much more than time, space and the right nudge.

Jeremy Utly, an adjunct professor at Stanford’s d.school, a design thinking institute, and co-author of Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win, says that in 2024 the ideas you come up with are “the only metric that matters.” That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s based on an appreciation that as more and more rote jobs are automated you have a stark choice: innovate or fall behind.

Tomorrow’s profits are based on your creative thoughts today.

If the idea of creativity is daunting, keep in mind the rule of “shitty” first drafts: Your initial ideas don’t even have to be good.

In fact, bad ideas are often the seeds of great ones. (According to studies, 50% of patent owners weren’t even trying to invent the product they eventually took to market.)

While there is still magic in the process, it is possible to be a little more systematic and intentional about how you extract good ideas, to create the conditions to make creativity a more predictable occurrence. In the following pages, we share advice and thoughts on how to come up with more creative ideas from fellow pet pros and experts in the field. Read on. An exciting new world awaits.

1. IT’S A NUMBERS GAME

Creativity is one of the few areas in business where quantity trumps quality — at least initially. The reason is threefold: 1) Your first idea is rarely the best, and yet because of the cognitive load required by fresh thinking, your brain likes to call it quits when it thinks it’s found a solution, however mediocre (it’s known as the Einstellung effect); 2) Creativity is not math. There is no one right answer. You want to explore all the options; and 3) Bad ideas are often the germ of good ideas. Some ideas that sound entirely feasible fall flat in the real world. Others that appear wildly impractical, even silly, work wonderfully with a few tweaks. “In most cases, you can’t really judge the merit of an idea until you’ve tested it in the real world,” Utley and his co-author, Perry Klebahn, write in Ideaflow. “At the start, you just need lots and lots of ideas. When it comes to creativity, quantity drives quality.”

2. GET EVERYONE TO CONTRIBUTE

There’s a commonly held belief that creative people are rare creatures, but just about everyone in your company should be invited to contribute ideas – after all, what is creativity but seeing a problem with fresh eyes. (As Zen teaching puts it: In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.) That’s the case at The Green K9 in Mount Dora, FL, where Paul Lewis says he leans on his entire staff, and not just managers, for ideas. “Most (of the staff) are younger than myself and the management team. Most of the time they have fresh perspective on what appeals to the younger generations.” The second advantage of this is that these lower-level workers are often the ones on the frontlines, dealing with customers and their frustrations every day, notes Natalie Kramer of the Albany Pet Hotel in Albany, OR.

3. GET THEM BEFORE THEY’VE DRUNK THE KOOL-AID

A related idea is the “entry interview:” Talk to new employees shortly after they start at your company and ask them what they like about it, what they hope to learn, what appears broken and how to make it better. When it comes to creative thinking, conformity is the enemy. “Truly innovative leaders never utter the phrase, ‘Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’ Most people agree that problem-solving is vital, but the subtle art of problem-finding is poorly cultivated,” Utley and Klebahn write in Ideaflow. “Innovation leaders know that problems are the necessary precondition to novel solutions, and they cultivate an awareness of problems across their teams.”

4. REFRAME

Much of the success of a creative exercise will come down to how the challenge is initially framed. In 2011, Disney decided it needed to overhaul its customer experience. “Instead of asking the question most corporations ask themselves every single day, ‘How can we make more money?,’ which would have resulted in shortsighted profit-boosting measures like ticket-price hikes, the team reframed the challenge from the consumer point of view by asking: “How might we eliminate a major pain point for guests?” recalls Duncan Wardle, Disney’s former head of innovation and creativity, in an article in ASCEND magazine. That led to focusing on the issue of lines, a solution in the form of the RFID-based MagicBand, and in record guest satisfaction and revenue (and a new source of data on customer traffic that was used to design future parks). “By simply re-expressing or renaming your challenge, you give yourself permission to think differently,” Wardle says.

5. GOOD MOOD = GOOD IDEAS

When we’re in a good mood, a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) becomes more sensitive to unusual thoughts and strange hunches. “When we’re in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. We’re able to give the ACC more time to pay attention to weak signals; we’re also more willing to take risks,” Steven Kotler writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer. Conversely, a bad mood amplifies analytical thought. The brain limits our options to the tried and true — the logical, the obvious, the sure thing we know will work, he says. Similarly, too much focus on “extrinsic” motivators such as money or recognition can constrain creativity. (For much the same reason, caffeine can inhibit creative thinking, and alcohol can unlock it … but obviously there are limits to that path.) What’s it all mean? Keep brainstorming meetings fun and relaxed. Gratitude, mindfulness, exercise and sleep are nonnegotiables for sustained peak performance. Kathy Palmer of The Fish & Bone in Portland, ME, says when she needs good ideas, she makes a conscious effort to “get loose. I’ll put on some good music, pick up a pen and start drawing or writing ideas as they come. If I’m stuck, I’ll move on, go for a walk or a bike ride — or really do anything else — and come back to it later.”

6. ASK, WHERE ELSE?

Most creative breakthroughs arise through analogy, when you look beyond your usual boundaries to find inspiration. Alexander Graham Bell modeled the telephone on the human ear. A hitch with the Hubble space telescope was fixed when a NASA engineer taking a shower in a German hotel saw how he might borrow the design of the shower head. It thus helps to make “Where else?” one of the first questions you ask. It’s an approach many pet pros take, in particular, in what human activities can be transported into the world of animals. “We look at what parents may do with their two-legged kids for engagement and try to morph it and use it for their four-legged kids instead,” Kimberly Gatto of The Wagging Tail Pet Grocery & Supply in Las Vegas, NV, says, noting how “hand prints turn into paw prints on objects that can displayed and kept.” Some ideas work and others don’t, she says. “But if you don’t try, you’ll never know.” Indeed, research shows that the further afield and more abstract you search, often the more creative your solution will be. Brendan Boyle, who heads up IDEO’s Play Lab, cites the case of an ER unit at a hospital that was seeking to speed up its response times. While looking at how other healthcare institutions handle the situation may have been the obvious first choice, they found their answers by investigating how a Formula One pit crew shaves seconds off a tire-change.

7. STAY IN BED

The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously loved to lounge in bed and think. It was on one such morning, as the story goes, while watching a fly flitting around on the ceiling, that he came up with the xy plane of Cartesian coordinates. In the pursuit of creative solutions, there’s evidence to suggest that we need to daydream. In short, it’s a good reason to take your foot off the pedal regularly — embrace those moments of afternoon lassitude and aimless conversations in the backroom. You’ll be in good company if you do. Leonardo da Vinci would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.” Einstein had a wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”) on which he liked to aimlessly drift wherever he could find a body of water. Tony Schwartz, in A Better Way of Working, urges you to be proactive and mark off time in your day planner for some “purposeful daydreaming.” Schedule at least one hour a week to brainstorm or strategize around an issue at work. Like Palmer, you can help access your right hemisphere by doodling, daydreaming or going for a long walk — anything that lets your mind wander. That’s when breakthroughs and spontaneous connections are most likely to occur. Neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen, who was among the first to do brain imaging of such periods, says “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the unoccupied brain defaults to creativity.

8. DON’T RUSH IT

A human’s more developed prefrontal cortex — which is responsible for planning and emotion control — is one of the key features that sets us apart from other species. But when it comes to creative thinking, it’s the deeper parts of our brain — the subconscious — that may be our real supercomputer. Yet to bring the subconscious into play usually requires taking a break from worrying about your problem — to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil. In short, it means you can’t rush creativity. Optimizing for creativity, means in a sense ignoring the problem or risk overthinking yourself into a dead end. Creative work depends on a kind of inefficiency. Breakthroughs also depend on being stumped and feeling frustrated. Make the path to them too smooth, and you get lower-quality breakthroughs. In Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into The World, Stanford business professor Tina Selig urges you to bask in your problem for a while. If you go straight to the solution, you will likely end up thinking too narrowly, whereas if you frame it wider, you can often come up with a creative answer. “Living in that problem space and falling in love with your problems is one of the most powerful ways to unlock really innovative solutions,” she says.

9. LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Most people don’t get their best ideas in the same place where they handle the paperwork for re-orders or respond to business emails — meaning their desk. For some, like Einstein and his boat or Descartes and his bed, it’s a regular place that reliably unlocks new thoughts. But most people seem to do better when their senses are triggered in a new way. “Being in environments that have new or novel stimulation in terms of sight, smells and sounds can fire up new circuits of your brain. Your brain becomes open to this new experience, it’s taking in more input and considering problems in new ways,” Cal Newport, computer scientist and Deep Work author, says. “We don’t know exactly how this neuroscience works but it seems to be when you’re in that state, you’re also open to new abstract ideas.” That’s certainly the experience of Karen Conell of The Bark Market in Delavan, WI. “Leave town for a long weekend,” she exhorts. “The ideas flow when I’m away from the shop, even if for just a few nights.” And that’s certainly the experience of Angela Pantalone of Wag Central in Stratford, CT: “I always try to find an hour during my vacations to think about new ideas, revenue generators and employee motivators. I’m an entrepreneur and business owner so I’m always working, but devoting a little time when I’m in a new place outside of my regular scenery somehow refreshes me and lets the ideas flow.”

10. MEET AND GREET (NEW THOUGHTS)

In addition to new physical surroundings, new faces can greatly boost cognitive diversity. On a weekly basis for 30 years, Ben Franklin brought acquaintances with various backgrounds together to discuss ideas in gatherings he called “learning circles.” These weren’t just scientists, thinkers and academics but often leather-aproned individuals who met and discussed what new people, technological innovations or things had arrived in Philadelphia. “And you wonder: How did Franklin come up with the lightning rod and map the Gulf Stream, and the Continental Congress and fire departments? It’s because his portfolio of collaborators was so broad,” Utley says. It’s an approach modern business people implement through “breakfast clubs” with members of their local community. Customers who share feedback on your organization’s offerings and collaborate in developing ideas can also help. And these events don’t even have to be focused on work. Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb urged his readers to “Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.”

11. BE OPEN TO NEW EXPERIENCES

What are you ordering for lunch today? Again? Don’t get that. Try something new. Your curiosity will sometimes lead you to amazing places. According to cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman, “openness to experience” is the No. 1 thing to cultivate for both personal meaningful creativity and world-changing creativity. “What that means is constantly challenging yourself beyond your comfort zone, constantly questioning assumptions, being intellectually curious and appreciating beauty,” he writes in his book Transcend. “Openness to experience” sounds fancy, but it basically just means try new stuff in every sphere: “Any exposure to things that take you out of your normal way of viewing the world really increases cognitive flexibility, and is a core part of creativity,” he says. According to technology writer Kevin Kelly, the optimal balance for exploring new things vs. exploiting them once found is: 1:3. Spend one-third of your time on exploring and two-thirds on deepening. “It is harder to devote time to exploring as you age because it seems unproductive, but aim for 1:3,” he says.

12. REPURPOSE THE PROVEN

Lee Iacocca was chosen as one of Ford Motor Company’s 10 “Whiz Kids” in 1946. But every time young Lee would go to his manager with a suggestion, his boss would say, “Show me where it has worked.” Far from being a mere functionary, a conformist with no courage or imagination, Iacocca credits his boss as being the man responsible for all of his later successes. Iacocca learned from him a pivotal lesson: If an idea is truly brilliant, you’ll find examples of its successful implementation scattered throughout history. The secret of guaranteed success is to import a tested and reliable methodology into a business category where it has never been used. Such an approach is a version of the aphorism “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” While overquoted, there is wisdom in it: In a world that fetishises originality, where a hundred self-help books urge you to have the courage to be “different,” it’s often smarter to hew closer to what actually works. Amy Wolf of The Dog Spot in Joseph, OR, concurs: “Honestly, I look to others for ideas. I read magazines while standing in line at the grocery store. I search the web late at night. I scroll through Facebook for photos. I let others do the deep dive and then take the main idea and tweak it for my specific needs.”

13. BUILD A CAPTURE HABIT

The late comedian George Carlin credited much of his success to a boss he had when he was 18 years old who told him to “write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time … A lot of creativity is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered, and our job is to just notice them and bring them to life,” he said of his lifelong “capture habit.” Sherry Cassin of Meow Mini Mart in Jersey City, NJ, says she collects ideas and tips from her “research time” each morning and keeps them in folders titled marketing, social, merchandising, fashion trends and events, “and when I need to get creative, I just pick up the relevant folder and go through it and, and within a few minutes I always find several ideas to take action on that I am excited by,” adding that while she’s a “paper and pen girl,” the same concept could all be done digitally. The voice-to-text app on your cell phone means a note-taker is never far away.

14. SET CONSTRAINTS ON THE BLUE SKY

In the public imagination, creativity is often portrayed as something unrestrained and wild — that great ideas will burst forth once the reins are eased. (There are no less than three books available on Amazon called Unleash Your Creativity.) But there is also a counter-argument that creativity thrives on constraint. Consider a good haiku or sonnet, and the answer is obviously yes: It’s precisely the limits of the form that inspire new ways of working inside them. Google sometimes puts fewer engineers on a problem than it needs; it inspires ingenuity. In The Art of Impossible, Kotler quotes jazz great Charles Mingus: “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.” The point, Kotler says, “is that sometimes the blank page is too blank to be useful. Constraints drive creativity — that’s why one of my cardinal rules in work is: Always know your starts and your endings. If I have these twin cornerstones in place, whatever goes in between is simply about connecting the dots.” If the problem is complex, it can help enormously by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts and then using constraints to frame the problem and focus attention.

15. BETTER BRAINSTORMING

When a crisis strikes or you just need ideas for a new season’s marketing campaign, management’s reflexive action is usually to call a brainstorming meeting. Get everyone together and watch the ideas fly. But in practice, the results are often mediocre as certain individuals dominate the discourse and the rest of the team quickly falls in line with the first or second idea. Then there are the turf wars, the Negative Nancies/Nathans, pet ideas that people refuse to drop and so on. According to numerous studies, a better approach is to assign your people to come up with ideas on their own first with a reminder that there are “no dumb ideas” and “dare to be obvious not creative” (what feels “obvious” to one person will strike others as novel, even inspiring). And then meet and go over the suggestions in a group. Not only will you get more ideas (a Yale University study found that the number of ideas produced by individuals and then aggregated was twice that of ideas generated by the group working together), but they will be better. To keep the discussion positive, you may want to institute a version of Steve Jobs’ “plussing” rule, where one could only offer a criticism if it included a potential solution. It apparently worked wonders during the hypercritical creativity sessions at Pixar.