In 2000, I first started working on the ideas that have developed into the stride4 creativity tool.
As I saw the internet unfolding, I decided to be part of it. It was too big an opportunity to miss. Having spent my career in product design and design management I had a lot of experience to draw on the topics of design and design business strategy. So this was to be my nich, but I wanted to do more than just a topical website.
I started by purchasing a web address of 'theknowledgeworkerstoolkit' and set about reading loads of business and psychology books and creating the knowledge working tools. I spent a couple of weeks searching though the my dictionary for acronym words that will fit with really good rules of thumb for knowledge working.
I soon came up with 'b-o-un-c-e' as 'Build on understanding customer experience' and with 'clout' which was something like 'clear link on your target' and finally with 'st-r-i-d-e' which in those days was.....'set target - research - ideas - development - envisage'.
Julie, my wife kept on pointing out to me though that 'bounce' sounds too much like a washing powder and that 'clout' is not a lot better. I could see a lot of potential though in the word 'stride'. It fitted really well with creative problem solving and progress forward. The more I looked at it the more I realised that if you take the majority of existing problem solving tools they all pretty much boil down to the steps of 'stride'. I knew I had something! and it was up to what I made of it. I was soon getting into 'striding' on 'creative journeys' of discovery! But %#^@!, the web address stride.com had already been registered just weeks before! Stride4.com was free though and I soon realised that you can make more of stride4...... eg Stride4creativity stride4design, stride4whatever plus even better, I realised the '4' works nicely as part of the stride4 creativity process. The four is a reminder when you are being creative to either expand out your options to four categories to trigger those extra thoughts or to narrow down and group together a wider range of options to just 4 to make your ideas easier to manage and communicate.
So what have I been doing since those early years of stride4? It's been a mixture of working on my design engineering / design management day jobs and developing and progressing stride4. And its been a mixture of developing 'stride4' the technique and 'stride4' the the web presence. My goal has been to progress without external funding. This is perhaps just as well following the dotcom crash of the early 2000's. Its made it a very gradual process though, as basically doing it with zero funding has meant doing everything myself. It's given me a great broad knowledge though to build on my product design and engineering skills. I now know a fair amount about web site building using Drupal, about website layout and aesthetics and I am pretty knowledgeable on web trends.
So after much research and trails, Stride4 now stands for the creative process of 'Set Target, Reality check, Decide + Do Effective action' Give it a go. You might just surprise yourself on how powerful the stride4 creative process can be!
