Jump Start Your Brain. Doug Hall

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      Settling in for a long soak one day around 250 BC, Archie was preoccupied with finding a way to determine the proportion of gold to ordinary metal in King Hieron’s crown. Evidently, the king suspected he had been shorted by his royal crown supplier and was interested in ascertaining whether the crown on his head was mostly, if not all, gold or some cheap imitation. At the time, the weight of gold per unit volume was well known. But given the intricate nature of the crown’s design, with all its curlicues and whatnot, it was impossible to measure its volume.

      So as Archie lowered himself into the tub, he noticed his bath water rise. The lower he sank, the higher the water rose, until it overflowed. The stimulus of the overflowing hot tub gave Archie an epiphany. He suddenly realized he could measure the volume of the crown by simply dunking it in a tub filled to the brim, then measuring the water that overflowed.

      Archie leaped from his tub and ran naked into the street hollering “eureka!” Thus, in the grip of inspiration, he also invented streaking. And it didn’t end there–the hot tub revelation led him to the discovery of the law of specific gravity and the general science of hydrostatics.

      Forty-something—From Idea Guru to Idea Factory Engineer

      Eureka! success was tremendous. We had an industry-leading 88 percent repeat rate from some of the world’s most demanding clients. However, much of our success came from my personal ability to think bold thoughts. Or as Inc. Magazine described it: “Most of the winning creative leaps, most of the marketplace-driven reshaping of raw ideas, took place in the caffeine-stoked furnace of Hall’s own uniquely nimble mind, often at 2 or 3 a.m. during 72-hour sessions with clients. That’s when the real rubber hit the road.”

      In the same article, writer John Grossmann described Eureka! as a professional practice not a reproducible business. “At the end of the day, Hall was no different from a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck or a wrench-twisting plumber. It all flowed through him. It worked because I ran around like the guy spinning plates on The Ed Sullivan Show,” I told Grossmann.

      Near this time, I traveled to the North Pole by dog sled. It was a brutal 200-mile trip at 40 below zero. During the trip I came to the realization that my “legacy” to date included the creation of new types of tortilla chips, candies, caskets, credit cards, and cars. And while it made me laugh—it was not exactly what I had dreamed my impact on the world would be.

      On the way to 90 North a new vision was born: a dream to translate what I’d learned into a reliable and reproducible business; to make the creative impact I delivered to my small, select group of corporate clients available to the masses of Real World entrepreneurs and corporations around the world.

      When I returned to the world of the warm, every Eureka! session became a laboratory experiment. I became fanatical about measurement. We measured client teams’ states of mind before we worked with them. We measured them during the process of creating. We measured the end quality of all final ideas and their eventual impact on the world. We then did correlation and regression analysis to help us understand how to modify our actions to maximize client success.

      The Eureka! method went through rapid transformations. As of this writing, we are at Eureka! 7.0—the seventh version in 21 years. Today’s approach reliably helps companies develop measurably smarter choices for growth. To be specific—Eureka! 7.0 develops some 12 times more “big ideas” than Eureka! 1.0.

      Most important of all, it’s a reliable and reproducible system. This means that others can be trained to lead Eureka! Sessions with the same reliability as me. The chart below shows how even rookie facilitators generate results from each of the six cycles of a classic Eureka! Session that are nearly identical to those when I am in charge.