A client asked me recently: “Where do you get your ideas?”
We had just finished a session where I’d proposed a solution to a problem that had been sitting on his desk, unsolved, for the better part of a year. He’d brought in two other consultants before me. Neither had cracked it.
I told him the truth.
“The shower.”
He laughed. Then he realised I wasn’t joking.
The best solutions I’ve ever built were not designed at a desk. They arrived in the shower — usually the morning after I’d stopped trying to force them.
Here’s what’s actually happening.
When you’re actively working on a problem — staring at a screen, pushing through options, trying to will a solution into existence — your brain is in a focused, analytical state. It’s useful. But it has limits.
It can only work with what’s immediately in front of it.
When you sleep, something different happens. The brain shifts into a consolidation mode — quietly processing everything it absorbed during the day, drawing connections between things that didn’t seem related, filing information in ways that make it retrievable in new combinations.
By morning, the work is largely done. The brain just needs a trigger to surface it.
Hot water. No phone. No interruptions.
No hair to slow things down!
That’s the trigger.
The shower doesn’t generate the idea. It releases the one your brain already solved overnight.
Why this matters for your business.
When clients ask me how I approach a complex process problem, they expect me to describe a methodology. A framework. A structured diagnostic with steps and deliverables.
And there is a methodology. Forty-one years of it.
But the methodology is how I gather the information. The solution itself — the unexpected angle, the elegant simplification, the connection between two things nobody had thought to connect — that rarely comes from the methodology.
It comes from immersing myself in the problem, then stepping away from it.
Walking the Northern Beaches. Sitting quietly. Sleeping on it. Showering.
What I bring to a client engagement is not just four decades of pattern recognition. It’s the ability to hold a problem lightly enough that the right solution can surface — rather than forcing the first plausible one.
Forced solutions fix the symptom. Rested solutions fix the cause.
The practical implication.
If you’ve been staring at an operational problem and nothing is moving — the answer is probably not another meeting about it.
It’s a walk. A good night’s sleep. A shower in the morning.
And if the problem still isn’t moving after that — it might be time to bring in someone who can immerse themselves in it fresh, sleep on it, and arrive with the solution your team is too close to the problem to see.
That’s not a criticism of your team. Proximity is the enemy of perspective. It happens to everyone.
What I’ve seen in over 40 years of consulting:
The most expensive problems in business are rarely the ones nobody has noticed. They’re the ones everyone has noticed, accepted, and stopped believing can be solved.
Fresh eyes and a good night’s sleep have unlocked more value for my clients than any software implementation I’ve ever seen.
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If there’s a problem in your business that’s been sitting on the desk too long — let’s find out whether a fresh perspective can move it.
A 10-minute call is usually enough to know whether what you’re dealing with is genuinely complex, or simply too familiar to see clearly.
→ Book a Priority Call: calendly.com/jurgen139/priority
P.S. The client who asked where I get my ideas? He books his most important thinking time as a calendar block with no agenda and no device. He calls it his shower meeting. His team thinks he’s eccentric. His margins suggest otherwise.