E12: Brainstorming is Stupid

What if brainstorming is stupid? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com and with that, let's get started with today's episode. Today I want to talk about brainstorming, which is something which so many companies do on a regular basis as a way of trying to innovate. And from my perspective, the traditional way that we do brainstorming is just so wildly ineffective. But there is a better way. Before we get to that better way, I just want to share a personal story. This goes back to 1996 and what happened was I was working at Accenture, a very large management consulting firm. Back then it was called Anderson Consulting. And I created, with the help of many people, created and led this 20,000 person innovation practice. And so one of the things that we did is we started off talking about some of the things that we could do for the group. What are some of the things we could do in the area of innovation. And so what we decided to do was be innovative in the way we were going to create an innovation practice. And one of the other team members was leading a brainstorming session and we got started and it was fun. In the beginning, we're doing these wacky creative exercises and coming up with hundreds and thousands of ideas. And then there's a point where I just realized after about two days of work that we were actually creating a lot of work without a lot of result. We had so many ideas, but we had no idea if they were actually interesting, valuable, whether we're going to solve important problems. And, and I basically put the brakes on everything right away and said, we need to have a better strategy, we need to have a better way to innovate. We need to innovate the way we innovate. And so that was sort of the birth of my perspectives on innovation and creativity and recognizing that the way we tend to do brainstorming doesn't work. Now, the reason why I call this episode Brainstorming is Stupid is because my previous book was called Best Practices are Stupid. And just like in the book Best Practices Are Stupid, I say, look, they're not always stupid, sometimes they're valuable. And if you use them right, they can actually be something useful for an organization. And the same is true with brainstorming. Brainstorming isn't inherently bad, but some of the practices we use, some of the ways that we do it are very inefficient. So let me give you five reasons, five reasons that I find that most brainstorming sessions are ineffective. And, and I will give you some possible solutions, possible ways that you could actually make it better. So the first way, the first reason why I think that brainstorming is stupid is most brainstorming sessions start with ideas. So just picture your last brainstorming session. You had reams of flip chart paper and post it notes. And we're always asking people for their ideas. But from my perspective, asking for ideas is a bad idea. We generate a lot of suggestions, but very, very few have potential value of solving an important problem. And the reality is if you start off your brainstorming session with no question, no problem, or if you're trying to solve the wrong problem, nothing you do is going to matter. All those flip chart notes, all those post it notes, all of those ideas filling up walls is going to have no value. This is why I think that most brainstorming sessions are so ineffective is it's about quantity. We don't need quantity, we need quality. We need to have a little more focus. We need to be a little more purposeful. Instead of asking people for their ideas, their opinions, suggestions, which everybody has them, it doesn't mean they're good. What we want to do is start your brainstorming session with the opportunity. Don't start with ideas, start with problems or opportunities. And this is a process that you want to start with. Get the group together, get clarity. And one of the things that I would certainly suggest is using the 25 lenses from the Invisible solutions book. Again, if you need them, go to getthelenses.com and start off your brainstorming session using those lenses. Identify a couple of problems that you think are important. Make sure you have the data to support that they're actually important. Better yet, don't even come to the meeting without having done the research to make sure that you're going to solve an important problem. And once you do that, now use the lenses, that to me is very, very powerful. Because now instead of starting with quantity of ideas, we are starting with the quality of the problem. And I'll talk a little bit more about how can you use the 25 lenses to maximize the value you get from it. Because you can use it some ways where it's not going to be valuable and other ways where you can get just incredibly, incredibly great. Great reframes. The second issue I have with brainstorming is that typically the way we structure the teams, the way we invite people to these Brainstorming sessions does not have any diversity. And when I mean diversity, I mean diversity, diversity of thought, diversity of personality, diversity of experiences. And so if you think about the typical meeting, we bring people from our team. I'm working on a marketing problem, I'm gonna bring the marketing team, I'm working on a sales problem, I bring the sales team. The reality though is if you're trying to solve a sales problem and you only have salespeople trying to work on that problem, you will probably get the same types of solutions you've always had. So we need to start thinking a little more broadly. We wanna bring people purposefully into the meeting. Now, yes, we could bring people from other departments and other functions. That's great. People who have different experiences. So maybe you want people who, for their spare time, they're musicians, or maybe in their spare time they are involved with some types of charity. So that will give them different perspectives. But I would also encourage you to think about in your brainstorming sessions, your internal brainstorming sessions, bringing people from other industries, non competitive companies from different industries can provide some really fascinating input. And another place where I really like to go for diversity is your suppliers, your partners, your vendors. Bring them into the mix because when you get them involved, first of all, they will know what's in their pipeline so they can start talking about some of the features and functions of their products and services that you could start incorporating into your future products and services. The other thing which I think is very important is to make sure when it comes to diversity, I talked about diversity of experiences, but we also want diversity of personalities. About two decades ago, I created something called Personality Poker and it's a card game. And the purpose of Personality Poker is to help people identify what is their strong suit, how do they contribute to innovation and how do they detract from innovation? What is your innovation blind spot and how do you create high performing innovation teams? So here's the thing. If you were to bring only people who are very analytical to a brainstorming session, people were the numbers and data and that's all they had. And that's where you started. Well, the problem is you don't have all the other pieces. What about people who are a little more creative, they think differently, they've had a wider range of experiences, or people who are a little more focused on the implementation side, because as you're developing your innovations, you want to be thinking about the future, how will this work get done? And you also want to be thinking about the who. So we need people who are heart centered, people who are connected to other people because they will help you see blind spots in your innovation solutions. The third reason that brainstorming is stupid is groupthink. And what ends up happening is you think about the typical brainstorming session. There's a leader at the front of the room, they have a flip chart, they have a marker, and then they ask everybody in the room, what are your ideas? And they start writing all those ideas down. Now here's the problem. Once the first person throws out an idea, once the first person throws out a solution, it influences the mindset of everyone else in the room. And what ends up happening is we converge too quickly. Everybody starts thinking the same way because whatever idea or solution the first person suggests is going to get everybody else thinking down that path. So here's what I encourage you to do. Have everybody in your room. Let's just say for the sake of argument, you have 24 people in your room and they're at tables of four. So you have six tables of four, 24 people. What I'd first have you do is have each person in the room individually, individually write down their reframes to the problem, or if you're in the solution finding stage, individually write down the solutions. So coming back to the 25 lenses, what I would have you do is have each person go through the process of taking the original problem statement that the group decided was going to be a good one to work on and have each person individually reframe them. Or maybe you reframe them at your groups of four, but small, small groups. Then once you do that, you start bringing it to bigger groups. So let's say you're in the solution finding portion of the brainstorming session. You're looking for solutions to the problem that you reframed earlier on. Well, have each person write down their individual answer. Then at the tables, have them share what they've learned, what their ideas are, what their thoughts are, what their solutions are, and have them share it at the table. And then each table would report back. And now what you've done is you really maximize the value you get from, from everyone. Now the reason why I think this is so valuable is because also it allows introverts to participate. If you think about most brainstorming sessions, and I'm an introvert, so I'm in a brainstorming session and the person at the front is asking people for their ideas, I don't speak, I wait for there to be an empty pause, I wait for someone else to stop talking. And in most cases, when you have a room of extroverts, everybody's talking all the time. And so I never speak. Whereas if we do this process of individuals writing down what they believe to be true, whether it's the reframe or solutions, and then they bring it to the smaller group, everybody, even introverts, are very comfortable with that process. And then you can scale up. Now what's great is you can do this on a zoom call. I mean, we're, we're virtual right now. It is great because what you could do is take the 24 people, put them into six different breakout rooms, have each person individually write down their reframes or write down their solutions. And then in their small breakout groups, they now share what they came up with as individuals. They all agree upon what they think are the right solutions to put forward. And then we bring everybody back to the main room where each group now does a share of what they thought the best three or four solutions or reframes were. And you get everybody to go through the process of agreeing. So we maximize the collective wisdom of the crowd. This leads us to number four. This leads us to number four. Now most brainstorming sessions are, as I've been describing, there's a leader at the front, you have one person speaking at a time. And so what this does is it actually leads to, in addition to not allowing introvert to participate, it also leads to something called social loafing. Social loafing. This is where some people just sit back and let others do all the work. And so yes, maybe you will break people into smaller breakout groups, but that doesn't give you necessarily the cross pollination. So another way to do this, to move away from the single threading, is to actually have groups that aren't organized randomly, but are organized by topic. Back in the late 90s into early 2000s, I lived in London, England and I lived right across from Hyde Park. Right in London and near Hyde Park. We're in Hyde park, right across from Marble Arch, which is actually exactly where I lived. There's something called Speaker's Corner. And what is really cool about Speaker's Corner is Speaker's Corner is an opportunity for anybody to get up on a soapbox and talk about any topic that they want. And as long as people are interested, they keep on talking and they engage people in the conversation. Once people are bored, they take their soapbox and they go home and anybody can create a new soapbox. I've used this technique a lot in in person meetings, but we can do the same thing with a zoom meeting. Instead of breaking people out randomly, we break them out by topic and we let people choose which topic they want and they stay in that topic for as long as they want. And they contribute and participate as long as they're getting value and giving value. What this does is it allows us to cross pollinate perspectives and people also get to spend their time on what they're most passionate about. Because if people are talking about something that's not of interest, they will start to lose interest. So this is number four. And the last one that I'm going to talk about is innovation as an event. This to me is the biggest issue most of the time when it comes to innovation. Organizations treat innovation as an event. They treat brainstorming as an event. And what I mean by that is it starts and it stops, but it's sometimes disconnected from reality because we're not able to really take all those ideas that we sort of boil down and convert them into results. If you think of the brainstorming session, the event not as the end, but rather the start of a process, you have a much better chance of creating value. And that's been my perspective with innovation all along. If you think about innovation, there are three different levels. There's innovation as an event, innovation as a process, and innovation as a system. The goal is to go higher and higher up that ladder because innovation is episodic. It happens when somebody decides to innovate. It's based on somebody's inspiration. It might be a brainstorming session. Innovation is a process now says we're actually building an ongoing capability. It's not something that stops, but it has a process to it. It keeps on going. And we're able to continually, ongoingly innovate inside the organization. And then finally, the last level is innovation as a system. And when we get to innovation as a system, we're now able to take all of the processes and all the structures we put into innovation as a process and remove them. Those were scaffolding. Those were done in order to help innovation become a repeatable and predictable process. But once you get to that highest level, well, now we can remove them and it becomes part of your DNA. So coming back to brainstorming, what we want to do is just make sure that before the meeting we are clear on what's going to happen after the meeting. Most of the time, things sort of fall apart. You got a bunch of flip charts and somebody transcribes them and they get lost. So get buy in early on the process from the people who are going to make the change happen. If the sponsor and owner of that challenge that you're solving in the room isn't in the room, make sure you have their commitment before you get to the brainstorming session. So that when you come out of the brainstorming session, you have everything lined up. Because when innovation is a process, it is repeatable and predictable. So brainstorming is sometimes stupid. It can be very powerful. It's getting a group of people together to solve a problem, and I think that can be very powerful. But we need to make sure we overcome the poorly defined challenge issue by by making sure we're starting off with a well defined problem. We need to address the lack of diversity issue by making sure that the people in the room have diverse perspectives, diverse experiences, and diverse personalities. We also want to avoid the group think mentality. We don't want everybody shouting out their answers at once. So therefore, we want to divide and conquer. We want to be able to make sure that each person has an equally powerful voice, even if they're an introvert. Number four is the single threading. And this is where we use that speaker's corner technique that I talked about. Instead of just bringing together groups of people, let's get them to come together purposefully around a topic that is of greatest interest to them. And then finally, we want to move away from the innovation as an event to innovation as a process so that we're able to continue the work from the brainstorming session. This is what I do with my clients in if you are ever interested in having a conversation with me about how you can bring these approaches to your organization, certainly just contact me. And as always, if you have a problem you want me to solve on this podcast, please go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com where you'll be able to submit a problem which we will use on a future episode. And again, if you want the lenses that I referred to earlier, go to getthelenses.com that's it for this week's episode of Invisible Solutions. Until next week, happy innovating.