Brainstorm Success

Hello, I am Paul Sloane. I help organizations improve innovation. I run workshops and brainstorms for corporate clients all around the world, and I'm convinced that you can be more productive and get great ideas from your team if you hold regular brainstorms. But if your brainstorms aren't really working or you're not running many of them, it may be because you're not doing it right, and I'd like to share with you in this short video My top tips for a successful brainstorm. And the first tip is this: choose a diverse group— men and women, young and old, experienced and fresh into the company, and maybe with an outsider who's going to bring a different point of view. 6 to 9 people is about the ideal group for a good brainstorm. My second tip is have a very clear objective. Tell people in advance what you're going to do. We're going to meet on Wednesday morning, 8:30, to find ways to improve customer service. And sometimes just changing the words will give you a better result. So instead of improve customer service, reduce complaints, or surprise and delight customers. The next thing I would say is appoint a facilitator. Have an external facilitator, somebody who manages the process if you can. Typically the manager is a very poor facilitator because the manager is so involved in the content, but a good facilitator just manages the process, makes sure you get the ideas, evaluates the ideas, sticks to the process. Ideally, you should meet offsite, not in the office, and I would say not in a hotel. I think somewhere different like a theater, a zoo, a castle, a museum, one of those different kinds of locations which just displaces people out of their normal work environment will get them thinking differently. Now, there are 2 phases to the brainstorm meeting. The first phase is divergent thinking where anybody can suggest anything and come up with lots of ideas. And in this phase, there's no criticism, there's no judgment. You must suspend judgment. The second phase is convergent thinking where you converge on the best ideas by being critical and judgmental and using some shared criteria. So, in the divergent phase, you should go for quantity, lots and lots of ideas. And typically, when I'm facilitating a brainstorm, I'm looking for 80, 100, 120 ideas before we then select the very best ones. And in those ideas, you should go beyond reason. Reasonable ideas are fine, but unreasonable ideas, bizarre ideas, even absurd ideas are quite useful because they provoke further ideas. And encourage people to ride on other people's ideas. When one person suggests something, get other people to build on that. Rather than criticize it. And you should use some techniques which displace people out of their routine thinking. I use lateral thinking techniques such as random word, random photo, scamper, similes, other ones which are all referenced in my blogs and my ebook. Once you've got all the ideas in the divergent thinking phase, then you go into the convergent thinking phase and you set some criteria. You say to the team, we want ideas which are better, simpler, and cheaper than existing methods, or ideas which are new and effective and feasible. So broad criteria. You then narrow down very quickly the 100 ideas into the 10, 12, 15 best ideas. And at that stage, once you've got a shortlist, you can discuss them in more detail. How would it work? Kick them around. Discuss how they could be implemented. And then you select the very best ideas, maybe 2 or 3, that you're going to implement, because there's no point having a brainstorm meeting if you're not going to implement the best ideas. And at this point, you assign actions. You say, John, I want you to do a calculation of what that would cost and bring us back a more detailed proposal. Jane, I want you to check with legal and marketing how we could implement this. And that's how you turn ideas into action. So to summarize, choose a diverse group, have a clear objective, appoint a facilitator, Meet offsite. Divergent thinking, suspend judgment. Convergent thinking, we agree some criteria and we select the best ideas, and then we turn those ideas into action. I'd like to wish you good luck and great success with your brainstorms.