Brainstorming Methods - Similes and Pass the Parcel

Hello, Paul Sloane here. I facilitate many brainstorm sessions with major corporate customers around the world. And in this creativity series, miniseries, I'd like to share some techniques with you, advanced brainstorming techniques. And I want to show you 2 methods that I find particularly useful, particularly strong tools. And the first of them is called similes. Or 51 miles as one of my customers once called it. And in similes what you do initially is you don't try to solve the problem. You try to think of a problem in another walk of life which is like your problem. So you write down your challenge. Our challenge is to recruit the best engineers or to double our market share or to halve costs or whatever. You say who had a similar problem to this? Who faced a similar challenge? Issue, but in a different field. And I don't mean an adjacent business field. If we're a retailer of books, you know, what did a retailer of magazines have? What you say is, who had a problem like this in warfare, or in the arts, or in sport, or in music, or in education, or in medicine? Who's got this kind of problem in a different walk of life entirely from our walk of life? And what did they do about it? Maybe they solved it, maybe they didn't. Maybe they've still got that problem. So everybody in the brainstorm meeting writes down 1 or 2 similes if they can. And they start with the sentence, our problem is like, and they say our problem is like something else. And then you share them. Now it's quite difficult finding a good simile, but the good news is you only need 1 or 2 in the whole room for it to work. You don't need every simile to be good. So you talk about them and then you choose the one that people feel in its essence, in its core, is closest to your challenge. And then you brainstorm that problem. You don't brainstorm your problem. You brainstorm that problem. You generate all sorts of ideas for that problem. And then for each of those ideas you say, does that translate into our environment? How would that move across? And what would it look like if we took that idea from this environment in the hospital into our environment in the drugstore or wherever you are? And that's the way it works. So I did this with a newspaper group, and one of the challenges was how can we reduce absenteeism? That was the challenge. And people wrote down various ideas, and they said, our problem is like, and they had to find similes. Something which was similar, in their opinion, to the problem of reducing absenteeism. Who has this problem of getting everyone to turn up on time? And here are some of the suggestions that came up. Somebody said it's like getting a child to brush his teeth. Somebody said it's like persuading undergraduates to go to lectures. They don't have to go to lectures. They can stay in bed all day if they want. Somebody said it's like sticking to a diet. Somebody said it's like getting the 3rd football team to show up for a match on Saturday. Not the best team, the 1st team or the 2nd team, the most brilliant team. prestigious teams. But the third team, how do you get them all to show up? Somebody said it's like getting teenagers to clean their rooms. Somebody said it's like making motorists observe speed limits, getting people to come to work in the morning. So we listed all of these and then we discussed them a little. And the one we chose to go with was it's like getting the third football team to show up for the match on Saturday. And we said, what would you do? How do you get them to show up? And a lot of the— we came up with lots of ideas. A lot of the ideas were to do with peer pressure. If you didn't show up, you were letting your mates down. And when you saw them later in the pub, they'd say, you know, we lost 7-nil because we didn't have a goalkeeper, and where were you? And if you said, I wasn't feeling very well, you'd feel bad. And then we took that concept and we said, how would that apply in the newspaper office, in the telesales department if somebody doesn't show up? And we decided that peer pressure was the way to encourage more attendance and discourage absenteeism. And we came up with ideas including league tables and percentages and charts which were commonly available so everyone could see who had the best percentage attendance and who had the worst. And therefore we allowed individuals in the team to effectively put a little bit of pressure on their colleagues because a lot of absence was making it harder for the team to achieve its objectives and its bonuses. So that's the way it works. You don't try and come up with ideas directly. You look elsewhere. You find a simile, a different walk of life where there's a similar problem. You brainstorm that area. You generate lots of ideas. And then you see how those ideas would translate, how they would move across, and what they would look like if you took them. So that's similes. And that works generally quite well. It takes a little bit of time, but it generally works well. The next one I want to show you is called Pass the Parcel. This is quick and fun and generates a lot of creative ideas very quickly. And what you do is you choose the problem or challenge again, and then people working individually each takes a sheet of paper, and they have to think of an absurd, ridiculous, bizarre, ludicrous, impossible, illegal, immoral idea which would solve the problem. The only good thing about the idea is it would flatten the problem. It would completely overcome the problem, but it would not be something that the organization would do because it's just so outrageous. It's so bonkers is the word we use, daft, crazy, bizarre. But everyone has to do that. You can't— you're not allowed to write down a reasonable idea. We're not looking for a reasonable campaign here or sensible approach, we're looking for something which is the opposite of sensible, something which is just absolutely off the wall. Everyone has to write down one of these. Some people find this a little bit difficult, but it's good, and some people find it amusing. So everyone writes down their idea, and then they pass it around the room. So you receive a sheet of paper from somebody else who's written down their crazy idea. And then you read that and you have to write down below it a second idea which is different but based on it in some way, triggered by it in some way, but it's still wild. It's not a reasonable idea. It's not something the organisation could or would do. Maybe it's not quite as outrageous as the first idea, but it's still wild. And then when everyone's done that, you pass the sheet of paper again. And everyone now receives a sheet of paper with 2 different ideas from 2 different people. And what you have to do now is generate a creative, radical, but workable idea based on what you receive. So if you receive 2 outrageous ideas that are possibly illegal, immoral, impossible, absolutely outrageously expensive, breaking the laws of physics, all sorts of things that are not possible. You've got to generate something, and that's the starting point for your idea. So then everyone should have at the end of this process, it only takes 10 minutes or less, everyone's got a really creative idea at the bottom of their sheet of paper. You then divide into small teams, typically 3 or 4 people in a team, and you discuss the final ideas, and you select the best one in that group, and then you might come back and select the best one overall. So very quickly you'll have a number of good ideas in the group, and then you select the best one or the best 2, and off you go. You're ready to implement. So this is what the form looks like. You start with the challenge, a bizarre ridiculous idea, a wild idea based on the first one, and then the 3rd session really is a creative workable idea based on the 2 ideas above. And this is— there is a pre-printed form that we use. Pass the parcel it's called, and this is what it looks like. But you don't have to use this form. You can just use your own. I did it once with a telecoms company, and the challenge was how can we motivate people and improve their performance? And somebody wrote the first idea he wrote down at the top of the sheet of paper was we hold a black mass every Monday morning. And we have a human sacrifice of the worst performing individual from the previous week. That's the sort of idea you want because it is, I'm pretty sure it's illegal. It's not something most telco companies would consider doing and it would certainly motivate you. You wouldn't want to be a human sacrifice, would you? So by the time it went through the process, what came out at the other end was we will hold a monthly staff meeting at which the highest performing individual is recognised and praised. And where we have a virtual sacrifice of a competitor, we will describe how we're going to beat a competitor in the marketplace. So the idea of the sacrifice was retained and became something creative in the final version. The final version was workable and implemented, and it helped. So that's the way it works. You start with something absolutely bizarre, and you end up with something creative. What's very clear in brainstorms is it's much easier to tame a really wild idea than it is to make a bland idea interesting. So if you start with the really ridiculous, you end up with the creative. If you start with the reasonable, you end up with the bland. So those are the 2 methods I would commend to you, pass the parcel and similes. And the summary generally in brainstorming is very simple. You collect a diverse group of people, different backgrounds and experiences, men and women, You brief them beforehand. You say, we're going to meet tomorrow morning at 8:30 to come up with ideas for how we can whatever. You then use some of these methods. You use divergent thinking to generate many ideas, whether you're using similes or random word or pass the parcel or anything like that. You then use convergent thinking to select the best ideas using some agreed criteria. So we're looking for ideas we can implement in the next 12 months which will really please customers and will really increase our brand awareness, or whatever. Some simple criteria which help you select. And then once you've chosen the very best ideas, you can't implement all the ideas, there's far too many, but you select the very best ones, you put them on the action list. You put them on the to-do list. You make things happen. And then people will be motivated. People see actions coming out of brainstorm meetings. It feels great. If they go in and generate lots of ideas and then nothing ever changes, it's demotivational. So those are my tips, and those are 2 advanced techniques. If you've got any questions or you want to contact me, here are the details. Here's my email address and my website. And I'd like to wish you good luck and great success with your brainstorming.