Brainstorming Principles

Hello, my name is Paul Sloane, and I facilitate brainstorms and creativity sessions all around the world with major clients. And I'd like to share with you some tips and techniques to improve your brainstorm meetings and to make them more effective. So, you've probably done some brainstorming, and you've probably got some mixed results with them. And a lot of people think brainstorms are old-fashioned, passé, Been there, done that, but they remain the single most powerful way of generating creative ideas quickly with a team. And if they're done well, they can be motivational and empowering. If they're done poorly, they can be frustrating and demotivational. So there's a big difference. And as you might guess, there's a process for a brainstorm. There's a right way and a wrong way to run a brainstorm. They're not just completely freewheeling. So you probably know or have heard the rules of brainstorming, so-called. You're probably aware of these, that you want quantity in your brainstorm meeting, and initially at least no idea is a bad idea, which means that you must suspend judgment. You're not allowed to criticize the ideas in the first phase of the meeting. You want unreasonable ideas. You want to go beyond what's reasonable and get people out of their comfort zone thinking about things in new ways. And you should build on the ideas of others. So when one person comes up with a crazy idea, other people should ride on the back of it and develop it and take it to new places. And the ideas should be short, specific, and action-oriented. So better communication is not an idea. Hold a meeting every Tuesday morning to review customer complaints is an idea. It's a specific, action-oriented idea. So you're probably familiar with this, and you think, oh well, we know all of this stuff. So let's just see— How good you are with this little quiz. And let's look at the brainstorm meeting quiz, should we, here. So the first question is this. How many people should there be in a brainstorm meeting, do you think? And this is an important consideration, I think, when planning your brainstorm. I think the ideal number is about 6 to 10. I think fewer than 6, and sometimes you don't have enough Of course, you can have a good brainstorm with 4 lively people. But 6 to 10, I find, works really well. More than 10, sometimes it's difficult to capture everyone's ideas, and the facilitator finds it difficult using a flip chart or Post-it note. You can run a brainstorm with a large number of people with software. If everyone's sitting at a PC or a laptop, and you've got a screen, and all the ideas come flying across the screen, You can have an ideas storm with 100 people. But using conventional methods, by which I mean flip chart or Post-it note, I think 6 to 10 is ideal. So if you've got a department of 16 people, divide into 2 eights. Go into 2 separate rooms and have a contest to see who comes up with the better ideas. Okay, let's move on to question 2, what sort of people should you invite? And the answer here really is diverse. You want diversity in a brainstorm. It really pays off. If you get the same group of people who've always worked on a problem, and you put them in a room and you say, think of some new ideas, it's so easy for them to fall into their existing patterns of thought, and to tread well-trodden paths, and go down existing arguments. So you want one or two provocative outsiders if you can in your brainstorm. You want young and old, men and women, experienced and fresh into the company. And as I say, if you can find an outsider who will challenge the way you think, that's very, very valuable in a brainstorm. You want someone who says, why do you do it this way? What's the point of that? And just challenges all the orthodoxies that you take for granted in your group. That brings us on to question 3, which is who should facilitate the meeting? Typically what happens is the manager facilitates the meeting. This generally is a very bad format because it's very difficult for the manager not to shape the content while he or she is facilitating the meeting. That's something the facilitator should not do. The facilitator ideally should be independent and they should manage the process and not shape the content. So what they do is they encourage ideas, they bring out the quieter people, They might have to quieten down the dominant people. They might use some techniques to generate more ideas. They move into the evaluation phase. They manage the timing and they make sure that you get the outcomes that you want from your brainstorm. That's what a good facilitator will do. Now, maybe you can get a trainer from another department or somebody from outside who can help. If not, then choose somebody enthusiastic who can facilitate this and run it well. But ideally it should not be the manager. And in fact that brings us on to the next question, question number 4 on this little list, which is this. Should you, if you're the manager, be present in the brainstorm? Now this is an interesting question and the answer really is it depends. It depends on you and it depends on the issue. But all I would say is this. If you are the manager of the department, Be aware that your very presence in the room can inhibit people from challenging orthodoxies, inhibit them from coming up with unorthodox approaches which challenge how things are done in the organization. And typically the people that work for you, you think you're very approachable and open, but some of them might be a little bit afraid of you and they will say things to please you. They think— say things that they— you you think will accept. And that's not what you want in a brainstorm. You want the exact opposite. You want challenge. You want heretical ideas. You want rebellious ideas in a brainstorm, because that's the place for them. And even though you sit there and you say anybody can challenge anything, people nod and they watch very carefully to make sure. And the first time you are critical of an idea, then that can send a very negative signal. So, If you're going to be present, I would recommend that you use some method, and I can show you some methods, which make the ideas more anonymous and make it easier for people to express unorthodox or controversial ideas. Or else, absent yourself from the first part of the meeting and just come back at the end when you're looking at decision-making and actions to carry on. Either of those. But if you're present in the meeting, you have to be aware that your presence can be an inhibitor. So the next question is this, and this is an important structural question. What are the 2 phases of a brainstorm meeting? People think brainstorms are just about throwing up a lot of ideas, but there's more to it than that. And I think what I should do here is move on to the next slide and explain the process of a brainstorm. The brainstorm starts by defining the challenge. The first thing you do is you define what you're trying to achieve at the brainstorm. And you can do that before the meeting begins. You can say, we're meeting tomorrow morning. By the way, I think first thing in the morning is the best time for a brainstorm personally. We're meeting tomorrow morning to find ways to improve customer service. We're meeting tomorrow morning to find ways to recruit the best engineers. We want to find ways to do more with less resource. We want to find ways to shorten delivery time. Whatever it is, you define the challenge. And the words that you use matter. And sometimes just changing the words in the challenge produces quite a different result in the brainstorm. The first part of the brainstorm is the part you're familiar with, where you generate ideas. And here you use divergent thinking. Divergent thinking means that anybody can go off in any direction and say anything. Ideas can diverge. And here's where you go for quantity and you suspend judgment, and all of those rules that we examined earlier about riding on other people's ideas and going beyond reason. These all apply in the first part of the brainstorm. And in this part you're looking for 80, 90, 100 ideas, literally. A large number of ideas, many of them silly, but you want quantity and you want diversity of ideas here. Then once you've got a large number of ideas, the facilitator says, great, thanks, let's move on. And you move to the second part of the brainstorm, which is evaluating the ideas or selecting the ideas. And here you use convergent thinking, which is a different thinking style. And one of the big mistakes that people make is to mix these 2 styles of thinking. Divergent, you can head off in any direction. Convergent, you're trying to narrow down to select the best ideas. And you do that by using some criteria. When you reach the end of the— you've selected the best ideas, then you assign action. So you say, John, that idea about the hot air balloon trip for customers that don't pay, I want you to check with legal what's involved in that. And Mary, that idea about the purple kangaroo that we have in reception, I want you to check with the zoo and see what it would cost to hire a kangaroo for a day. Or whatever the ideas are that you've developed, you assign actions and you start people working on them immediately at the end of the brainstorming. Brainstorm meeting. So people see an output. They see an outcome. They see a result. They see actions, and it's motivational. So let's just go back to the question in the quiz that was the final question. How do you select? How do you go from 100 ideas down to 3 or 4 ideas? You can't implement 100 ideas, even if they were all good, which they're not. You can implement 2 or 3 or 4 ideas from a brainstorm. And a successful brainstorm is a meeting that produces 2 or 3 good ideas. Even 1 good idea could be a successful brainstorm. But you've got to go quite rapidly from the 100 ideas down to a shortlist, and then to the final selected ideas that you're going to implement. How do you do that? Well, I recommend that you use criteria, broad criteria, which people can apply to help them in the initial pass of the ideas to select the most promising. If you just say select good ideas, that's too broad. If you say select ideas which we can implement this quarter within budget with no extra resource, that's too narrow. You're going to eliminate some good ideas that way. So I think you need a mix of criteria which are neither too broad nor too narrow. And there are a couple that I'm going to recommend to you that I find work really well. And the first comes from Synectics, which is an American management consulting team, and they recommend you should look for NAF ideas. I'll explain what this means in a moment. And Tesco, in their internal suggestion scheme, tell evaluators to look for ideas which are BSC. So what does that mean? Well, Synectics, let's look at that. The NAF ideas are ideas which are novel, attractive, and feasible. And what they mean by that is something new should come through the selection scheme, preferably to something that's been around for a while. Something that's appealing to you and to customers, and something which is feasible. Feasible does not mean easy. Feasible means possible. So what you do is you go through the 100 ideas very quickly, and you say, this one, is this novel, attractive, feasible? No. This one, yes, it's got 2 of them. This one, no. This one's got all 3. And you quickly go through, and you might then end up with a list of 12 or 15 ideas which meet the initial pass. You then discuss those in more detail. How would this work? We could combine this idea with this idea. What would this look like? What would be involved here? You discuss them. And then you might reach consensus. Well, the obvious one is this. It's a no-brainer. We've got to do this. Or if you can't reach consensus, you might vote. So the brainstorm team will vote. Everyone gets 2 votes. The manager votes last if the manager's in the room. And you see which are the most popular ideas from the shortlist. And you select 2, 3, or 4 to implement, I would suggest. Because it's better to take the best ideas and implement them rather than to have a long list, none of which ever So that's the Synectics method, and that's a generic method that works in almost any brainstorm, I find. The Tesco criteria look like this. They say we want ideas which are BSC, and that means better, simpler, and cheaper. And they put this into context for the evaluators by saying this. We want ideas which are better for customers, simpler for our staff, and cheaper for us. And cheaper for Tesco. Any idea which makes things better for customers, simpler for staff, and cheaper for Tesco is likely to be a winner. Even 2 out of 3 is pretty good. Now this criteria works really well for incremental ideas, for process improvement ideas, for cost reduction ideas, and not quite so well for new product ideas or for radical innovation ideas. But it's very good if you've got a brainstorm where you're looking for ways to improve things, improve service, reduce cost, and so on. This works very well. So both of these I would recommend. They're very simple, and yet they speed up the process quite remarkably when you've got initially 100 ideas to look at. You can race through them quite quickly using these broad criteria. There's one other set of criteria which a delegate at a workshop recommended to me when I was talking on this very topic. He said, we use a set of criteria when we're doing new product brainstorming. And we use these criteria: need, greed, succeed, and speed. And what they mean by this is, first of all, is there a customer need for this new product? Do customers need this new feature or new function? Because if not, why are we developing it? Greed means, can we make a profit doing this? Can we make money with this new product or service? Thirdly, can we actually build it? Is it feasible? And can we be a winner in this marketplace? Can we be first or second in this market? And fourthly, and less appropriately sometimes, is speed. This is the least important, but it's also relevant. How quickly can we bring this to market? Can we do this quickly? And any product which ticks these boxes, any idea which ticks these boxes, is likely to be a good new product innovation idea. So if you're looking for new products or services, need, greed, succeed is a very useful set of criteria to speed you through the process. So I think you've seen the main structure there, and you've got an idea of how it works. What I like to do is form the brainstorm challenge using these words, how can we? So in the challenge, you're looking at the outcome, not the method. How can we achieve shorter delivery times on new products? How can we reduce our inventories? How can we significantly improve customer service? So you define the outcome, and then you're completely broad-minded about how you get there. You don't define the method in the brainstorm. You simply have a challenge which expresses the desired outcome. That's the way to do it, and get everyone to write down a how can we challenge. And as I said before, the words that you use here really matter. There was a company that ran a brainstorm and the question was, how can we improve productivity? And they got fairly poor results, not very many ideas with the team that they used it with. They ran a similar brainstorm a couple of weeks later and the question was, how can we make your life easier at work? And they got lots of ideas. And of course many of them were productivity improvements. When you make life easier at work, very often you improve productivity. You eliminate waste or unnecessary processes. So just changing the point of view of the words can sometimes have a dramatic impact. So that's the basic brainstorming. And there are some advanced brainstorming techniques which we'll look at in subsequent webinars. Redefine the problem I've mentioned. Reverse the problem, we'll look at where you try and initially not find the best solution but find something that makes the problem worse. External stimuli is an interesting approach where you use a deliberately random stimulus to take the brain in a different direction in order to come up with more creative ideas. And this stimulus can be a word, a song, a picture, an object, even a walk. And this is quite effective, though it does need to be facilitated because people don't get it initially until they see it demonstrated, and then suddenly the penny drops and it works. But you can have people bring in random pictures. You can have people select their favorite piece of music. You can have people bring in a random object. You can have people go for a walk in a city center or around an art gallery or museum. And you can then force an association between what they've seen, or the object, or the word, and the challenge. And it produces all sorts of crazy ideas, and sometimes very creative ideas. It doesn't always work, but when it does work, it's highly effective. So that's all I wanted to say in this introductory webinar, and in the next couple of these, I will explore some of the specific methods in more detail. But that lays the ground rules and gives you the general principles of brainstorming. And if you follow these, your brainstorms can be much more effective, more motivational, and more enjoyable. So if you want more information, there are more details here, my website and my email. Contact me, I'd be very happy to help, to advise, or to help facilitate your meeting if I can.