INBOUND Bold Talks: Jason Keath "Why You Suck at Brainstorming"

All right, so this is the title of today's talk. So I assume all of you suck at brainstorming since you're in the room with me today. Subtitle where the hell do ideas come from? What we're going to talk about today is not only brainstorming, but creativity, how to develop ideas. Brainstorming is, of course, just a creative process. It's the most popular creative process. Anytime we have a problem, anytime we need a big idea, we have a brainstorm meeting. It's a Go to Corporate America staple, right? And they're not always so successful. How many times have you had a brainstorming meeting and it really changed your company? You know, it really. Everything changed right after that. Good one. It doesn't happen a lot, but what I want to help you with today is how to be more creative as an organization, as a team, as an individual. How to get better at developing ideas. So we're going to start where all creativity starts, with Pop Tarts.

The Pop Tart, by the way, was a moment in time. And when I was. I was about 8, they invented the Pop Tart. The back of my head blew right off, right? Do you remember, like, what. I was in the supermarket aisle with my mother and I'm like, hold it, hold up, hold everything. The hell is that? Fruit filled frosted rectangles in a box. The same. The food is in the shape of the box. What is this? And you open the packet. How many were in the packet? Two. Why two? One's not enough. Three is too many. That's why it was perfect.

So he keeps going those 45 seconds of like a three minute bit called Pop Tarts by Jerry Seinfeld. Now, Seinfeld is one of my favorite comedians. I think most people would agree he's a comedic genius, one of the best comedians in the world. These are his actual notes from that joke. The interesting thing about the Pop Tart joke is how long it took him to write. How long do you think it took him to write that joke? Just shout it out. Six months, A minute. So we're going long and we're going short. This is some extremes. It took him two years to write that joke. You can't really tell by the notes, but two years to write one joke. So, you know, I'm sure he didn't write it all in one sitting or that's all he did for the two years he had royalty checks to cash and brunch with Kramer. And whatever Seinfeld does, I have no idea. But the point is that Someone as talented, even someone as talented as Seinfeld, struggles with creativity, struggles with inspiration. So let's talk about the word inspiration. The word inspiration, we use it as the source of where our ideas come from, right? It means to inhale, the oldest definition of it. To inhale, to breathe in, to take life into your body. It's a very, you know, poetic word, romantic word, and we use it that way. We use it very romantically. We use a lot of words to describe creativity on kind of a higher plane. We put it up on a pedestal, which is good, but it also makes it seem less achievable. It seems like it's hard to be a very creative individual. We think of people like Steve Jobs as a very gifted person. He was very gifted at creating new products. We think of J.K. rowling as an inspired writer. We think of Jay Z's new album as genius, right? We use these words that put creativity on a very high plane, and it makes a lot of people not try to be that creative because they just don't think they're on that level. When in reality, you can learn to be more creative, both as an individual and as an organization. There's a lot of research that's coming out in the last five to 10 years and studying creativity, which hasn't really been done before, and you can learn to be more creative. There's a lot of fundamentals that help us teach people how to kind of open their minds and how to bring in some fundamentals of creativity into their lives and into their organizations more often. So it's almost as though we treat creativity as a sort of magic. And one of the things I want to do is demystify that today. And the way we're going to demystify that is talking about these three fundamentals of creativity. Freedom, scale, and friction. Those first two, freedom and scale, are basically the creative process. It's the early beginning of the creative process, which is the most important part. That's where most of us screw up. That's why most of us suck at brainstorming, because we screw up very early and then the rest of the process is just screwed. The last one, Friction, is the inspiration piece. It's where ideas truly come from, connections between other ideas. So we'll start with freedom. Freedom is incredibly important at the start of creativity, at the start of developing new ideas, because it's how we open our minds up, right? It's how we come up with the big ideas. Anyone can come up with a very obvious, a very simple idea, a very simple solution to a problem. But to get the really big ideas, the really unique ideas, you, you don't have a brainstorm meeting to come up with the obvious solution. You have a brainstorm meeting to what, come up with unique ideas, new ideas, big ideas. Right. And that only happens when you're able to open your brain up, when you're able to have freedom to kind of explore more than you normally would. Big ideas do not grow in cramped spaces. So there's a nice metaphor here I like to tell people, which is if you buy a fish and you put it in a fish tank, there's a lot of species of fish that will often grow to the size of the enclosure you put them in. If you have a little tiny fishbowl, it's going to be a little tiny fish. And if you have a much bigger fish tank, it's going to grow to be a much bigger fish. Ideas are the same way. Ideas grow to the size of the enclosure they're in. So if you put employees in a box, if you put yourself in a box, if you restrict your brainstorm team a lot, then their ideas are going to be small. If you give them more freedom, they're going to be able to come up with bigger ideas. So a great example of this, one of the most famous corporate examples of this is the Google 20% rule. How many people have not heard of the 20% rule? Just a handful. So Google is very famous for giving their employees 20% time, which means 20%, one out of every five hours, one day out of every week they can spend working on whatever Google project they want to work on. It's been so successful for them, this freedom that they give their employees that over half of their new projects as of a year ago come from 20% time. Things like Gmail, things like AdSense, which is over a quarter of their revenue, things like Google Talk, and all because they give this freedom to their employees to work on the projects they're passionate about, to work on their pet projects. It's a bottom up innovation solution for a company. So they achieve a very creative corporate culture through that freedom they give to employees. That same freedom is just as important in a team brainstorm meeting, and it's just as important to individuals trying to be creative. If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Great Einstein quote. And what we're talking about here is again, the big ideas. You want to make sure you're not only giving people freedom to think in big directions, to think in new directions, and Absurd directions, but you want to encourage it. You want to push them to those levels because that's how you leap over the obvious. That's how you leap over the simple solutions. The people that coined the term Brainstorm was the New York ad agency BBDO, and it was actually Alex Osborne back in the 30s. This is a photo of an actual BBDO brainstorm meeting in the 50s. This, you know, very Mad Men style. It's not as glamorous as Mad Men, but it's, it's very accurate. And the number one rule that BBDO had, and this has stayed true for a lot of Brainstorm meetings today, and you'll hear it in a lot of, a lot of these meetings, is that there's no judgment, right? No criticism, no. Saying that does not, we don't have budget for that. That doesn't really fit in the scope of the project. In the early days or the early moments of a creative process, you want to have no restrictions on thought. You want to have as little criticism as possible. And this allows people to jump to those bigger ideas, to jump to as many ideas as possible, which is the next fundamental scale. So once you're able to open your mind, once you've given people the freedom to really stretch their mental capabilities out, you then have to generate as many ideas as possible. No one ever invented the light bulb on the first try, right? You have to generate more ideas to get to that great idea. Ideas come from connecting other ideas, connecting other concepts. In order to get new ideas, you have to stretch as many ideas out of your system, out of your team as possible. It's totally fine to fail. You just have to fail fast. Marissa Meyer, she said this while she was at Google and now she's probably living at Yahoo a little bit. But what she's talking about here is the same thing. Moving past mistakes, moving past simple ideas, moving past the obvious ideas and learning from them along the way. One of my favorite examples of scale helping creativity is from Saturday Night Live, the Weekend Update skit. This is my favorite skit of snl. I will often watch SNL and hate most of the skits on it and turn it away and say, I'll turn it back when Weekend Update comes on because it's always funny. It's been on air since SNL's been on air. In the average Weekend Update airing, they tell 15 to 20 jokes and they're usually, like I said, very high quality jokes consistently. How many jokes do you think they pitch to come up with those 15 to 20? I can't hear any of you. You gotta speak up. 500, 200, 1,000. They pitch over 800 jokes. I don't have a price is right prize for ever said 1000, but over 800 jokes every week. Every week they have a live episode that's over 50 times the number of jokes they need. And that number kind of, kind of is consistent across a lot of creative endeavors. 50 to 100 times what you need out of your creative process is what you should start with. So if you have a client that you need to take, if you're an agency, you have a client, you need to take a solution to them, and you know, they typically reject the first one. So you better have two backups. You need three solutions. So you need to be brainstorming with 300 ideas, 150 to 300 ideas, at the beginning of your process. It's a lot. But it's important to do that scale in order to get all the obvious stuff out of your system. In order for a team or for an individual over time to make more connections with more raw materials, those ideas are the canvas that you're going to paint on. Right? I call the process of a scale, of a volume of ideas, broadening or growing your canvas, because those initial ideas are your room to work with or your room to play later on in the creative process. So the more you have, the more room you have to play with. And there's no ceiling on it. 50 to 100 is just kind of a minimum. You can go as large as you want. So freedom and scale are the first two fundamentals, and they really encompass the beginning of a brainstorm meeting, which is all about getting a large number of ideas out there in the beginning. Friction, the third fundamental, is all about, like I said, inspiration is all about the source of new ideas, the source of creativity, both for an individual, both for an organization. And friction. And focusing on friction is how you're going to improve your own creative abilities. So friction, without getting too geeky or sciencey, mainly because I'm not smart enough, is two objects brushing up against each other, right? They affect each other. They might accelerate each other. They might deform one another. There's a push, there's a pull. They affect each other. Ideas are the same way. Ideas thrive on that friction. They thrive on the effect they get from other ideas. That's why when you get more ideas out on the table, out on the whiteboard, you're more successful in coming up with new ideas because there's more friction. Opportunity. So it was a little Funny, I thought nobody. All right, take that one out next time. So back in the day, there's this gentleman named Bernard Sadow. And back in the day, when Bernard was working in his luggage company, he lived in a time where men would always carry the suitcases for their wives. Always very chivalrous. Probably still happens a little bit today, but it was always back then. So Bernard was on a vacation with his wife. He was coming back from that vacation. He was walking through the airport carrying three or four suitcases, struggling, much like this gentleman in the image, probably. And they came to the big opening in the airport, and he was starting to really feel the weight. Anybody that's carried something over a long distance before starting to really feel it in his shoulders and his back. He wasn't complaining. He was being a man, but he was starting to feel it a little bit. And all of a sudden, he sees this employee for the airline pushing this machinery across the same space, much heavier, probably like 10 times heavier than what he was carrying. It had no problem, was streaming past him, and it's because it was on wheels. So Bernard turned to his wife and said, why don't my suitcases have wheels? And she probably said something smart to him. I don't know. He works for a luggage company for 20 years. It took him that long to think of it. But that day, he invented the wheeled suitcase, the first one. Bernard's company patented and sold the first wheeled suitcase. And it was from that moment of friction between his expertise and that aha moment he had in the airport where he had heavy bags and he saw something on wheels, and he had that idea, that friction between his expertise and life experience. Ideas come from expertise brushing up against life experience. And it sounds a little vague, and you know, that's a real world example from the wheeled suitcase. But if you want to increase your creativity, life experience is the way to do it. And not just traveling the world or something abstract like that, but reading more and watching videos that you wouldn't normally watch, reading magazines from other industries. Another example we see in TV a lot, you see on Mad Men, you have Don Draper on House, you have Gregory House. Both of these guys are heroes. They're problem solvers. Both of them have creative teams whose only job is to give them ideas, and they should decide on those ideas. Don Draper and House should decide which of those ideas is best to solve their problem, right? And their teams always suck. Their teams never give them the solution. So they have to leave the office or leave the hospital. And when they do leave, is when they get their aha moment. Now, this is fiction. Obviously, people are writing these for scripts, so it's always perfect. But in life, often you create more friction to feed ideas when you leave your expertise, when you leave what you're focusing on. So if you're a creative team, you'll get stuck a lot because you're too close to the problem. And often the solution that you're looking for or the big new idea that you're looking for comes from the edges of a problem. And you're too close to see the edges on the edges are where the opportunities are. So there's a website, there's a scientific website that for about six years has been taking submissions from companies. It's kind of like 99 designs, except it's to solve big engineering or big scientific problems. And they put a bounty on these problems. So it'll be a big engineering challenge that a company has spent three years on and they can't solve. So they put it out to a wider community. And the average problem on this website gets solved in three to six months. Some of them get solved in days. Some problems are decades old and get solved in hours. It's really remarkable. And often they've studied this. Often the people that solve the problems are not people that have direct expertise, but they have a corollary expertise. They have expertise in the industry beside that, because they can see it from a new perspective. They have enough knowledge, enough expertise to really understand the problem, but they have a unique perspective which allows them to attack it from the edges and see those opportunities. So the final thought I'll leave you with is if you're struggling, if you have writer's block, if your team is really hitting a roadblock on a brainstorm, the solution is often to step back, to take a break, to take a walk as an individual, to listen to some music you haven't listened to, to read a magazine from another industry, step back and look for opportunities to brush up against life in new ways and more often. Thank you very much.