Preparation
‘Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It’s knowing what’s right.’
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
I’m not going to labour the point here; it’s all simple stuff but it’s also an area where some problem-solving models get bogged down.
To prepare for your brainstorming session, think about these five things:
First, invite the right people. People relevant to the problem area. Perhaps people who, in some way, are causing the problem. People who are probably going to be involved in the solution’s implementation. People you think are creative thinkers. People who have no connection with the problem, and therefore bring fewer preconceptions in with them. And decision makers in the relevant area. You may not be agreeing a way forward there and then, but it’s very, very good practice to have people in the room who are later able to green light your solution.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
‘Radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines,’ write Dr Karim Lakhani and Dr Lars Bo Jeppesen in the Harvard Business Review of May 2007 (‘Getting unusual suspects to solve R&D puzzles’). ‘The more diverse the problem-solving population, the more likely a problem is to be solved. People tend to link problems that are distant from their fields with solutions that they’ve encountered in their own work.’ Make sure you’ve got people from different areas in the session, to create your own cross-departmental supergroup.
Second, spend some time studying the problem so you have a good understanding of it – its history, how significant it is, which people and areas it affects. If you can monetise it – e.g. get an estimate of how much it might be costing the business – then you’re giving everyone in the session a great incentive to fix it.
Your research might give you some good material for helping solve the problem (or capitalise on the opportunity, if that’s the purpose of the session you’re having) and it will certainly be good for giving everyone a ‘potted history/state of the nation’ address so everyone has the same understanding. Partly for the people you’re inviting along who might not be very close to the problem, but partly because you’ll often find people close to the issue still have different understandings – or different versions – of the truth.
Ensuring everyone has the same, objective and factual understanding of the problem can get you halfway there. ‘A problem well stated is a problem half-solved,’ as inventor Charles Kettering said.
Third: props. Some of the creative-thinking tools suit having props anyway (such as think like another), but there may be other things you want to bring along. Ideally, you’ll hold the session somewhere different to the norm – maybe you can borrow the function room of a local pub or bar; perhaps there’s a museum or gallery or local attraction that has a room available. A different venue can be really stimulating. But, if you have to do it in one of your usual meeting rooms, props will help the session feel different from a typical meeting.
Things like magazines (useful for the icebreaker idea that follows), amusing YouTube videos to get everyone in a positive mood, crayons or chalks instead of pens, modelling clay, board games, interesting objects – anything you reckon might help people free up their minds and develop their thinking, as well as make the session more stimulating and memorable.
Fourth: have the problem written out nice and big, to stick up for everyone to refer to throughout (not just on the first page of the flipchart, vanishing from sight as soon as you start collecting ideas). Having the problem visible at all times will help keep everyone on brief, looking at a standardised expression of the problem, not the version of it they keep in their own head.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
It’s vital everyone has the same understanding of the problem before you begin. Displaying it prominently throughout your session avoids misunderstandings. Unlike when, during filming of the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, director George Stevens tried to get John Wayne to inject more passion into the line Truly, this was the Son of God. ‘You’re talking about Jesus,’ said Stevens. ‘Think about it. You’ve got to say it with awe.’ So the next take, Wayne duly obliged. He paused dramatically.
‘Aw, truly this was the Son of God,’ he said.
And finally, make sure you’ve got the basic stuff you need for a brainstorm – flipchart, paper, pens, sticky notes or cards, sweets/cakes (a bit of sugar has, I believe, been shown to give your thinking a short-term boost), a good-sized room … and enough time booked with everyone for the session to be meaningful. A whole morning, generally. Which is where monetising the problem/opportunity comes in useful. If people are saying they can only spare an hour, remind them there’s £2 million (or whatever the figure is) at stake. Wouldn’t they like to be the person who saved/made the company two million quid in a morning?
(The truth is you may well need more than one session, and you might certainly hold a second session to develop the ideas you’ve generated. But after your spectacularly successful first brainstorm, getting people back together for subsequent ideation should be much easier.)
OK, that’s your pre-session prep sorted: you’re ready with a boxful of iced doughnuts, blank postcards, felt-tips, old magazines and video clips of cats playing the piano. But there’s also some in-session prep: briefing the team on how you’re going to run things and their role in the session.
Structure for the session
At the start of your brainstorm, go through this six-point plan with people on how you’re going to run things.
Of course there’s no problem-solving law (not that anyone’s told me about anyway). So if there are any of these steps you want to miss out or do differently, then just do what feels right for you and your brainstorming supergroup.
TOM
Everyone should get a few minutes to individually capture any ‘Top-Of-Mind’ ideas they’ve had just from hearing the problem (or which they’d had previously, having already known about the problem). Otherwise they may get frustrated that they’ve got an idea but it doesn’t fit with the tool you’re currently running. So they won’t concentrate properly or participate fully. They might even forget the idea they had – and you might possibly, maybe, perhaps have lost a little gem.
So give everyone a chance to write down their initial ideas first – you can then collect them and write them up on the flipchart while everyone is having their first individual brainstorm using the first creative thinking tool you’ve chosen.
1M1
That just means ‘one-many-one’ – i.e. people brainstorm individually, then together as a group, then again individually. Why? Because group brainstorms can encourage some people but discourage others, depending on their personality. They can also set everyone’s thinking in too-similar a direction, following the format of the first few ideas generated. And, if you run a group-only session, you’re actually likely to get fewer ideas in total. Plus, a bit of individual quiet time can help people focus their thinking.
All reasons why it’s better to start by getting everyone to work on individual ideas and contribute them to the flipchart. Then brainstorm as a group. You’ll find some of the individual ideas on the flipchart trigger new ideas from the group. By discussing the ideas already generated, people’s brains will become fired up and generate even more ideas.
Then, afterwards, give people the chance to take the ideas they like best and build on them, or come up with new individual ideas, fired up by the group session, before reporting back again. Let everyone know this time they can work in mini groups of two or three if they’d prefer that to working individually.
I can’t tell you what a difference the 1M1 approach makes – just try it and see. Combining the best of individual and group brainstorming like this should take you much further than either would alone.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
‘Good is a good start.’ Very often, great ideas come about by building on good ideas – so one person has a good idea which gives someone else a new idea which someone else then adds to and so on (read How Breakthroughs Happen by Andrew Hargadon). So create an environment where ideas can be generated and also added to. Let one idea spark another, spark another, spark another, spark the winner.
You can also invoke the ‘classic rules’ of brainstorming. There’s a visual for them in the next section, but they’re listed below, based on the original four rules of Alex Osborn’s 1953 Applied Imagination (where the term brainstorming was first popularised). I’m sure you’ve seen them oodles of times before, but they are worth reiterating at the start of a session as, although people know them, they still often forget them in the heat of the moment.
Rules for the session
| i. | Quantity – Just get lots of ideas down. |
| ii. | Acceptance – No judgements or criticism at this generation stage. |
| iii. | Welcome unusual ideas (it’s easier to later pour water on a fiery idea than oil on a barely flickering one). |
| iv. | Combine – Add to and build upon ideas (without debating them at great length). |
| v. | Don’t talk over one another. |
| vi. | Make sure ideas are accurately captured. |
Finally, as mentioned in the six-point session structure, you may want to run an icebreaker event before you give the group a tool to crack the problem with. Just to get everyone warmed up, interacting, contributing and creative.
A good icebreaker is to divide the group into smaller teams (say 12 people become three teams of four) and get them to create a poster. Using pens, flipchart paper and magazines, scissors and glue, can they create a film poster which brings the problem/opportunity to life? They could do it as a horror, a thriller, a comedy, a rom-com, a period drama, an action movie – whatever they want. (If you want, you could assign each group a different movie genre to get different takes on the same challenge/opportunity.)
Give each group 15 minutes to create their film poster, plus a minute to present back their idea to everyone. It’s a good way to get everyone discussing the problem in a fun and stimulating exercise before you move on to generation. Stick the movie posters up next to the matter-of-fact version of the problem you’ve got written out and you’re ready for the ideation magic.