Development
‘Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best.’
TIM DUNCAN
One idea will prove the spur for another.
Building on ideas, developing them, enhancing them, it can all happen during the session.
There’s a belief that brainstorming should only be about getting the largest possible quantity of ideas – and of course that’s important. But, while everyone’s fired up and ‘bouncing ideas off each other’, it’s invaluable to have people and ideas interact. Idea A may not cause someone else to come up with Idea B, but they may come up with Idea A Ultra.
The facilitator needs to find the right balance, which will depend on the speed of the session and the personalities involved. Some development and ‘Oh yes, and what if …’ positive building is great – just watch out that the session doesn’t get bogged down endlessly debating and refining one idea during the idea-generation process or lots of other potential winners will get lost.
But clearly, you’re not going to finish a brainstorming session with every idea perfectly polished. After all, storms aren’t really the best environment for polishing.
Having spent time thinking up ideas, you need to spend some time thinking about those ideas. It’s time to push them, prod them, pull them apart and put them back together in better shape than they started.
Are they any good? Could they be better? Of course they could. Does spending a bit more time discussing one of them inspire someone to think of something stronger? In problem solving, 1 + 1 = 3.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
At the end of your generation, when you’ve got all the ideas captured, read them out loud to refresh everyone’s memory.
Then everyone gets three votes. Read through the ideas again and everyone gets to raise their hands three times, to vote for the three ideas they think have the most potential. Write the number of votes against each idea. The three highest scores in this vote-off can be your first candidates for development.
There are a number of routes you might choose for a development session:
- The original group could work on them on the same day.
- The original group could work on them at a later time.
- A smaller group (a subset of the original) could develop them.
Getting the entire group to give up a whole day might be a big ask. The advantage of getting people to work on it the same day is that they still remember the ideas well and their brains are in a heightened state of creativity. The disadvantage is that you might all be mentally knackered.
In which case, schedule in a development session for a few days (no more than a week) later. Use an exercise like the movie poster icebreaker (perhaps developing a poster for one of the solutions you have, rather than of the problem again) or the ‘Mad Inventor’ described in tool ix, random insertion, to get everyone back into a creative, collaborative mindset.
It may be that you feel the whole group isn’t needed (or efficacious) for developing ideas. That’s OK; just bring in the people you feel are right – but try and maintain a bit of variety in personality and experience.
Whatever you do, you’ll be going back to the flipchart and panning for gold.
Turning a good idea into a great one
Here are four suggestions for developing ideas further.
i. Distil not dilute
Remind everyone – as often as needed – that development isn’t about trying to make a solution more palatable to the business. You’re working with the aim of making the solution more potent. Don’t worry, the desire to dilute will come from other people soon enough, when you get to implementation. But for now, work like idealists to push the idea on.
Do great business breakthroughs come about as a result of compromise and dilution and trying to please all of the people all of the time? No, of course not.
ii. Combine and refine
We’ve already talked about the idea of using multiple tools on one problem/opportunity not merely to try different ways of cracking the same starting point, but to try and take each step of progress on a little further. It may be that when you come to development sessions, you want to try this angle again.
For instance, give yourself a new constraint: how do we do this solution, but for half the price or in half the time? Or think bigger: could this idea be used in a broader context than we’re currently considering?
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
As Leo Burnett said, ‘When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ What’s the equivalent here? To take the idea you’ve got and push it to the nth degree; be really demanding of yourselves and say, ‘How could this solution be amplified even more?’ As Spinal Tap would say, turn it up to 11.
iii. Persistence beats resistance
A really important one this: just keep going. I’ve already said that a thinking tool can provide the 1 per cent inspiration, you need to provide the 99 per cent perspiration. So show some persistence: if you believe you’ve got the nugget of a great solution, keep discussing it, researching it, prodding it … really work your brains and bounce ‘What if’ ideas off each other to take things further – beyond what your business has ever done before. Perhaps beyond what anyone has done before (especially if you’re looking for a real innovation).
And be critical of yourselves: Are we going far enough? Are we thinking broad enough or deep enough? Be excited: how far could we take this? And as I say, be determined: we’re not giving up ‘til we’ve cracked it. Instead of saying, ‘It doesn’t quite work’, make your mantra, ‘It doesn’t quite work … yet’.
I’m back to Edison again and his famous quote, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.’ Or Henry Ford, who when told he’d been lucky, replied, ‘Yes, I have been lucky. And I find that the harder I work, the luckier I get.’
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
I’ve already mentioned spider diagrams in interrogate and extrapolate; they can be useful here too. Or try a digital version like the MindNode app. You’ve got your core new idea at the centre. Now when people come up with an addition or refinement, that becomes a new node off the centre. That new thought may inspire a comment from someone else – if it’s related to the new node, then it comes off that one. But if it’s just connected to the initial idea, it comes off that central node. That way you have a visual, at-a-glance representation of the relationship between – and relative scale of – each development.
Unlike the sequential nature of flipchart recording, spider diagrams can encourage the group to build on an area, rather than just adding to a list with a new, unrelated thought each time.
iv. Play angel’s advocate as well as devil’s advocate
I always think it’s nice to play angel’s advocate first. Ask: what do we like about our idea? What are its strengths? Try this: get everyone involved in development to say, in turn, something positive about the idea being discussed. What’s a benefit of it? Go round the room several times – force people to keep coming up with new positives. For one thing, it’ll give you a great list of ‘selling points’ when you want to get the idea implemented by the business – a list of benefits more comprehensive than you may have captured up until now.
But discussing benefits can also surprise people: a benefit that one person thought was obvious (so didn’t previously mention) is something another person had never considered. But now they’ve heard it, it’s given them another idea, or a thought to augment that benefit’s effect.
Then, after the angel’s advocacy, it’s time for the stress testing. Ask what isn’t great about the idea; what its shortcomings might be ‘in the real world’.
You don’t want to take the edge off (or lose enthusiasm for) your solution by getting too ‘practical’ too soon. But looking at it this way can be useful because now you’re creating new, smaller problems – problems around implementation of your great idea. And since you’re in a roomful of problem-solving experts at the top of their game, what better time to explore some of those problems. Tackling them might well make the initial idea even stronger.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
I’ve seen it in advertising agencies many times: the client comes back with amends on your work, telling you there’s such-and-such an issue with it. And the creatives groan and moan and curse the heavens. But then they go and work on the work to address the problem. And do you know what: often, afterwards, they’ll grudgingly admit that the idea is now stronger than it was before.
Contributing after the session
At the end of the session(s), people will be tired, but (hopefully) buzzing. You’ve made great progress. In a day’s work you’ve got further than you had in the previous six months. Time for a celebratory, restorative lunch.
But people’s brains might keep working, even after the development. There might be an idea or two that particularly resonates with them. So at the end of any session, make it easy for people to add further thoughts later. Give them an email address. Email them the notes. Tell everyone you want them to say something more on the subject – that you want comments on the notes, particularly any other ideas/developments. Once people have had a few days to absorb the session and ruminate on it, what you might get back is just a collection of ‘My favourite is number 3’ or ‘Number 4 will never work’. But you might just get back a little gem.
So make it clear: just because the problem-solving session is over, doesn’t mean the problem solving is.
The session is the beginning. The successful implementation is the end. What happens in between is also important.