When the breakthrough ideas don’t come, don’t blame the brainstorming process. That’s like giving up on hammers after you smash your thumb. It’s always easier to blame the tool than to question your technique, but focusing on blame will fail to fix the underlying issue—every time.
Too often, managers assume that all they need to do is assemble people in a conference room, offer some cookies, provide a vague instruction to think outside the box, and promise that no idea is a bad idea, for creativity to burst out. But instead, this kind of approach usually leads to a painful, meandering process with no meaningful result; grist for a Dilbert cartoon or an episode of The Office, perhaps, but little more.
There is a better way (though the cookies don’t hurt). In fact, as we argue in our bookThinking in New Boxes, human brains really are not wired to think outside the box. Rather, we need various “boxes”—mental models, frameworks, and theories—to make sense of the world’s complexity. A strategy, a market segmentation, a vision: these and other boxes help leaders interpret and simplify the complex world in front of them.
To really drive ideation, leaders need to shape the new boxes within which their teams can brainstorm freely and productively. BIC, for example, drove decades of successful growth after shifting from the original box that defined its business, “we make affordable plastic pens,” to a new one, “we make affordable plastic consumer goods.”
In short, a good brainstorming session isn’t something that you jump into—it’s something you design.
Based on our decades of experience with driving creativity in our clients’ companies, we offer five suggestions for how to achieve real, valuable insight from a brainstorming session. Interestingly, almost all of these recommendations focus on what you should do before and after the actual session, not during it, since the session itself is rarely the problem. It’s the way people use it that needs some adjustment.
Never forget that framing the question effectively is half the battle. Albert Einstein reportedly said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend fifty-nine minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Extreme, perhaps, but the importance of using an effective question, and laying out specific constraints and criteria for success in advance, cannot be overstated.
A good question for brainstorming will be narrow and concrete, so that people feel they know how to begin answering it. Typically, such a question starts with “How could we…?” or “What if…?” It is visceral, enabling people to instinctively understand it in the context of their situation. For example, rather than asking a broad question, such as, “How can we improve our brand image in the Indian market?” try asking, “How can we get a 25-year old woman in Mumbai to rave about us to her friends?” Rather than wondering, “How can we come up with new marketing ideas for our airline?” try asking, “How can we ensure that our airline is the first thing that every businessperson in Los Angeles and New York thinks of when booking a trip?” or “How can we ensure that every new Expedia customer sets his or her Web browser’s home page to our website?”
Create conditions that foster creativity. Be thoughtful about the environment you create for a brainstorming session. Gather a range of people with diverse perspectives, perhaps even some customers or experts. For example, we asked a toy store owner and a children’s book author to join us in an exercise with members of a company focused on a children’s offering. Try to take people away from their daily routine, to change their perspective and remove their inhibitions. Explicitly encourage full participation, and ensure that junior and senior members alike feel comfortable sharing their ideas, even ones that may seem silly or far-fetched. Make sure that everyone is on board with the plan throughout the exercise: a significant impediment to successful brainstorming is when people in one half of the room are freely generating new ideas while those in the other half are picking those ideas apart.
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