Generation
‘A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.’
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
You think coming up with new ideas and brilliant solutions is tough? So is effectively running a brainstorming session. And both the facilitator and participants might need several sessions until everyone clicks with the approach – especially here, where they’ll be using new, creative thinking tools for the first time.
Just getting the hang of any given tool and establishing the best way to run a brainstorming session can take a bit of persistence, practice and training – before you even get to the problem you want to solve or opportunity you want to maximise.
Demonstrate ESP
If you’re the facilitator an important skill to show is ESP: encourage, support, provoke. Encourage people in the group: get them fired up and enthused about contributing. Support their ideas – help the group debate them and develop them and help them turn a tiny seed of an idea into a flourishing solution. And provoke: when the group is becoming staid or the ideas are getting a bit flat, be ready to throw in a controversial idea or challenge people a little more. You need to be creating energy, then harnessing and directing that energy.
Over time a group will start to middle out at a level it finds comfortable – especially if individuals are starting to get a bit tired. That’s why (after a triple-espresso coffee break) you’ve got to fire them up again and get them hitting those peaks ‘out of their comfort zone’.
So you’ve been through the session structure and the rules of brainstorming, and you’ve outlined (and stuck up) the problem/opportunity/innovation need. You may have also run the movie poster icebreaker. And you’ll have asked people to write down their Top-Of-Mind ideas.
Now you’ll go through the creative thinking tool with the group, using the visual and the details described in the action part of the tool’s explanation.
It’s up to you which problem-solving tools you choose to introduce, and when. Typically, for an initial session I’d suggest that you try two different tools for 40 minutes each, then give everyone a 10-minute break, then use another two tools for 40 minutes each. Then you might choose to have a mini-development session (perhaps using the combine and redefine approach) for another 40 minutes.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Give Electronic brainstorming (EBS) a go if you can. People link up via a chat program or other peer-to-peer software, using avatars or names (e.g. Mr Red, Mr White etc. a là Reservoir Dogs) to make contributions anonymously. People add their ideas, which are seen instantly by everyone else connected. People can build on those ideas or use them as inspiration for their own.
There are a number of advantages of EBS: you can do it with larger numbers of people than you can fit in one meeting room; people don’t have to wait for someone else to finish before having their ‘turn’; people aren’t influenced by who said the idea (because it’s anonymous); and because the ideas are being typed in they’re automatically captured for later analysis. It’s not hard to set up so I’d recommend at least trying it, to see if it works for you.
As the session progresses, be sure that the ‘rules’ of brainstorming are being adhered to – particularly focusing on getting a good quantity of ideas down and not judging or criticising ideas. Keep the energy up, the mood positive and encourage people to feel as relaxed and un-selfconscious as possible.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
You know who’s no good in a brainstorm? Perfectionists. You can’t expect every idea you come up with to be good or right or ‘perfect’. So don’t try – or you’ll say nothing. Encourage people to say whatever pops into their head; ‘verbal diarrhoea’ is good in a brainstorm, providing everyone gets to speak. Aim to come up with 50 ideas rather than five. Because, as Linus Pauling said, ‘The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.’
Running your session like this means you’ve spent a morning gathering ideas – and you’ll doubtless have a great quantity of them. Some of those ideas may be partially developed. It’s possible that one or two of them have sprung out of someone’s head fully-formed and flawless, like when Mozart composed whole arias without ever feeling the need to reach for the quill eraser. But a good many more of them will be seed ideas: fertile and full of potential. But in need of development.
Flippin’ flipcharts
I say flipchart; perhaps you’re capturing the outputs in a more contemporary fashion (see EBS in the tip box above). Or perhaps you’re using one of those giant digital screens you can ‘write’ on and then save/print. Perhaps you’re videoing the whole thing, because you’re planning on showing an edit at the Christmas party.
Either way the point is the same: capturing the output of your sessions is really important. Yet so often, it’s done very badly. Inaccurately. Incompletely.
This is such a basic mistake, but it’s one I see again and again. People are coming up with brilliant ideas, but the person writing them up on the flipchart doesn’t capture them properly. Either because they’re rushing, or they don’t understand what’s being said, or they just don’t personally like the idea.
All of which can be fatal for your ideation. If someone’s idea is, ‘Let people create looping, six-second videos that only record when their finger is touching the screen’ but all that goes on the flipchart is ‘short videos’ then you’ve just lost the idea for Vine, Twitter’s phenomenally successful video app.
So, here are three tips for creating notes that do justice to the ideas:
Anyway, before you can say, ‘Where has the morning gone?’ you realise you’ve stacked up a huge pile of life-changing, game-changing, rule-breaking, breath-taking ideas.
You may need to rivet the flipchart to the floor, it’ll be vibrating so strongly with the potential energy you’ve poured into it. You’re Pixar in that lunch meeting I mentioned right at the start. But just like Pixar, now you’ve got to put in the hard yards, developing those seed ideas into something more fully formed.