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Tips for better brainstorming

01-Sep-2011

Creative thinking, innovative solutions, new products and services, even completely new business models - one of the keys to continued success in business is a flow of good ideas (followed by the effective business execution of the ideas we choose to take action on).

Many firms gather a group of their key people for an offsite meeting and engage in “brainstorming” in an effort to come up with these good ideas.  However, in most brainstorming sessions there is no real structure.  An external facilitator going around the room asking everyone for ideas, “The more ideas the better”, and asking people to suspend their judgment, “There is no such thing as a bad idea”, and then helping the group to choose their favorite ideas has proven to be an inferior approach.

If you want better results from your brainstorming efforts, an article in McKinsey Quarterly proposes a more efficient structure.  Here is our take.

Ask the right questions.

Prepare a series of questions in advance that will force people to think from unfamiliar perspectives (to jolt them out of their old thinking patterns), and provide the boundary conditions without being so restrictive that it forces any particular outcome.  E.g. “What is the biggest frustration our customers put up with, that we could fix within the next 12 months?”

Choose the right people.

It sounds obvious, but assemble the people who can actually answer the questions you’re asking.  It does not matter where they sit on the organization chart.  If your questions are asking people to think from the customer’s perspective, your frontline staff are better qualified to discuss such matters – not the leaders who are stuck in their office all day divorced from reality.

State the boundaries upfront.

It is pointless to come up with wonderful ideas that the company would not even consider implementing.  What criteria will the company use to make the final decision?  Are there any restrictions or parameters?  (eg: We cannot change our current IT system, and the idea must be able to be implemented within 12 months at no more than a cost of $X)

Everyone writes their own ideas down first.

This tip wasn’t in the McKinsey list, but research suggests that posing the questions and getting people to go away in isolation and write down their individual answers first, and then present their written ideas back to the group encourages everyone to contribute more fully – even the introverts.

Divide and conquer.

Smaller sub-groups of 3-5 people encourage full participation – there is nowhere to hide.  Rather than the typical approach of having 1 person from each functional area in each sub-group, it is better to identify all the “idea crushers” (bosses, loud people, subject matter experts) and put them all in the same group so they can duke it out, without suppressing the ideas of people in the other sub-groups.

Time limit.

To keep people focused, have each sub-group focus on 1 question at a time for no more than 30 minutes per question.  No other questions or ideas outside the scope of that question are allowed. If anyone thinks of a wonderful idea that’s outside the scope of the question, they should write it down and share it later.  A good outcome to aim for in 30 minutes would be two or three worthy ideas, which they then share with the full group.

Closure.

Do not have the full group choose the winning ideas from the pile at the end of the day, as is common in traditional brainstorming. The group won’t always understand the tradeoffs that the CEO needs to consider when prioritizing which ideas to invest in.  It can be demotivating if the “real” decision maker overrules the group’s favorite choices.  Instead, describe exactly what further research needs to be done, who will choose the winning ideas, and how the final decisions will be announced.

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