Companies run on good ideas. From R&D groups seeking pipelines of innovative new products to operations teams probing for timesaving process improvements to CEOs searching for that next growth opportunity—all senior managers want to generate better and more creative ideas consistently in the teams they form, participate in, and manage. However, most attempts at brainstorming are doomed around the world. The scene is familiar: a group of people, often chosen largely for political reasons, begins by listening passively as a moderator (often an outsider who knows little about your business) urges you to “Get creative!” and “Think outside the box!” and cheerfully reminds you that “There are no bad ideas!” Ideas pop up randomly—some intriguing, many preposterous—but because the session has no structure, little momentum builds around any of them. However, this shouldn’t be done this way. The trick is to leverage the way people actually think and work in creative problem-solving situations. This is usually referred to as “Brainsteering” and while it requires more preparation than traditional brainstorming, the results are worthwhile: better ideas in business situations as diverse as inventing new products and services, attracting new customers, designing more efficient business processes, or reducing costs, among others.
We can significantly reduce the odds of success by following the following seven steps
1. Know your organization’s decision-making criteria
Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas.
The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective because whenever you look for new ways to attack an old problem you naturally gravitate toward thinking patterns and ideas that worked in the past. Changing your participants’ perspective will shake up their thinking. The second characteristic of a right question is that it limits the conceptual space your team will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes.
Pick people who can answer the questions you’re asking. It’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the organization chart.
Don’t have your participants hold one continuous, rambling discussion among the entire group for several hours. Instead, have them conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people—no fewer, no more. Each subgroup should focus on a single question for a full 30 minutes. Why three to five people? The social norm in groups of this size is to speak up, whereas the norm in a larger group is to stay quiet.
The boss’s presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. Take the 15 to 20 questions you prepared earlier and divide them among the subgroups—about 5 questions each, since it’s unproductive and too time consuming to have all subgroups answer every question. Whenever possible, assign a specific question to the subgroup you consider best equipped to handle it.
After your participants arrive, but before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will—and won’t—accomplish are clear.
One thing not to do is have the full group choose the best ideas from the pile, as is common in traditional brainstorming. Instead, have each subgroup privately narrow its own list of ideas to a top few and then share all the leading ideas with the full group to motivate and inspire participants. But the full group shouldn’t pick a winner. Describe to them exactly what steps will be taken to choose the winning ideas and how they will learn about the final decisions.
Decisions and other follow-up activities should be quick and thorough. Make sure to communicate the results of the decisions quickly to everyone involved, even when an idea was rejected. Participants are often desperate for feedback and eager for indications that they have at least been heard. By respectfully explaining why certain ideas were rejected, you can help team members produce better ideas next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment