Brainstorm Brush-up
With organizations facing greater uncertainty, the ability to generate fresh solutions has never been more critical. It’s a good time to brush-up on brainstorming basics at the heart of many innovation and creativity practices.
The art of the question
When you’re trying to generate new or innovative ideas through brainstorming, you’re looking for possible answers to a question. You formulate your question after researching the challenge you’re working on. Your research might involve conducting interviews, observation, user “journey mapping,” empathy mapping, statistical data, or an immersive experience. Based on that research you find the right problem to solve and frame your question.
Common pitfalls
There are two tricky bits about the question. One is navigating between being too general and too specific. For example, “how might we reinvent healthcare?” is too broad, but “how might we place our logo on this medical device?” is too narrow.
Consider this example from Tim Brown’s book Change by Design, about the problem of the airport security experience. Observations showed that passengers felt anxious and uncooperative because of procedures and rules that were difficult to understand. The security staff relied on scripts that made them seem intimidating and unsympathetic. There was a downward spiral, despite the common goal of “safe travel.” The original question, “how might we improve airport security?” evolved into, “how might we instill a feeling of empathy in participants on both sides of the x-ray machine?”
The other tricky bit is to avoid including an answer or incorrect assumption in your question. Doing your research can help you avoid this, but it’s important to double check. Here are some examples where an assumption is included and, if inaccurate, could lead the brainstorming in the wrong direction:
How might we make our website faster for users?
The question assumes the solution is improving speed, rather than exploring other factors that might affect peoples’ experience of the website.How might we redesign our product packaging to reduce waste?
This assumes that packaging holds the solution, which could limit other approaches such as changing the product's design.
And we can add a couple of worst-case scenarios:
Kodak: how might we make better film?
Blockbuster video: how might we improve the in-store movie rental experience?
By contrast, Netflix asked “how might we delight our customers?” rather than “how might we improve our streaming service?” Some Netflix results include in-house productions, dropping all episodes at once, autoplay trailers, and recommendations.
Admittedly a third challenge might be using the phrase “how might we…?” It may sound a bit contrived, but it serves an important purpose of encouraging many ideas while at the same time conveying possibility.
Maintaining idea flow
A key rule here is: don’t edit your ideas when they are flowing. Don’t dismiss an idea as impractical before you even write it down. Instead aim for quantity over quality of ideas and capture them all. Unusual ideas often contain the seeds of innovation.
Give the team a time-box of 5 or 10 minutes to generate ideas, then go back over the ideas and consider them more practically. Sometimes it can be helpful to have multiple rounds where people can build on the first round’s ideas. It can also be helpful to include some structured idea generation techniques to bring out playfulness or offer different viewing lenses. See for example structured idea generation techniques such as forced connections, seeing through new eyes, starting with bad ideas to reverse engineer good ideas (here are other resources).
Summary
Our brainstorm brush-up leaves us with these steps:
Set up for brainstorming with research using human factors as well as other approaches
Frame questions carefully
Set time-boxes for idea generation
Establish a “no editing” rule when ideas are flowing
If time allows, consider multiple rounds and structured idea generation exercises
Brainstorming is flexible. It can be a full day process with many rounds, or it can be a 10-minute exercise in a short meeting. Just stick to the ground rules for best results.
What challenge could you tackle with a well-designed brainstorm this week? Share your hopes and fears about brainstorming.