Let’s say you’re faced with a unique challenge at work. You’ve got to come up with a way to increase sales by 30% by the end of the year, or a way to market a new service with virtually no budget. Or perhaps you have a challenge in your personal life, like earning an extra $1000 dollars this month to cover an unexpected expense. It’s time to brainstorm, right? Let’s get some folks over so we can noodle on this challenge and remember there are no bad ideas. Sound familiar? What if I were to tell you this is absolutely the WRONG approach to an effective brainstorming session.
WRONG: Let’s do it all together
It’s true, there’s a lot of fun, creative energy that happens when you get a bunch of people in a room and you start throwing ideas around like 2 year-olds, eating spaghetti. I remember facilitating a brainstorming session about 10 years ago and bringing along a turkey baster. I asked the folks in the room to come up with 10 unique ways they could possibly use the baster, other than basting a turkey. This method was great for getting people in a creative mindset, but it was NOT an effective way to hear all of the BEST ideas. Unfortunately, when someone comes up with what they perceive to be a good idea, it’s only natural to get attached to it. If you are in a room with other folks who are getting attached to their ideas as well, usually the loudest or most persuasive person wins. Unfortunately, the quiet guy in the corner with the 10 million-dollar idea is often never heard. A talented facilitator can mitigate one person dominating a conversation, but that still doesn’t solve the challenge of creating a process that generates truly uninhibited ideas.
Instead of having people generate ideas right there in front of each other, consider giving them homework ahead of time. To accomplish this, present a question that gets all of the individuals working on the challenge a few days before your scheduled “brainstorming” session. For example:
“By Thursday, send me an email with your 10 best ways to cut payroll by 10% WITOUT laying anyone off.”
By working on creative answers in solitude, everyone has the opportunity to show up with their best 10 ideas, knowing their ideas will actually be considered.
If you are a “solo-preneure,” and you’ve got no employees, you might believe there’s no one to brainstorm with, but it’s easy to get a few trusted peers together to do the same activity. I used this method myself and created a mastermind group comprised of other solo-preneure’s whom I trust. We meet once a month and use the same method to generate some awesome stuff.
WRONG: There are no bad ideas
Continuing with the scenario above: Lets say you have 5 people in your brainstorming group. You now have 50 ideas on the table. That’s great, but how do you make sure what you have in front of you is a pile of awesomeness and not a pile of lame and crappy ideas. How can you create a way for people to really dig deep for a creative answer that might actually work? It’s all in how you frame the ground rules for your meeting. Remember those brainstorming sessions when you were a kid? The teacher would say “Now remember…there are no bad ideas.” Fast forward into adulthood. Have you ever witnessed a bad idea in motion? Yes, of course you have, and the reality is that people do have really bad ideas, and a lot of them get put into practice. (Note: Bad idea = doesn’t achieve the desired result.) There is a belief about brainstorming sessions that you can’t shoot down a bad idea because you will hurt people’s feelings. However, if you want people to bring their BEST ideas to the table, you might have to risk bruising a few egos.
As adults, and especially in business, constructive criticism is a necessity for successful projects and ideas. You wouldn’t drive over a wobbly bridge even though it had a really creative design, simply to spare someone’s feelings, even if the bridge was designed by Dr. Seuss. The same applies for implementing any other ideas. Again, it’s a question of whether or not the idea stands to achieve the desired result. If you want people to bring their “A-Game ideas,” set a high expectation ahead of time by setting firm ground rules for your selection process. Think in terms of quality control. For example, you can tell your team the following:
1) “For the first 15 minutes of the meeting, we are going to consider every suggestion submitted and write down our thoughts about each suggestion.”
2) “The next 20 minutes will be dedicated to a healthy and lively debate to determine which ones we should discard, and which ones we should hold onto for consideration in the hopes of drilling down to a few workable options.”
3) “Each of you will then play your best Devil’s Advocate game, considering each idea with the intention of examining it from all possible angles.”
Presto! You’ve created a way in which everyone understands the process of elimination involved: If you show up with an idea that doesn’t work, you are gonna hear about it! It’s not an ego trip, it’s a matter of what works and what doesn’t. So don’t be emotionally attached to your ideas—they’re just ideas. All you can do is bring your best!
WRONG: We need to pick the best ONE.
In most brainstorming sessions, you whittle down all your ideas until you have a handful of possibilities. Then you pick the best one. Good ol’ Democracy in action, right? Unfortunately, you’ve unwittingly created a whole new challenge by putting all of your eggs in one basket. If it is a brand new idea, there is no data or proof that the idea is going to fly. Rather than choosing one option over the other at the onset, consider narrowing your options down to 3 choices. Next, find a way to simultaneously implement all 3 over a short period of time. Determine a period of time that will be long enough to gather good, viable data, and short enough to make it feasible. By doing this, you will have narrowed the field from 50 ideas to 3 options. Rather than hoping the best idea will work out, you’ll create a process based on hard evidence, and the true winner will naturally emerge.
The whole idea behind brainstorming is to create new and creative approaches to challenges. Beef it up in your organization by implementing an unapologetic process that results in unique, viable solutions. This “straight-talk” approach will save you time, and it will be a lot of fun—especially when you see it working!
