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The authors offer here a more structured and productive alternative to the traditional fast and furious 'brainstorming' process. The seven steps they identify to do this are as follows:
- Know your organisation's decision making criteria
This is about boundaries - it's no good to say "think outside the box!" if there are circumstances or policies that require specific boxes to be respected. Instead, take time to set clear and specific criteria for the task, e.g. 'ideas must cost no more than £5K per department, not require IT investment and must create incremental profits'. - Ask the right questions
Academic research shows that the traditional emphasis on loosely structured brainstorming techniques that generate masses of wildly diverse ideas is less effective than more structured approaches. Instead this book suggests you use questions with two specific characteristics: first that they get people to adopt a different perspective than usual and second that they limit the conceptual space for exploration. For example, ask 'what's the biggest avoidable hassle customers have to deal with?' or 'where do we have restrictions created by outdated company policy?' The ideal number of such questions for a session is 15 - 20. - Choose the right people
The rule here is to pick the people who can answer the questions. This means ensuring that people on the front line are involved alongside more senior colleagues, so that directly relevant experience and knowledge can be captured in new ways. - Divide and conquer
The idea here is to optimise the likelihood of people being able to think and communicate well together. To do this, the authors suggest structuring the participants into groups of three to five people and quarantining the 'idea crushers' (senior bosses, 'big mouths' and subject matter experts) into one sub-group together. This avoids others feeling constrained by hierarchy, intimidation or deference. Then allocate each group several of the questions and ask them to dedicate 30 minutes to each question. - On your marks, get set, go!
Setting up the process is important, so the authors suggest making it clear that this will be a slower but deeper process than normal brainstorming, exploring a single question together for half an hour and coming up with perhaps just 2 or 3 worthy ideas. Let people know precisely what is expected and give real examples where possible to set the tone of the exercise. - Wrap it up
Running multiple sub-groups simultaneously, this process will generate quite a number of interesting ideas for consideration overall. The authors warn against doing what is normal in brainstorming, which is to have the full group choose the best ideas from the collection. Instead, have each sub-group get together and narrow down their list of ideas to a very few top ideas and then share these with the big group, explaining that the final decisions will be made later. Finish the event on a high, describing how and why the winning ideas will be chosen and the steps that will achieve this. - Follow up quickly
Decisions and any follow up actions should happen as soon as possible. These should be made by people with executive-level understanding of the criteria and considerations that must go into prioritising ideas for actual investment Results should then be communicated to everybody who participated, even when ideas have been rejected, with respectful feedback as to the thinking involved in making the choice. This helps people to stay engaged and generate even better ideas in the future.
"A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind."Antione de Saint-Exupéry