Description: Optimizing brainstorming to achieve the maximum effectiveness
Keywords: Ideas, Process, Team, Customers, Problem, Brainstorming, FIT, Good Ideas, Problems Worth Solving, Good Idea, Brainstorming Sessions, New Product Development,
Author: Christopher W. Miller, Ph.D., Gary Graziano, AIA
It takes 3,000 ideas to generate one market success. Let’s just figure this out. Being conservative, there are 100 million businesses in the world. If every one, big and small, introduced just one improvement a year, this would suggest an idea requirement of 300 billion ideas. Even at a “dime-a-dozen” this is an investment of $25 billion in US dollars. And, at “a penny for your thoughts” the price is reduced to just $3 billion.
Ideas are simultaneously almost worthless and absolutely priceless. One thing we all know for sure is that a good idea is what changes every successful business. How do you assure that your company has a continuous flow of high quality ideas? How do you get good ideas to strike like lightning and roll like thunder through your company?
Creating idea storms that lead to white-hot, actionable ideas requires more than a suggestion box – a veritable coffin in which many good ideas are buried – it requires focused effort, the right tools, a repeatable process, and attention to real problems worth solving.
Brainstorming is a flexible tool that, when used properly, can work exceptionally well. In its modern form, brainstorming emerged in the 1930’s and 40’s from the thinking of one of the fathers of modern advertising, Alex Osborn (of the legendary BBD&O). He evolved his thinking in his 1942 war manual, How To Think Up, and continued to refine it with his classic, Applied Imagination, teaching us to treat all ideas as friendly possibilities.
Almost all of us have at least a basic understanding of what brainstorming is and how lightening bolt ideas can come from it. Fewer of us, however, understand that in today’s world every great idea emerges from a truly important problem – a problem worth solving—and the hard work of people with prepared minds who are highly motivated to solve it.
Often, the thunderous sound of dissatisfied customers – or management – precede the gathering of a brainstorming team. As customers we have all experienced our ability to wring creativity out of a company that otherwise seems to have the intellectual agility a farmer running through a storm-sodden field. A few well-placed zaps and the creative juices just seem to flow.
“Creativity” almost always emerges from an intense focus on a targeted problem and a rigorous “problem-solving” process—although we would all prefer that the focus of creative energy emerge from a thoughtful desire to improve our services than a stormy-faced customer standing under a black cloud blustering at the clerk behind the counter.
So, put up the lightning rods and pray for rain – because here’s a tool that you can use to make lightening strike where and when and as many times as you want it to.
The Focused Innovation Technique™ (FIT) was developed in the 1980’s to help corporate innovators focus so they could generate and shape the kinds of ideas that would advance their businesses. The technique was developed by studying the problem solving processes of engineers who regularly do things that have never been done before. As a result, a FIT-enabled team can quickly diverge to consider a world of “what if” possibilities before converging on a few high-potential solution options and then focusing on how to make them work.
The FIT works because it takes familiar “brainstorming” – something that’s easy and that everyone knows how to do—and builds a simple, structured, repeatable process for idea generation and development by using a series of progressively more solution-focused brainstorming sessions enabled by stage-appropriate thinking exercises.
As an example of how the process works, and how simple and effective it is, in 1995 High Concrete Structures, Inc. applied the FIT it to its product development effort and in one day developed a product concept that helped treble its business and improve its competitive position.
More recently, in April 2004, 40 volunteers and staff from the North Museum in Lancaster got together for several hours to convert their strategic plan into actions that would get results. The team members were active volunteers and staff guided by expert FIT facilitators. None of the team members were idea creation experts nor did they need to be. In a few short hours, using the FIT process, they generated nearly 200 ideas, over 40 concepts and then selected nine of the best actions to pursue. Richard Fantazier, President of the Board who had first experienced the FIT process while at Armstrong remarked, “The meeting generated the excitement and the sense of direction we had hoped for”. The Lancaster Alliance is now applying the same technique to the Crime Commission Report.
As mentioned earlier, finding problems worth solving, bringing good ideas to light and making them a white-hot reality is hard work and a stormy, thundering, frustrated and dissatisfied customer is what’s required to generate the static needed to ignite the creative sparks. Even with the right conditions for innovation, moving the storm front of ideas from the mind into the field called the marketplace on time and with the intended level of intensity can be a process with results that are about as predictable as the weather – unless you have access to some high-level radar.
To make sure that your customers get the benefit or the ideas you have—so that your business can grow—takes people with a high degree of preparation and motivation, as well as the tools, resources and time to get the job done. So, where do you find these people? Do you hire them away from a competitor, or from outside your industry? Or, do you use a consultant?
The answer is, none of the above. The fact is that the most qualified people in the world to invent your future are probably sitting very near you right now. They know your business, and they want it to succeed. Equipped with the right tools they can easily invent a better future – and make it a reality. And, they will be more excited about doing it – and consequently more successful in getting it done – if it’s their idea than they would be in implementing an idea given to them by you or someone else from outside your company.
As you focus your innovation on storming the problems worth solving you are going to need five types of people in the room with you:
Customers – including your customers’ customers
Suppliers – from every link in the value chain
Experts – knowledgeable in your targeted problem areas
Key decision makers—for budget and resource allocation and control
Implementers—people that will do the work
To make your brainstorming sessions really effective, and create the lightening you’ll need, you will need to make sure that everybody does not think alike. That is, you’ll need some who blow hot, and other who blow cold. It’s always a good idea to have several different personality types in the room ranging from visionaries and out-of-the-box thinkers to analytics, hard-nosed decision-makers and “people people.” If you don’t have some of these types on your team, find some – even if you have to borrow them from outside the company. Their presence and ways of thinking will collide to create a raging storm of ideas.
The people who are going to pass judgment on these ideas are always better managed at the front-end of the innovation process than after it. If you think you will have a problem getting the finance or legal team on board with your ideas (because they can strike down an idea like a bolt out of the blue), then have them in the room and make them part of the solution. If you have concerns about manufacturing or engineering—or some other function whose opinions can resound throughout your organization like thunderclaps, be sure they’re there too.
Before getting started with your innovation process, it is absolutely critical that you decide and communicate what defines a good idea. Otherwise, idea contributors will become quickly demoralized – and non-productive—as their great ideas are killed for reasons that are not apparent to them in the noise and chaos of a really productive brainstorming session. So, what are your success criteria? And, how will you know when you have found that good idea? To help, here are some commonly used guidelines:
The idea must:
An idea, even a weak idea, that will happen and will be there to help your customers is more valuable to your company than the great idea that you just happen to like—but probably can’t get to market. And, the only idea that can hurt you is the one you don’t have. An idea emerging from a significant problem and supported by a focused, committed team, is unstoppable.
Showers of ideas reward those who are willing to stand open, exposed in the fields. Listen to the thunder from your customers. Gather your team to storm. Watch the lightning strike everywhere. Enjoy the rain. And after the storm, breathe the fresh scent from the brilliant blooms of satisfied customers.