Reflect on the most surprising aspect of your brainstorming experience today.
We’ve all been in those “brainstorm sessions” where everyone is being lame and the resulting ideas are just as lame. What’s really going on here? My experience is that the problem isn’t necessarily the people or the difficulty of the topic. It’s the environment.
In class Thursday we had all the tools we needed and were in this great space. But more importantly, we were all excited to be there and had this amazing mindset/attitude. So it was easy to get a little crazy when we brainstormed ways to have more time in the day. Oddly enough, every team mentioned slowing down the spin of the earth so that the day would be longer. Our group even wanted to fly around the earth SupermanII-style in order to do this. Who says that? Who writes that down and shares it with their peers? The entire class did. No, that wasn’t any group’s best idea, but crazy ideas are the stepping stones to great ideas. Without them you’re stuck lamestorming.
I believe that the safety of our class environment allowed teams to get the crazy ideas out. In most social situations, we have our personal brands on the line: “If I say something stupid in class, then everyone will think I’m an idiot so I better try to sound as intelligent as possible. Intelligent people don’t say they want to make the day longer by putting on spandex and flying around the earth really fast…therefore I’m just gonna keep that one to myself and say something vague ans safe about being more efficient.”
I hypothesize that we are all constantly trying to establish or maintain our personal brand – even if that brand is a rejection of these very social norms (i.e. “I don’t care what you think”). This focus on building our own social currency acts as a hurdle to effective brainstorming because we hold back on crazy ideas that others might judge us for. In class Thursday, the norm was the opposite: there was a social reward for crazy ideas. I think having intrinsic rewards for having wild ideas is key to setting up the right environment for successful brainstorming.
Bottom Line: An environment where egos are checked at the door and where the group values craziness creates the safety necessary to bring out the wild ideas that get you to great solutions.
Andrew – it’s interesting to see this as an alignment of incentives. The IDEO rules really set up these incentives to reward the growth of ideas and support the wild ones. I think the idea that we are constantly building our personal brand is right on.
In particular, I think it is the exclusion of judgment or critique that really encourages the wild ideas. Once that becomes fully built into our social construct, it makes it easier for everyone to be as unusual as possible. Even when we finally judge the ideas, one doesn’t need to feel ‘stupid’ or ‘crazy’, because the idea of ownership largely does not exist within this framework.
Apart from the self-censorship that might be a way to protect your image -as you point out, Andrew- I also believe that the stress our education system puts on critical thinking has something to do with people’s unwillingness to take risks and put forward a wild idea during a brainstorm. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t learn to be critical thinkers, but we should learn to be creative thinkers as well and, most importantly, acquire the metacognitive skills needed to know which mindset is appropriate at a specific stage of solving a problem.
Also, as you mentioned, we had created in class an environment that rewarded creative thinking by mentioning the rules of brainstorming. In general when working in teams, is important to explicitly make sure that every member agrees to the ‘rules'(which might be created as part of a team ‘contract’), instead of just assuming that this is the case.
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