On Generating Ideas - Leadership & Work
Forget brainstorming. I am sharing a guideline for exploring ideas together with your team that promises to deliver some fruitful ideas.
Imagine a brainstorming scene from a movie. We see a group of people loudly discussing ideas in a conference room. They are screaming at each other and drawing on the whiteboard. The boss is in front of them firing questions and finally someone comes up with a good idea, then a few others build on that and the final solution is clarified. End of scene. They have just saved the company from bankruptcy or saved the Earth from a collision with an asteroid. This is not how the process of generating ideas should look but it is impressive in movies.
During my career I faced a need to build new processes and work on new initiatives dozens of times. These challenges required clever ideas and novel solutions. I borrowed the brains of my team members, our leadership team, as often as I could.
I believe that our own perspective alone is not enough to have a complete view of the problem and possible solutions. In this article I am sharing an easy framework for exploring ideas together with your team that promises to deliver some fruitful ideas.
Baseline - Human Nature
We need to keep in mind some facets of human nature in a group setting:
We want to be accepted and aligned with a group (conformity).
We unconsciously agree more often than we should with our bosses (authority bias).
We are different. There are introverts who will not share their ideas out loud in a brainstorming session, while extroverts will try to steal the show.
We don’t want to look stupid. This blocks a lot of interesting ideas from being said out loud.
In a brainstorming session we have just a single channel of discussion which is a bottleneck for generating new ideas and it favours people who thrive in such an environment. To prevent relying on a single communication channel and address the various facets of human nature, quiet idea generation comes into play.
Quiet Idea Generation
The core of Quiet Idea Generation for leaders is the following:
State clearly what you are going to generate ideas for and make sure that participants understand the context.
Set a fixed amount of time to concentrate. Also, set a minimum number of ideas to generate, not a maximum, as quantity beats quality in Quiet Idea Generation. This prevents overthinking.
Ask your team to work quietly for 10-15 minutes to generate and write down as many ideas as they can. Make sure that they cannot see each other’s ideas during this time.
When the time runs out, ask each participant to present their ideas one by one. You can group the ideas together as they are being revealed. Make sure that neither you nor the group judge the ideas as there are no bad ones. To prevent any authority bias I always preferred to be the last one revealing my own ideas.
Congratulations, the process of generating ideas is over.
Feel free to experiment with it as much as you like. This approach worked for me many times and delivered good results that I would not have been able to deliver alone. I usually tested this approach in groups no bigger than six, but the format can be adjusted for bigger teams.
Further actions depend on the goal for the session. For me, the next step was usually voting for the best ideas together. Then, we used a matrix of low/high impact and low/high effort to prioritise the results and take it from there. However, that’s something outside of the scope of this post.
Summary
What we see in movies does not often work in reality. Brainstorming sessions should not be full of thunder, strong wind and chaotic thoughts. It may work for some people but I prefer a structured, stable and calmer approach. Addressing human nature restrictions can lead to surprising positive results, and using what we know about psychology can help us harness the potential of our teams.
I wish you a fruitful Quiet Idea Generation.
Thanks for reading!
Hey great post!