Have you ever found yourself sitting in a brainstorming session absolutely blank? Or, worse yet, found yourself coming up with the same old ideas?
I have found myself thinking down the familiar well-worn path of thought while participating in business brainstorming meetings. The intention is to come up with innovative ideas yet I have come up blank or recycled a previously well-received idea.
How can we avoid this? How can we, as leaders, facilitate pattern-breaking thinking?
In his book, Manager’s Guide to Fostering Innovation and Creativity in Teams, Charles Prather, outlines 6 actions a leader can take to encourage pattern-breaking thinking. I share these with you below:
1. Present a compelling challenge: Does the problem you pose require path-breaking innovation? Is the challenge worth the team’s time? Reap business benefit by presenting the problem you are trying to solve as a compelling challenge that requires innovative ideas. Setting the challenge up is the foundation of breaking patterns.
2. Create an environment of playfulness and humor: As a team leader, you can help set a climate of playfulness and humor by dressing casually and doing a warm-up activity prior to the brainstorming meeting. Ultimately, you want to create a climate where your team feels safe in proposing unconventional ideas. I personally love improv warm-ups (you can Google these). The objective is to make it okay to think of weird combinations and unusual ideas that can serve as a springboard on which useful ideas can be developed. If you are serious about the outcome, you should be lighthearted about the process.
3. Ensure diversity of participants: Strive for diversity in age, academic background, cultural background, work streams, and positions within the organization. Diversity in problem-solving styles is highly desirable. You will get better results if there is a great diversity among participants.
4. Provide an appropriate setting: The environment is everything! Select a room that is not crowded, with plenty of room on the walls for sticky notes and flip-chart paper. You need a comfortable and relaxed surrounding and a talented facilitator. This facilitator can be you, or an expert your organization brings in. Or me. Check out the "Hire Gunjan" page for more information.
5. Appoint people to capture ideas: Let your participants stay in ideation mode – identify one or two people to capture ideas so that the others are free to create. Use sticky notes. Use chart paper. Write on the walls.
6. Apply various tools of pattern-breaking thinking: “Empty the box” of usual ideas through brainstorming before using pattern-breaking tools. Prather presents five creative thinking tools that can be applied to boot participants out of the box. These are:
- Reverse hidden assumptions (Example: The customer pays for the computer. This assumption reversed is: The customer does not pay for the computer. Use this as a springboard to create specific and actionable ideas)
- Force associations (Force an association between a problem and something completely unrelated, determined by chance)
- Make comparisons (Select a system you understand well and make comparisons between that system and the problem at hand)
- Take other perspectives (What would Gandhi do? What would Rihanna do?)
- Start from an outrageous idea (Simply start with this: What is so outrageous that we would never ever consider doing because it is so shocking?)
Try Prather’s methods to break away from a well-worn path. Shake up your thinking and create new channels that you had never considered before. Happy pattern-breaking!
