Management Excellence by Art Petty

Note from Art: there are many forms of ideation and all sorts of new tools available to facilitate web-based and remote brainstorming. The same issue in this post applies regardless of method: what are you going to do with the output?

Imagine yourself in the following scene:

You’ve just wrapped up a day of brainstorming with colleagues from all areas of your company. The ideas were flowing and so were the flip-chart markers. The day’s hard work is reflected in dozens of flip charts stuck to the walls around the room, and the only things left on the snack table are a few granola bars (has anyone who makes those things ever tasted one?) and some bruised apples in a bowl.   The table in front of you is filled with markers, post-its, note-cards, wrappers and partially empty drink glasses.

You view the mess as a sign of an active day, and the volume of charts around the room supports that notion. Now, all that’s left to do is figure out where to go next with all of the output.

Sound familiar?

Many of you will recognize the scene and a number of you will recall the challenge of figuring out what to do with all of the input.  More than likely you were reminded mid-session of the critical follow-up work by a participant who appropriately asked, “By the way, what’s going to happen with all of these ideas after the session?”

So, yeah, what do you do with your walls filled with ideas?

Six Ideas to Help You Dig Out After the Brainstorm

1. Plan for the post-session work ahead of time. Real value is created based on what happens after the brainstorming session. Planning must reflect administrative needs…the capture and repurposing of the flip-chart information, as well as the critical process of determining how to identify ideas to push forward.

2. Share the rough post-session plan with your participants in advance of the brainstorming. A good number of brainstorming invitees have taken up residence in the “Show Me” state of mind. As a condition of their unfettered involvement, they are looking to you to show them or at least describe to them what will happen to their ideas. They’ve participated too many times in the mental gymnastics of providing input with no output, and they are tired of wasting their limited time.

3. Keep the creative process running post-event. Ask people to keep thinking and building on session ideas. Provide the summary output to everyone and encourage them build on the ideas or develop new threads. Provide a way for input to be added and shared with others.

4. Selecting Ideas Part 1-A Cautionary Tale. A common technique for identifying ideas to extend is to apply some form of in-session voting process. Typically, after the brainstorm has reduced to a trickle, the facilitator suggests a mechanism for voting on the ideas to explore at this time. More often than not, this is where the multi-colored sticky dots come into play.

Each participant receives a certain number of dots (votes) and is free to distribute them across their favorite ideas or to place them all on one particular idea. At the end of the voting, the top two or three are selected for exploration. There are a variety of iterations of the sticky dot (Vegas Voting) approach, but all suffer from the same challenges:

• Brainstorming and selection are two very different sets of activities and I hate to let selection issues bias or impact the ideation process. Just the knowledge that people will be voting on ideas to pursue opens the door for all sorts of social biases to join the meeting.
• Those that offer ideas and those responsible for filtering ideas may be two different groups of people. (Yeah, I know…how undemocratic of me. I’m not sure where the rulebook says majority vote rules on idea selection.)
• There’s little stake in voting…you simply place a dot or add your tick mark without being invested in the vote.
• The voting may be based on unclear or inconsistent understanding of the ideas generated in the session.

5. Selecting Ideas Part 2-Extend the Process. Improve the process of selecting ideas for exploration by extending the process of evaluation and idea development.  (Hey, no one said this was supposed to be fast…just good.)

I’ll make the leap that the brainstorming topics were well defined in your pre-planning session, and the output focused around those questions. Without this focus, the selection process is an impossible or at least highly arbitrary affair.

An Approach:

• Redistribute the ideas after the session and encourage participants to continue thinking about and building on the ideas, and to select one and recruit other colleagues to help extend the idea. The willingness to invest time in recruiting others and in thinking through the idea (and its implications) puts some personal skin in the game. People passionate enough about a concept to work it out are much more convincing to me than people capable of placing a sticky dot on a flip chart or index card. And I can assure you the universe of ideas will be narrowed considerably to the limited number of ideas people are willing to invest time and effort developing.

• Create an opportunity for people to come together to describe and yes, even pitch their extended ideas. While I don’t discount political biases here, it’s fairly easy to see someone pushing an agenda versus someone and some group pushing an idea.

6. Moving beyond the pitch. At the end of the day, someone or some group still has to say “Yea” or “Nea” on moving ahead. I propose to push that point in time out until the idea-sponsors are ready to ask for money..even if it’s just money to conduct more research.  Once investment has entered the dialogue, you’ve made the leap from idea on paper to potential project. Of course, if you don’t have a good mechanism for evaluating and selecting new research activities and project investments…you’ve got a new problem.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

It’s good to find good ideas, but it’s great to find good ideas that grow legs. The process of moving from ideation to action is awkward and filled with opportunities for mistakes. One way to improve the process of idea development and selection is to let people vote with their time.  A group of individuals motivated enough to invest time in building out an idea is a group worth listening to.

I would love to hear your practiced ideas and approaches for improving the leap from brainstorm to action.