Digging Your Way Out After the Brainstorm
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.
Management Week In Review-January 14, 2011
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance
Note from Art: Every Friday, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.
This week, I’m including content on assessing your status and progress as a boss, simplifying complex problems to spur innovation and gain feedback, and overcoming that ever-present “resistance” as we pursue personal and professional development. Enjoy!
-From HBR Blogs, Are You the Boss You Need to Be? by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback
From the Post: “As a leader and manager, someone responsible for the results obtained by others, are you the boss you need to be? Are you getting the best from your people, and from those you need but don’t control? Are you fully satisfying the ever-rising expectations of your firm and its customers? Equally important, are you meeting your own expectations?”
Art’s Comment(s): The authors are posting here in support of their book, Being the Boss-The Three Imperatives of Becoming a Great Leader (I plan on reviewing it in the future). I like the questions they raise, and I agree with their perspective that many managers reach a point and quit growing: “Most managers grow and develop to a certain point, and then they stop. They reach the “Plateau of Good Enough.”
This post doesn’t offer the answers…but it does help us frame some important questions. It left me anxious to get my hands on the book, so stay tuned.
From Fast Company: Innovation Agents, How Jack Dorsey Succeeds Through Simplification
From the Post: “We have everyone you can imagine against us,” says Jack Dorsey, the CEO of mobile credit card pay startup Square and cofounder of Twitter. But he is not cowed by fact that his startup is competing against banks with far more money to spend on pushing their products to market. Because by allowing design and engineering to lead his strategic decisions, Dorsey knows that he can out-innovate everyone else.”
Art’s Comment: click over and view the 4-minute video for a look at a possible revolution in mobile credit card payments, and stay for the lessons that Jack offers on simplification in pursuit of innovation.
-From Steven Pressfield On-Line: Resistance Tomorrow
Art’s Comment(s): Consider this my mid-January dose of encouragement to keep moving forward on those resolutions and improvement programs! Steven Pressfield is one of my favorite authors of historical fiction, and the author of my favorite book of all on driving yourself to achieve-The War of Art. In this particular post, Pressfield offers up some additional ideas for all of us to increase our propensity to do the hard things that we tend to put off until some mythical tomorrow.
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OK, that’s it for this week! Have a great weekend and I will see you Monday with another fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine!
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About Art Petty: Art mentors high potential professionals and develops and delivers powerful and pragmatic workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams. Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote. And whether you are an experienced leader seeking to revitalize and develop as a professional, or, a new leader looking for guidance on starting up successfully, check out Art’s book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership at Amazon.com.
The Leader’s Role in Promoting Innovation
Note from Art: the blog here at Building Better Leaders focuses on short, powerful tips, suggestions and exercises for leaders at all levels and in all functions and vocations to apply at work, in school and even at home. For Leadership Caffeine posts and other more detailed management content and essays, please visit my Management Excellence Blog.
If the role of a leader wasn’t challenging enough, let’s pile on one more abstract but critical challenge to the heavy lifting already required by leaders in this fast-changing world: promoting a culture of innovation.
Your Role in Fueling Innovation in Your Workplace:
Innovation is one of those big hairy topics with a lot of legs and we will leave the gross majority of it for other posts and for other writers focused on this important discipline. My encouragement here today is for you to recognize your role in fostering a healthy working environment that actively promotes experimentation and innovation.
- We live and work in an innovation-focused and driven world. Developing the skills, systems and talent needed to fuel innovation is a must for leaders in today’s organization. Time pressures, global competitors and the march of technology, coupled with a baker’s dozen of major global stresses ranging from the economy and environment to natural disasters and sovereign debt crises, all demand that firms find ways to innovate to survive, sustain and succeed.
- Innovation isn’t just for products...it’s applicable to business models, approaches to serving customers, approaches to structuring organizations and so on.
- In spite of the myth surrounding the “lone genius,” innovation is the outcome of enlightened trial and error on the part of groups of individuals seeking to solve a vexing problem for a specific audience. These individuals need a workplace free from fear and filled with the spirit of adventure and learning. The task of forming this environment falls on your shoulders.
7 Must Have Conditions to Create a Healthy Innovation Environment:
- Leaders must be viewed as having high personal credibility.
- The workplace environment must be free from FEAR.
- Team members must share mutual respect and they must learn to trust each other.
- There must be a culture of accountability that is driven by pride, not fear.
- Individuals must be comfortable conducting tough discussions with those above, below and next to them.
- There must be a focus and commitment on striving to create high performance teams.
- The management systems and practices must actively support experimentation by reducing obstacles, simplifying decision-making and promoting enlightened trial and error.
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How healthy is your innovation environment? Use the checklist of “Must Haves” with your employees to assess the situation. And remember, as leader, you own fixing this one.
Leadership Caffeine: Managing Risk Without Stifling Experimentation
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth
The art and science of management is much about coping with risk. There are few certain outcomes in business, and that’s particularly true when we factor in the reality that people are darned complex and don’t always act rationally.
More often than not, I see managers and leaders looking at their world through the eyes of “what can go wrong?” and basing their decisions solely on attempting to minimize those identified adverse outcomes. I also see a great number of aberrant behaviors impacting the decision-making processes and risk-taking actions of managers and organizations.
4 Bad Habits that Stifle Experimentation:
1. Fear of being wrong rules the day. In particular, early career leaders lacking the benefit of experience and often left to sink or swim on their own, act conservatively out of fear of making mistakes. While they may be anxious to experiment with people, teams and programs, they often lack a framework for understanding what is acceptable or unacceptable.
2. Managers and leaders struggle to interpret what “new” means and the knee-jerk reaction is to avoid “new” until it’s better understood. Social Media is a prime example of this, as many firms opt to create punitive and restrictive policies versus challenging their employees to find ways to leverage the tools. It wasn’t so long ago that the web was the “new” and many firms carried the same “wait and see” attitude and failed to leverage new and powerful capabilities to improve their businesses and gain an advantage.
3. Risk is managed to perceived political tolerance levels. Politically motivated managers and leaders focus on identifying decisions that fit within the tolerance zone of their superiors. Experimentation is reduced to subjective and politically motivated thought-processes.
4. Fear rules the day. In toxic environments, people strive and struggle to avoid making decisions out of fear of gaining the wrath of someone with a vested stake in his/her people not making decisions. Experimentation in this case is non-existent.
5 Ideas for Leaders to Help Experimentation Flourish:
1. Define, communicate and reinforce risk tolerance levels in all aspects of your business. As a senior leader, you owe this critical context to your team members. If you’re encouraging experimentation and innovation, then you need to create the processes and systems to reasonably evaluate opportunities AND risks and help the team understand choices that are acceptable. It’s common for me to see firms where there is no context for risk, yet ample lip service for innovation. The lack of context slows or stifles any true experimentation in some cases and simply confuses the situation in others.
2. Cultivate a “what does this mean for us?” opportunity and risk assessment type of thinking with your team members. Teach and encourage big-picture, competitive, customer and other industry scanning habits and challenge people to end all discussions with their own translation of what the opportunity might mean positively or negatively for your firm. Of course, the next discussion is, “What do you suggest that we do?”
3. Build experimentation into professional development plans. A key part of everyone’s development is their ability to cope with increasingly ambiguous circumstances. Move beyond encouraging people to experiment to making it a part of what gets done and what gets measured, and you are actively supporting personal professional development. Of course, ultimately, experimentation needs to provide meaningful outcomes, with a blend of lessons learned through failures and gains from successes.
4. Remember to help your team members cut through the very-real political fog and fud. They don’t have the political capital that you do and it is your job to help them gain it, while knocking down obstacles and cutting through aberrant organizational behaviors.
5. Extend experimentation beyond programs and processes to management tasks, including team development, decision-making processes, developmental activities, job definitions and so forth. We cannot keep solving the increasingly complex problems of our world with yesterday’s management approaches.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
A healthy workplace is one where people are comfortable being uncomfortable, as long as the discomfort is not politically motivated or driven by fear of repercussions. Healthy discomfort comes from pushing the envelope on new approaches, while managing and monitoring risks and learning in the process. I would much rather have a team of professionals pushing me as the leader to take chances for the right reasons than a team of professionals hiding in their cubicles hoping not to draw my gaze.
Innovation is Everyone’s Business
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth
Take a poll in your firm on whether people feel responsible for innovation in their jobs or in their departments, and I’ll offer an educated guess on the outcome. Those involved in engineering, design, marketing and product management will feel a strong sense of responsibility to innovate. For others in supporting or operations-focused roles, the need or ability to innovate will be rated towards the low end of perceived priorities or even capabilities.
That’s a shame. A good innovator and good innovations are terrible things to waste, regardless of functional role.
This “I” word has been a hot topic for several years now, giving rise to entire shelves of books and legions of consultants, and yet the majority of people that I connect with in organizations from small to large, tend to view innovation as someone else’s job. This view ensures that some of the best ideas and solutions to vexing problems for internal and external customers are left behind in the pursuit of the urgent day-to-day work of many employees.
It’s time to alter organizational and leadership thinking about the concept of innovation and get more leaders and people doing the right things to push out of their transactional modes in search of new ways to create value.
First, A Working Definition of Innovation for All of Us:
In interviewing individuals inside of a number of small and large firms that have successfully fostered cultures where innovation is viewed as everyone’s business, the definition that emerged was:
Innovation is solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways
While the continuous improvement group might be quick to claim some of that real estate, the intent of the “innovators” offering up that definition was to look beyond incremental operational improvements to solving significant problems that adversely impacted an internal or external customer group.
The adoption of the definition helped create awareness that everyone was responsible for recognizing upstream or downstream problems and pulling together the people and resources to find solutions. Solutions include process changes, technology adoption, new products and new approaches.
7 Suggestions for Jump-Starting an Innovation Focused Culture:
1. Challenge leadership to stand-up and own this one. Leaders at all levels own the responsibility for fostering an atmosphere or working environment that encourages innovation in all corners of an organization. While there’s no simple formula for building a successful innovation culture, it starts with the simple, but significant leap of faith for leaders to say, “Yes, we want all of our people thinking beyond tasks and looking for problems to solve and new ways to better serve their customers.”
2. Promote situations that jump-start the right thinking. People don’t innovate on command, so, it’s imperative that leaders and managers create situations where typically transaction-focused individuals can step back and look at the bigger picture of their work. Choose simple but important questions and conduct ideation sessions around the topic, such as:
- What gets in the way of serving our (internal/external) customers?
- What in our working environment frustrates you?
- What are our customers telling you that they wish we could do for them?
- If you could fix one thing about how we do our work, what would that be?
3. Create an outside-in view. Move beyond the functional four walls and invite customers in your value chain to sit down and share their insights, observations and needs. An example might be the order-processing group engaging with sales, shipping and manufacturing to gain a better understanding of how things flow and where the opportunities are to change and improve.
4. Go beyond process and promote innovation as a way to compete. The most innovative teams that I’ve worked around include a few marketing communications groups and professionals that found ways to out-promote, out-maneuver and out-perform much better heeled competitors, while operating on a shoestring budget. The push to innovate, adopt new technologies and to put a spin on traditional activities to shake up the customers was a core part of this organization’s success.
5. Celebrate innovation victories. It’s fun and easy to celebrate the blockbuster new products, but the type of innovation we’re describing is much less visible to the outside world. People are people, and the recognition that their work is making a difference in someone’s job or life reinforces positive innovation behaviors. Don’t skimp on the opportunity to celebrate.
6. Incorporate innovation activities and challenges into professional development activities. Making this part of the PD plan reinforces the cultural imperative to innovate.
7. More work for leadership. Once started, the innovation machine needs care and attention. Your role transitions from getting things going to providing on-going support and enabling capabilities. You need to challenge yourself to step-up and recognize the need to both channel the innovation as well as to let it run on occasion. And remember, your job is to knock down barriers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Critics of this proliferation of innovation thinking typically suggest that too much distracts from the business of execution. And while I’ll agree that a culture of the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” is a problem, it’s up to leadership to ensure that the intent and approach here stays true to the mission of getting more people focused on solving the right problems for the right customers. Difficult, but not impossible, and well worth the investment in leadership capital.
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