Effective Individual Brainstorm
Who loves brainstorming? People who have amazing ideas all the time and love to shine. People who love to hear themselves talk. People who have an affinity for Post It Notes (that's me). We often think of brainstorming as a group activity, but research actually shows that the most effective form of brainstorming happens - surprise, surprise - in your brain when you are alone.
Harvard Business Review wrote an article about group brainstorming:
What they found is that ideas were less effective and less original when in a group versus an individual conducting their own brainstorming alone. One of Albert Einstein's famous quotes about this goes: "Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have a holy curiousity. Make your life worth living." He was famous for thinking of experiments in his head, never conducting the actual reasearch, and imaging the potential results. E=mc2 is one of those individual brainstorms we all know.
For many people, they think of brainstorming in a group, but having the ability to do it on your own and share a more completed thought or idea after you've had a chance to work it out in your head can be beneficial to your organization and your career. I'll show you the process that I use to brainstorm and think through challenging issues and we can channel our inner Einstein.
A - P - P - L - E
Effective Individual Brainstorm
A - Ask Questions
Goal: Ensure you start with questions, not answers, and the more the better.
Expectations: To really understand a problem or challenge, it's often more important to have the right questions to get to the best answer. Think about a problem like "we are shipping 40% on time and complete." What is the real qustion you are trying to solve? Is it the product? Production? The way it's ordered? Suppliers? Tracking? The problem statement is a starting place, but should be a way to identify a variety of questions. By not asking the right question, could you spend time solving something that doesn't help in the end.
Note: It's easy to stop at one or two questions and start looking for answers, but if you focus and say for 30 minutes (which is a long time when you are alone) what are all the questions you can think of that may relate to the problem, and generate multiple angles around a question, you will be surprised where your brain goes.
P - Prioritize the Problem
Goal: Make sure you are solving for the right problem.
Expectations: Often times people spend time solving a "problem" that is not the actual problem. Like a good mechanic, if you have a car that's not running, if you look at the light on the dashboard that says check engine, you check the engine, find something small and call it good, your customer may be calling you if you didn't actually find the real problem. What's on the surface is rarely the actual problem, but usually a result or visible output of the true problem. For many companies, flying in to be the hero and solve the surface level issue feels really good, but over time (and sometimes not very long after) you find it didn't fix the real problem and requires you to repeat the process. Think of all the problems it could be and prioritize where to look first to have a roadmap of how to go forward.
Note: The Five Why's is a great exercise to make sure you are thinking through this. We'll use a fun example with me. I know I need to work out, but it's a hassle and I don't always like doing it. Why (1)? Because it takes a lot of time to go to the gym and I'm busy. Why (2)? Because sometimes I don't plan my week around things like exercise. Why (3)? Because I know I'll eventually get around to it or squeeze it in. Why (4)? Because that's what I've done before. Why (5)? Because I know I need to priorize my week and have time for working out with equal importance to other activities. The real problem is not that I don't like working out, it's that when I don't plan my week it's a friday and I haven't hit the gym yet and can feel it.
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P - Prioritize the Opportunities
Goal: Not all opportunities are created equal and require prioritization.
Expectations: The higher up at a company you are, the bigger and more all-consuming the problems are. If you tackled all the things you could fix to resolve a situation you and your team would never sleep. Start with what moves the needle the most, gets things going in the right direction, to ensure you are on the right path. People call it "low hanging fruit." The kind you don't need a ladder to pick and are right there. And once you get to the true problem, you can prioritize the opportunities around the "best" priority which might be something that fixes an urgent need, something that will fix it without needing to fix again soon, or something that is a first step on a path toward a complete redo of something.
Note: Not all resolutions are created equal and neither are priorities. What's important to you may not even make the list with someone else. The important thing is to not look for the easy answer (if the answer was easy someone else would have solved it) but look for the best priority of where to start digging using the criteria that addresses the root problem.
L - Loud & Quite Ideas
Goal: Some loud ideas aren't always the right ones, and sometimes the quiet ones surprise you.
Expectations: Individual brainstorming lets you think. And like a room full of people, the ideas bubbling around in your head will be loud and quiet. Loud ones typically come in the form of "I don't want to do that" or "We did that before and it didn't work." And quiet ideas often start with "There's no way we could do that" or "Our company doesn't do things like that." It's often the loud ideas that you need to reevaluate or think about differently and the quiet ones that become interesting, original and different. Problems arise all the time, and being able to think differently about it, listening to the voice that says "Maybe we could do something like that" could change the way your organization addresses a long-standing issue in a completely new way.
Note: People who get far in their careers or life are often the ones that listen to the quiet ideas, roll around with them, and take a chance on them. The quiet ideas feel scary or challenge a lot of thinking, but if you really listen and write them down, are often the creative thoughts that change your thinking all together. No one thought everyone would drive a car until they did. No one thought you could have a computer in your pocket until you did. No one believed going to the moon was realistic until it was. Write down your quiet ideas and separate those from the big or loud ideas when brainstorming and keep going back and revisiting those.
E - Explore Alternatives
Goal: Take all your great ideas and thoughts to solve your problem and come up with alternatives to ensure you aren't missing anything.
Expectations: You've brainstormed the problem, thought about ideas, written down your loud and quiet ideas. Now is the tough part. You have to turn 180 degrees around and see what alternatives could work that are faster, smarter, cheaper, better, shorter, or all the other -er words to your idea. This is the piece where group brainstorming comes in. You have an idea and people share good alternatives or other ideas - areas based on their experiences or backgrounds that improve upon your idea or question how you went about it. And if you can do this on your own you are a rock star in the making.
Note: Alternatives are hard, because people get married to their ideas. You came up with something great and want to go implement. Let's go back to our original note about shipping on time 40% of the time. You discovered it was a supplier that kept shipping things late and your resolution is to tell the purchasing team to find another supplier. Great idea! But wait, could you start by working with the supplier you have to resolve the issue? Could they priorize your solutions until you are back to normal lead times? Could you pay 5% more for rush shipping? All those may be better in the long-run and require you to challenge your primary idea. Your first instinct may be right, but maybe not and being able to work through realistic alternatives and share your thoughts with your final recommendation helps to get people on board.
For some folks, sitting alone and thinking big thoughts sounds like fun, and for others super scary. So many innovators and thought leaders know the importance of working through big problems alone before bringing in a bigger group. Being able to work through a process for individual brainstorming helps to refine your thinking and makes you better at problem solving. Taking the time to question, prioritize, dig deep into a problem, and consider alternatives puts you on the road of Einstein and his theoretical way of approaching science and physics.
Here's an idea. Next time you have a problem to solve, consider working through this process and have your team do the same all on your own. I bet you will come up with more thoughful, enriched, interesting, and diverse ideas than being in a room together. I'd love to hear about your experiences. Happy thinking!
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