The expectation is that people will show up to a brainstorming session with a grip of solutions ready to go. I previously worked through an alternative approach to brainstorming for those who have teams of people with varied personalities (introverts, extroverts) and how to ensure the loudest idea wasn’t mistaken for the best idea.
A lot of that approach required significant prep time. The more preparation a problem has, the more vetted the solution will be. Continuing with the initial idea, what if we asked people to show up to brainstorming sessions with far more questions than solutions?
Maybe we have them show up with questions instead. Deeper, weirder, more esoteric questions in an effort to better understand the problem.
Reversal Questions
How would you turn the problem on its head? Sometimes this means going into the absurd or intentionally challenging the assumptions we have about the problem at hand.
List out the assumptions (quickly, get them on the page before your internal censor starts to see the holes). Turn the assumptions on their head.
- A proper blog post should be 750 words. (assumption)
- Blogs should only be 75 words
- Blogs should be 75,000 words
Consider the pros/cons of the assumptions. 75-word blogs are short and will likely be read to completion, but the information might be limited. On the other end, 75,000 word posts are about the length of a novel and not great for on-screen consumption.
So, why are we assuming they should only be 750 words?
- (now that I write this out, this sounds like another exercise for another post entirely.)
Ask questions *not* at the center of the problem.
Problem: our company needs to increase revenue by 25% to stay in business.
Non-central questions:
- Suppose we gave away our product for free – how else could we make money?
- What is a completely different way to use our product or service?
- Suppose we were over our revenue goal by 25% – what could we do with the windfall?
Constrain Creativity
You can do anything with an unlimited budget, time, resources, etc. In the past, this usually means a sub-par product comes about (Cybertruck?) while creative restraints force a careful assessment of the goal and what is available.
IKEA designers were challenged to come up with a coffee cup that could be sold for just $2. Designers had to carefully assess materials and processing to come up with the DINERA mug – on sale today for $1.99 – and is one of the most popular products in the store.
Not everything needs the same constraint. Chances are, the design team for the DINERA mug likely had all kinds of back-end resources to make the product come to life.
Other times, constraints are absolute and cannot be changed. When astronauts are faced with a problem, the ground crew will put all of the resources the astronauts have available in their ship to see what they can create to solve the problem. There are no compromises in space – bring extra duct tape.
In brainstorming sessions, not all constraints need to be real. Hypotheticals can be effective if they are still treated with the weight of a real constraint.