Design Thinking: The greatest Danger to Brainstorming! (In defense of Brainstorming - Part 2)

(A little while ago Fast Company's Rebecca Greenfield wrote a piece entitled "Brainstorming Doesn't Work; Try this technique instead". I wrote a response: "In Defense of Brainstorming (aka you may not need Brainwriting)", but I realized *now* that I had forgot to add what I think is instead the biggest obstacle to Brainstorming, so this Part 2 attempts to address that.)

There are *many* obstacles to a good Brainstorming session, but the actual biggest *danger* I believe is not having enough 'quality' ideas and especially getting those amazing, once-in-a-lifetime radical ideas. It's the same principles regarding Quantity and Quality of ideas.

(For more info on why I believe quantity begets quality, see a previous post on 50 lbs of clay and how Quantity also intrinsically begets Quality.)

User Interview/Insight expert Steve Portigal has a great graph I like to use to illustrate the divide between the 'first wave' of pedestrian ideas and the 'second wave' of magical of "Wacky, transgressive, innovative, breakthrough, weird" ideas. Steve goes so far as to say we need to slough through the 'bad ideas' to get to this 'second wave'.

(Steve Portigal - Power of Bad Ideas)

As good Design Thinking coaches and Brainstorming facilitators we need consciously to *PUSH* to get people into the 2nd hump or 'second wave'.

This is why as part of Part 1 of this post, we have rules #1, #2, #6 & #8

1. Defer Judgment - to prevent smoothing radical ideas
2. Go for volume - to push envelope to get to great ideas
3. One conversation at a time - to ensure everyone gets a voice
4. Be visual - to stimulate right-side of the brain and communicate efficiently
5. Headline - to communicate efficiently, allowing iterate through ideas quickly
6. Build on the Ideas of others - to help iterate and evolve ideas
7. Stay on topic - keep sessions moving and prevent time wasting
8. Encourage wild ideas - getting past the easy, obvious ideas

(8x Rules for Brainstorming)

Over the years I've personally become more keenly aware of passing through the barrage of easy ideas ('first wave'), into the more difficult silence or lull of little/no ideas and then finally into the flood of 'second wave' ideas.

(1st Wave vs. 1st & 2nd Wave Brainstorming)

The above graphics attempts to show the difference between simply settling with only 'first wave' Brainstorming vs. 'first wave' and 'second wave' Brainstorming. In this example, it's 7+ more Ideas Total and 3+ more Great Ideas.

Funders and Founders Anna Vital has a great post called How Many Times You Should Try with an info graphic that shows James Dyson tried 5126 prototypes before his initial success. How close are you to Brainstorming out that truly great idea? Are you giving up before the second 'hump'?

If you want to keep doing additive or derivative innovation, don't worry about what Steve Portigal is talking about. You can Brainstorm out the next iPad-mini from the normal sized iPad, basically a slight/marginal improvement over the original. (BTW Apple/Tim Cook, if you reading this, maybe you should 'invent' the *new* iPad-Biggie while you're at it...)

OR *IF* you want to do something disruptive and truly innovative, to build that first iPad, iPod, or iPhone, then I encourage to have a look both the Quantity and Quality of ideas your next Brainstorm.


Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau


p.s. There is no magic number of post-it-notes where the you know you are getting the 'second wave' of ideas. However it's not uncommon when I get a group as small as 5 people to aim for 150 post-it-notes within a 30 minute session.

5 people x 30 mins ==> 150 Ideas

It sounds radical, but it is really is a reasonable target. The first 50-100 will probably be 'first wave' ideas. If you push really hard, often you can get an extra 50-100 ideas if you are consciously about it. (As your diverse, T-shaped, multidisciplinary teams evolves, you'll easily surpass this target! Honest.)

Design Thinking: In defense of Brainstorming! (aka. You might not need Brainwriting...) Part 1

A  week ago Fast Company's Rebecca Greenfield wrote a piece entitled "Brainstorming Doesn't Work; Try this technique instead". While Fast Company has many great articles and I did agree with some of pitfalls listed in the article, (with apologies to Leigh Thompson of Kellogg School), but I think Brainstorming works just fine if you're doing it 'right'. We don't need Brainwriting, but rather just stick to Design Thinking's Brainstorming 8x rules and you should be in great shape!

We love Design Thinking at SAP and we especially love the Brainstorming part. Along with SAP I suggest that Stanford d.school, IDEO and many other companies also aren't giving up Brainstorming anytime soon. When done correctly, I believe those companies are still reaping many rewards from those sessions.

We have 8x basic rules that govern Brainstorming sessions (link to d.school Bootleg PDF on Brainstorming):

1. Defer Judgment - to prevent smothering radical ideas
2. Go for volume - to push envelope to get to great ideas
3. One conversation at a time - to ensure everyone gets a voice
4. Be visual - to stimulate right-side of the brain and communicate efficiently
5. Headline - to help communicate efficiently and filter through ideas quickly
6. Build on the Ideas of others - to help iterate and evolve ideas
7. Stay on topic - keep sessions moving and prevent time wasting
8. Encourage wild ideas - getting past the easy, obvious ideas

You can see a great blog post describing the rules above by Caroline O'Connor of Stanford d.School at Rules for Brainstorming.

Below are 3x concerns I have regarding why Brainstorming wasn't being applied optimally in Leigh Thompson's research. I've love to see if the statistics and outcomes would have differed if the groups had a proper Design Thinking coach and were adhering to the d.school process.

#1 - In Design Thinking Brainstorming sessions, we have idea/post-it-note rounds where team members write down their ideas on post-it-notes by themselves individually before verbally sharing with the group.There are definitely oral parts of it, but I disagree with Leigh Thompson's premise that (2:01 of How to Stop People from Dominating Meetings video):

Brainstorming: Simultaneous Oral Generation of Ideas
Brainwriting: Simultaneous Written Generation of Ideas

If Brainstorming was just Oral Generation of ideas, why do I keep buying so many darn Post-it-Notes and Sharpies! One of the d.school Design Thinking rules is being visual (#4), which *only* can happen on written down ideas. We do in fact write ideas, atomically one per Post-it-Note all.the.time.

(Using Voting Dots with Design Thinking)

#2 - In Design Thinking we also use voting dots to help semi-democratically decide on which ideas to execute on first. The dots are equal in size (and therefore also equal in 'voice') and can't lobby other dots, so aren't vulnerable to 'Doom Loops'. The process is usually done with little talking, so once again minimizing any dominating participate effect. (There is obviously still some small possibility of peer pressure but it's largely minimized for the reasons stated above.)

#3 - The Stanford d.school's Design Thinking Brainstorming has more rules and structure in place over and above the 2x rules that Leigh Thompson from Kellogg School has. Rules that encourage full group participation and embrace not just balance but also diversity. So if you're looking to change things up, why not move to a more encompassing methodology?

While it's often hard to argue with Fast Company or Kellogg School, but I believe I'm going to keep to Stanford d.school's Design Thinking Brainstorming sessions. At least for me, it's been working great and we don't often suffer from Doom Loops and Uneven Communication Effect. 

We've never really had a problem with that using d.school's Design Thinking methodology. These days I feel that a "Brainstorming Session" without these rules is just a discussion. ;) It's not really what we'd call "Brainstorming."

Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau

p.s. I realized that I did not outline what I thought was biggest obstacle for Brainstorming. Therefore I'll be posted a follow-up Part 2 on this posting.



Original Links for Fortune & Fast Company articles on Brainwriting:

• Fast Company - Brainstorming Doesn't Work Try This Technique Instead
• Fast Company - Solving Brainstorming's Loudmouth Problem
• Fortune - How To Neutralize A Meeting Tyrant