Brainstorming, Brainwriting and Swimming Pools
I was out of the office for most of last week, meeting with the Greenpeace fundraising community to discuss their requirements and wishes for a new CRM system. The purpose of the time was to do some initial reconnaissance on the project, get a feel for the scope and complexity of the issues, and assemble a working group who could take the project forward.
The meeting was held in a hotel near Barcelona, which makes more sense when you realise that people had to travel from all over the world (Argentina, China, India etc.) to attend. The hotel turned out to come complete with the one thing every brainstorm needs - an empty swimming pool...
In 'The Art of Innovation' Tim Kelley writes that while most people think they can do brainstorming "I believe you can deliver more value, create more energy and foster more innovation through better brainstorming". I just started the book today, but I was introduced to Tim's ideas about brainstorming several years ago when touring the offices of IDEO - the design consultancy he manages. Since then I've read up on a number of techniques and evangelised about my ideas to anyone I've worked with.
Brainstorming commonly runs up against a number of problems, and most can be dealt with through some simple groundrules and facilitiation. Others are more serious, particularly the one known as 'production blocking'. This is the stage where one person has an idea and wants to talk, but can't because someone else is. For small groups it's manageable, for large groups it's a killer. Since I was faced with around 20 people for this session and had about 60 minutes available for the brainstorm it was obvious that a traditional approach would leave 3 minutes per person - and be very dull for most of the participants.
The solution is a technique called brainwriting. In essence you ask people to write down their ideas instead of shouting them out, and then share and discuss them. It's best combined with a traditional brainstorm (brainstorm for ten minutes, brainwrite for five then back again), but in this case the number of people and time made that difficult. In addition I asked people to structure their ideas into my favourite requirements format - As a ... I would like to ... so that ...
The result was that everyone got to go outside and spend fifteen minutes writing up their ideas. Then we came back together to share, group, and select the ideas. The 20 people generated around 120 ideas in those fifteen minutes, and while many were similar few were identical.
The best place to do the discussion and grouping turned out to be sitting round the empty swimming pool. People could read out their ideas in turn - and anyone with a similar idea could read it out as well. Then the collection of related ideas was grouped together in the pool. Since it was a little windy we had to weight the ideas down with shoes - probably the only time in my career I'll be glad to have my teammates throwing shoes at me....
In the end the sharing and sorting produced around 40 batches of ideas, and participants were able to vote for the ones they felt would be most valuable to their office. A good result - and a great process - albeit not one I'll probably ever manage to repeat.
