Sometimes the point of brainstorming should be to focus on surfacing interesting questions, not on finding answers. This piece in HBR lays out the thinking and it makes a lot of sense.
First some context. I spend a lot of time brainstorming and 99% of the time I enjoy it. I still have cold flushes about the 1%. I recall at a meeting years ago in Nokia I was chairing a meeting with a diverse group of executives on the topic of “Nokia2.0“, an initiative I’d started back in 2006 to try and reinvent the company. (It was no coincidence that Nokia2.0 was launched around the same time as the iPhone – and that’s a longer blog post at some stage.) Anyway, in this meeting all eyes looked at me and I found myself in the hot seat. “What should we do?”. I froze and felt like an imposter. If I’d have had this trick up my sleeve then, I’d have said, ok let’s take a few mins and fire up some of the key questions we need to be focused on. It would have no doubt got me out of that hole, but more importantly surfaced a whole bunch of different perspectives and underlying assumptions and frames that could have helped Nokia think differently about its transformational innovation challenge.
Here’s the TLDR version of the HBR article for the ‘Brainstorming Questions’ method that Hal Gregersen proposes:
- Organise into small groups. If there’s a large group, you’ll get better engagement breaking into smaller groups of around 6.
- Frame the topic at hand in 2 minutes in a a high level way, trying not to be prescriptive about where you think people should look for answers.
- Let people know what good questions are. There are no bad questions, nobody should attempt to answer questions raised, justify or introduce them. The best questions are open-ended, short, simple, descriptive (what’s working?) and require cognition (i.e. not How many widgets are there? but What’s the thing about our widgets that needs improving?). Further they should be positive and not put anyone on the spot (“Why do you suck at your job?…”)
- Check your energy. Before asking questions, note down your energy levels and those of the room.
- Create a Question Burst period of e.g. 4 minutes to get the group to surface 15 good questions.
- Re-check your energy. See how the energy has shifted.
- Review the questions and look for patterns & pathways. See what are the common threads. Go deeper with the 5 Whys. Understand what are the underlying assumptions (that may be misplaced).
- Pick one pathway to solve. Apply a Jobs to be Done lens to chart an action path for a solution.
- Repeat 2-3 times. The more you do it the deeper you’ll get.
- Make questioning and curiosity a core culture. As the article says, at school we get rewarded for having good answers, in life we get rewarded for having good questions.
