Innovate safely
Editor’s note: Gregg Fraley is principal at D.S. Fraley Associates, a Chicago research company.
There is a growing need in the research industry for consultants who specialize in assisting corporations with new product development. Many qualitative research moderators are helping to fill this need. They facilitate a technique that has come to be called ideation. Ideation is essentially structured brainstorming. Traditional brainstorming - a technique that has been around for years - falls in and out of favor because results are too frequently hit-or-miss. Ideation, on the other hand, addresses most of the shortcomings of brainstorming by putting a structure around it. The structure includes techniques to generate not only more ideas, but more on-target ideas.
This added structure works - and more corporations are realizing the benefits and joining the trend. Managers are often pleased with results - but perhaps not pleased often enough. I suggest that managers sometimes end up disappointed because the sessions are being subtly compromised - sometimes by the participants, sometimes by the “system,” sometimes by the planners themselves. In the latter case, it’s unintended of course, but the effect is the same as if one deliberately loaded a pistol, took off his or her shoe and pulled the trigger.
Given the investment of time and money, it’s disheartening how often these sessions fail to produce marketable concepts. It shouldn’t be surprising. Ideation sessions are complex events - it’s difficult to guide the collective imagination of a team. There are no guarantees of results even under perfect circumstances. But just like the duck hunter who is taught to keep the safety on while striding through the fields, there are ways to avoid disaster. Here are nine ways to avoid shooting yourself in the foot as you plan and execute your next ideation session.
Potential self-inflicted injury #1: not being there - no real commitment
It’s Monday and an ideation session is called for Friday morning at 9 a.m. The goal is to develop some new product ideas for implementation next year. It’s to occur in the conference room and a working lunch is planned. The memo says the meeting will be over by 2:00. Eight people, across corporate functions, are invited. A professional facilitator is brought in to help. The facilitator makes efforts to design a good session, but his corporate contact person avoids extensive discussion and he’s had to make due with a few quick phone calls.
Friday arrives and the facilitator is alone in the room at 9:00. Six people have arrived by 9:15. One of the missing phones in - can’t make it due to an emergency at the plant. Nobody knows about the other guy. At 9:40 the session gets off to a sluggish start. An hour goes by. Two participants begin slipping in and out of the room to take cell phone calls. Administrators occasionally duck in and whisper questions. An introvert makes notes on a piece of paper but doesn’t participate in spoken-out-loud idea generation. The rest of the team seems somewhat constrained because a high-level manager in the group is editing the ideas as they’re offered. The facilitator gently reminds the manager of the non-judgment rule, but this guidance is treated as a joke. The guy who was missing-in-action shows up at 10:30 and has no idea what’s going on. The session ends with just four people present, and the results are nearly non-existent.
Safety tip: This session was doomed from the start because there was no real commitment to the process. The evidence: facilitator blow-off, late arrivals, cell phones, invasive administrators, and ignoring the rule to suspend judgment. In this scenario, even the participants who showed were probably missing-in-action. Ideation synergy happens when everybody’s head is in the room, and when everyone is truly “present” for the challenge at hand. Like most creative acts, ideation is most effective when people get totally involved in the content - it’s a flow experience. Imaginative thinking doesn’t happen with distractions, poor planning and low energy. And the best ideation sessions are conducted offsite in order to minimize the constant interruptions. And by all means, if there’s low or no energy, forget the whole idea!
Potential self-inflicted injury #2: facilitate it yourself
A software company needs ideas for a new product introduction. The marketing group decides to hold an ideation session to come up with specific concepts for the launch. There is a sense of urgency - the CEO wants to review concepts immediately. Budgets are tight and so the group decides to facilitate the session themselves. One of the managers has some facilitation training, so he takes the pen and stands in the appropriate spot next to the flip chart. The session goes out of control almost immediately. Ideas are brought up and shot down in quick succession. Tempers flare and the team divides into several competing camps. The facilitator not-so-subtly sides with people on his immediate team. The session ends with three unexciting and watered down launch concepts that were the result of group compromise.
Safety tip: Don’t facilitate your own sessions. Hire a qualified ideation facilitator. Spend the money, get someone experienced, and check references. A facilitator’s first job is to be neutral and to focus on process, and it’s amazingly hard for the already-involved to stay out of the way. The facilitator in the scenario above was neither neutral nor process-oriented - he allowed the dialog to disintegrate into the pattern of idea-critique. The ideal process for ideation is long stretches of idea generation, followed by constructive convergence - with no mixing of the two.
The manager of a group is also a risky choice. Team managers have a difficult time managing process and time, and can seldom resist the urge to contribute ideas. With the best intentions, they may subtly edit the ideas and thoughts of others. People notice, and the flow of ideas, particularly the wild out-of-the box ideas, shuts down.
Many corporate groups have trained facilitators on staff. If they are not on the project team, they can be ideal process facilitators for your session. Many organizations, however, don’t have anyone qualified to lead an ideation session.
This is not to say there are no great leaders in these groups, but ideation facilitation is a niche skill. Even trained facilitators in strategic planning processes are not necessarily good choices. The reason: Ideation is fundamentally different. It’s not a critical/analytical process. Some of the most powerful consulting groups in the world (and they will be nameless here!) are ill-prepared to assist with ideation because their skills are “rigorous analysis”-oriented. New ideas don’t spring forth from analytical thought; they spring forth from a mindset of openness, curiosity, wonderment, novelty, fun and risk.
Potential self-inflicted injury #3: - no time for ideas to incubate
Ideation sessions are often the result of a corporate emergency. The competition comes up with an innovation that could put you out of business, and that ideation session you’ve been putting off for months suddenly becomes a top priority. Management sees the need - that’s the good news. The trigger is immediately pulled - bam! - let’s do the session! Now! People are flown in from the far corners of the globe and hustled into a hotel conference room. Someone presents a hastily done PowerPoint presentation - an analysis on the status of things - and that goes on for a couple of hours. Then the flip charts come out and the brainstorming begins. And it continues all day. You work through lunch, breaks are short, and the coffee is bad. Everybody is brain dead by 3 p.m. (or much earlier, more likely), but they battle gamely on.
Has this ever resulted in a wonderful new concept? I suppose brute force cybernetics has worked once or twice, but usually what emerges from these types of sessions is a rehash of all the old or obvious ideas.
In the haste to get a session together quickly, the leaders, consultants and participants have no opportunity to think about the challenge ahead of time. There’s no time to conduct, review, or research data which might inform the ideation. There’s no chance for an exploration that might reframe the challenge. Then the PowerPoint introduction sets an atmosphere of logical analysis - which is not where you want the “heads” to be during an ideation session. The brain does not turn on a dime from analytical thinking to imaginative thinking. Logical analysis is critical, but the time to do it is before, not during, the session.
Safety tip: Give participants notice of what’s going to happen in advance and give them (fun and involving) tasks that will get them thinking, a lot, about the challenge. A homework assignment may include a shopping trip, observation of products in use, and/or Internet research. These activities will give the brain a chance to do what it does best - ruminate and come up with new combinations. When the session does start, you won’t need the PowerPoint - you can spend the entire day in imaginative mode.
Potential self-inflicted injury #4: overly ambitious or poorly defined goals
“We want breakthrough innovation” says the CEO. “Organize an ideation session that really gets us out of the box.” So you go about making it happen. You set a tone that allows for anything and everything; you even invite in some “trained brain” outsiders to get a fresh perspective. Except that when it happens you are not prepared for a wall of wacky, far-out, impractical, expensive and illegal solutions. Now, you chicken out and change your mind during the session because you fear you won’t be able to deliver anything to the CEO. You redirect the group to more close-in, more practical ideas. And what do you end up with? Unpolished, untamed far-out concepts, and a few close-in ideas. A lot of valuable time is wasted, and you get about half of what you’re looking for.
Safety tip: Know what you want. Clearly define your challenge and direct your ideation towards that specific need. Don’t frame a session with an “anything goes” opening and then change horses midstream. When you want breakthrough thinking, brace yourself for the unexpected. Be prepared for ideas outside the current paradigm - ideas that could change the business drastically. Maybe it’s a new distribution channel, maybe it’s a spin-off company, or maybe a new factory to produce a radically different product. These things take time to implement.
What ever happened to good old-fashioned improvement? It’s totally fine to devote an ideation session to practical ideas for improvement. In fact your odds for success are much higher than in a session dedicated to breakthrough innovation. Sometimes in-the-box thinking is exactly what you want. Many ideation sessions are planned, and “innovation” is the goal. A vague objective like this, however, often leads to two disappointing outcomes. First, the ideas generated (while usually worthwhile) may be too generic or ambitious to be realistically implemented - at least in a short timeframe. And second, a more specific outcome, which might be more appropriate, is not realized.
Potential self-inflicted injury #5: two days of ideation a year
You pull the whole team in once a year. It’s difficult to get everyone together in a decentralized organization. These infrequent sessions are viewed as the time when the “magic bullet” will be identified. The ideation team is comprised of people who spend most of their working hours in demanding, complex management jobs...jobs that require constant critical analytical thinking. They fly in for the pow-wow and spend two solid days generating ideas. They are not used to this. They get off to a good start but mental fatigue soon takes over. Ideation, for these people, seems like an unnatural act.
Safety tip: Why wait to begin ideation until everybody is in one physical place? You should be generating ideas all the time. With e-mail, Web, and database technologies people can contribute ideas wherever they are, and whenever the spirit moves them. Virtual sessions can then be coordinated by a facilitator for highly focused efforts. Or, instead of flying everyone to a central site, organize in-person sessions at regional centers. Respond to these regional efforts by providing feedback on the ideas. Conduct regular reviews of ideas on an actively managed set of lists. If you want to have skilled idea generators on your team, they must practice the skill constantly. Practice in small teams, for short bursts of time, frequently! Train those brains! Then, when the marathon session happens, your team is conditioned to handle it.
Potential self-inflicted injury #6: not inviting the “troublemakers”
Developing the invitation list for an ideation session is a real challenge. You choose your best people, your best thinkers. As you review the list of candidates you cross folks off the list who have a history of, well, being a pain. You have your session and it seems to go very well. You quickly identify the most promising ideas and everyone agrees on how to move forward. It shocks you to learn later that you have missed the mark completely. Management - or consumers - are unexcited with your ideas and you are back at square one.
Safety tip: Invite a diverse team that includes both innovative and adaptive thinkers. The cross-pollination of different thinking styles on an ideation team generates the most creative solutions. Depending on your own personal creative style, we tend to invite those who...well, who think a lot we do. Sessions with homogenous teams feel productive - there are few conflicts. But everyone tends to have similar ideas.
Creative style has been expertly defined by researcher Michael Kirton with his famous adaptor/innovator scale (see www.kaicentre.com). The idea is that everyone on the scale is creative, but in different ways. Kirton has learned that it’s easiest to communicate with people of your own thinking style — it requires less negotiation. The farther apart on the scale people are, the more they are viewed as “difficult.” On a diverse team, adaptors can help make the ideas of high innovators workable. The innovators can expand on small improvement ideas and add real value. Bottom line: invite the “troublemakers.”
Potential self-inflicted injury #7: guessing or projecting the consumer
You organize a session with a deliberately generalized objective - you want a really wide range of ideas. It works. You get ideas for all areas of the business and some interesting ideas for new products. You test the product concepts with consumers in focus groups and they bomb! And the business and operations ideas are rejected by the leaders of those groups. The feedback is that “You don’t understand the problem,” or more tersely, “It’s not your problem.”
Safety tip: Sometimes you want a free-for-all kind of session to explore ideas about your business. When you are trying to reach a specific consumer market (or an internal customer) however, it makes a lot of sense to get into the consumer’s head - intimately - in order to generate ideas that resolve specific problems. Exploratory consumer research is an ideal preparatory step for an ideation session. Taking into account the insights and expressed consumer needs you gleaned in exploratory focus groups, you can tailor the structure of your ideation session to respond directly. Consider different ways to include the consumers. Invite one or more “trained brain” consumers to the ideation session itself - hire their thinking. Consider having the ideation team conduct their own interviews of the target audience and/or implement or perform observational research. Then, explore the challenge in some artistic way, through music, dance or drawing. This begins the session with an experience that invokes the imagination, the emotion and the spirit of the consumer. No, this isn’t just touchy-feely for the sake of touchy-feely - it’s a time-tested exploration that has been proven to lead to actual breakthroughs. And, while we’re on the subject of touchy-feely...
Potential self-inflicted injury #8: cutting short the use of goofy games, energizers and fun
It’s 2:00 p.m. on the first day of a two-day session. The morning went okay, but you know you’re not there yet. The ideas just aren’t exciting, so you’ve had to make some adjustments to your objectives. Some people arrived late due to bad weather in Chicago and now you’re behind schedule. The facilitator gets everybody in a circle and hands out “angel cards.” You think it’s absurd but you go along. Then she (or he) starts tossing about an imaginary ball. You pull her aside and tell her to get on with the show and to cut all the energizers for the rest of the day in order to get back on schedule. She agrees reluctantly. You feel better but an hour later everybody looks like a zombie and the idea flow has slowed to dribs and drabs. For the rest of the day people are walking out, taking their own breaks, getting a bit snarly, talking on cell phones, etc. They are emotionally uninvolved. By the time they leave the group looks something like the walking wounded. And when the session ends, the results reflect those attitudes.
Safety tip: Resist the urge to cut the touchy-feely and energy-enhancing activities. In fact, add more. These games and energizers are exactly what the brain needs to get into, and stay in, an imaginative mode. The value of games and energizers is seriously undervalued in ideation sessions. Most facilitators are sensitive to time requirements and sensitive to touchy-feely resistance, and will usually only put in just enough games and fun stuff. They are well aware that these games can be viewed as a waste of time by the less experienced skeptics — the same skeptics who are often the folks paying the bill. When cuts are made to the agenda, such activities are unfortunately often the first things to go.
According to Pierce J. Howard, author of The Owner’s Manual For The Brain, physical exercise is highly effective in improving the speed of recall, and much research points to an effect on the quality of mental function and the amount of recall. It releases endorphins, the neurotransmitters that relax us into a state of cortical alertness.
Humor also works. Tests of problem-solving ability yield better results when they are preceded by laughter. Many of the games/exercises used for energizing were originally designed for the theater. The intent is to bring the actor into the present moment, enabling him or her to respond to stimulus authentically. These exercises are time-tested - they bring people’s minds into the room - instead of cranking away on other problems and challenges in their lives. Once a state of “being present” is achieved you will have more effective ideation results. This state is hard to maintain, however, and that’s why about once an hour you need to refresh. You want people to play with ideas, and these games help establish the environment of playfulness that allows those magic ideas to pop up and be heard by the conscious mind. If you want the magic bullet, play with the magic ball.
And the good news? Even the skeptics usually end up being won over once they’ve participated.
Potential self-inflicted injury #9: not getting into action
A month after the session, the business crisis that triggered it has passed. You were able to use a few of the ideas, and they are testing well in focus groups. That’s been “good enough” - maybe even quite successful. It’s easy to rationalize: “Well, we got what we wanted from the session. We don’t need to explore/expand upon the other ideas we generated.” You “mean to” get to that list - but you never do.
Safety tip: Somebody needs to take ownership of all the ideas generated, and put a process in place to continually work them and put them into action. Have them reported and distributed as soon as possible. That data is a strategic asset and should be treated as such. The data should be easily accessible. Leverage that corporate intranet - with proper security of course. The longer the data gathers dust, the less likely it will ever be used.
Why this recommendation? Buried in that data could be the next idea that fuels the growth of your company. Ideas that seemed silly or impractical at first are often the best ideas, even if your brain and/or the corporate culture weren’t ready to accept them initially. Out-of-the-box ideas are sometimes so jarring that the immediate reaction is, “No way.” On further reflection you might see a way. Put a process in place to continue the work and put into action as many ideas as possible. You’ve invested the time and resources to conduct the session - by all means preserve the product!
Spur innovation
Idea generating sessions require commitment, focus and a considerable investment of time and money. Don’t plan and conduct an ideation marathon session unless you are committed to the technique. Structured ideation can be the most important tool your organization has to really spur innovation. But like a duck hunter’s rifle it must be used carefully. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Keep the “safety” on and you’ll enjoy better and more consistent results.