Brainsteering: An alternative way to conduct your brainstorming session

By Patrick Mayoh

First of all can I just observe I prefer the term Brainsteering to brainstorming? Think of it; what comes to your mind when you consider brainstorming is where/when people in a group blurt out all kinds of ideas and propositions sometimes with a serious lack of focus or perspective. When it comes to Brainsteering you can think of the steering wheel in your car providing a clear sense of direction and leading you exactly to where you want to go.

Well Brainsteering is still a very new term out there; actually my Google search yielded very scanty information. However this is worth talking about for my post this week. And I came across the concept a couple of days ago in the MC Kinsey Quarterly. Simply put Brainsteering is a refined or an improved way of brainstorming. In a traditional brainstorming session, people sit around a table (with tea or coffee, pens and papers) and have to think “out of the box” to come up with the latest ideas on issues ranging from cost reduction, pricing, market entry strategies and all the rest.

While this has been greatly lauded in organizations and by virtue of the fact it has often yielded great results, MC Kinsey believes it could be done much better. So do me. They have therefore identified seven ways of completely turning your brainstorming session upside down. It is a combination of very commonsensical principles and details managers have to take into account when they meet up with their teams.

Bearing in mind that the cardinal rule for great products and services is to have great ideas Brainsteering therefore revolves around the followings even steps:

1. Knowing your organization’s decision-making criteria

2. Asking the right questions

3. Choosing the right people

4. Dividing and conquering

5. On your mark, get set, go

6. Wrapping it up

7. Following up quickly

Assessing your decision-making criteria

This pretty much makes sense doesn’t it? Before you get your team to think about your market entry strategy for South Asia, you should as a coordinator check and ensure which decisions your team can or not make. The old cliché according to which brainstorming is all about “thinking out of the box” is very misguided. Because like it or not you operate in a specific context governed by particular rules and regulations pertaining to your organizations. So although going into China for example (everyone wants to) would be a fantastic idea for your business do you have the means as a team to make such a decision? The point here is Brainsteering strategically and wisely delineates the confines of an idea generation process. Members suggest ideas based on their collective decision-making power. Good ideas not matter how good they are, are discouraged if they cannot be implemented by the group.

Asking the right Questions

Quality is definitely better than Quantity. It is not about the number of ideas but about the pertinence of those in a given context. Therefore the ideal Brainsteering session manager carefully identifies a problem, pattern or issue and then articulates specific question built around finding key answers to the problem. This is about saving time; frankly going into a brainstorming session where the manager says “any idea?” is catastrophic. Rather the “any idea?” could be replaced with something like “any suggestions about providing better customer service for new mums that come to our store”.

Choosing the right mix of people

This does not need much explaining does it? Ideally when it comes to decision-making you should have a mix of people working within all the layers of the organization. This is even when the decision to implement for example is just affecting the operational layer. The idea is to obtain perspectives from key sectors of the organization. Say your Brainsteering session decides you should upgrade your computers. Sounds great; but what if unbeknownst to you, the top management has decided to freeze capital investments in IT. So the idea is to ideally have a Vice-President, Middle managers and Customer service reps for example. Ideas are guaranteed within such a context to flow better and to be generated in a more coherent way.

Dividing and Conquering

Sounds like a line from the Iliad or the Lord of the Rings. But this is probably one of the very important and attractive aspects of Brainsteering. It is common wisdom that when you have a large group of people three things happen. You have those who never run out of ideas and keep on suggesting off the wall perspectives. Then you have those that enjoy contradicting those who have the good ideas without suggesting anything of value. And then you have the stone faced, those who never say anything and that are hardly noticed in the course of the brainstorming session. This is usually a waste of time, ideas and resources. Because that quiet member could surely contribute something given the right context/atmosphere; and it is up to the manager to acknowledge that. An ideal Brainsteering session means you have to divide a large group say of 8 into small groups of 3 or 2 members. The tendency is to talk more when there is smaller group. The taciturn colleague will undoubtedly contribute something if he finds herself or himself in a smaller group. Conquering is then about assigning each group the task of finding specific answers to pre-articulated question (before the meeting).

On your marks, get set and go

This is most likely to be at the beginning of your meeting having prepared already (the four steps above). Here your participants will have to briefed on what you are up to (as the manager) many of these might find your paradigm shift very strange. Ideally you will set out the problem, the pattern or the issue and then proceed to lay out the key questions to be answered and therefore assign people to their various groups.

Wrapping it up

There is still the likelihood that your participants will come up with many ideas although they are in sub-groups (you can’t help it can you?). Wrapping it up is the stage where you get your team to summarize their main points. It could be done in two steps. First each group indicates how many ideas they have regarding a specific question assigned to them. Say 4 ideas per group about 16 for the whole group; the next step will be then to get them to narrow down their points to 2 or just 1 depending on your context and end up with 8 top ideas.

Following up quickly

Once you have generated ideas you should with a decision-making team (CFO or COO) tick in or out the best ideas. Informing the members even those whose ideas have not been implemented is critical at this stage. You need to thank everyone and clarify the fact that decision making based on capabilities is actually the reason why one idea gets rejected or accepted.

You are ready! Find it very useful actually. Hope you do as well. I am still thinking about my article on Phone applications. See you next week.

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The Branding era or how your branding strategy can attract and retain faithfuls

Patrick Mayoh

It is a reasoning I recently read in a book that prompted me to write something about branding this week (after a long break). The book itself is about youth culture and its ramifications within the field of business in general and marketing in particular[1]. The author made an observation which got me thinking about the whole idea of branding and how it was affecting our choices or even emotions today. Jason Gardner (that is the author of the book) hypothesised that today’s generation are the first to “have grown up within a brand culture”. Adding that “promoting brand isn’t a new idea, but the heavy emphasis on selling the image of a company, as opposed to promoting the quality of goods they sell is new”. In addition he reckons that “companies realised they could create a cheap product but sell it at a high price if the image of the company was right”. Although this needs may be to be substantially proved and empirically demonstrated, you cannot help but feel this series of statement is very reflective of what is going on today. Traditional marketing which consists of promoting goods and services is not as relevant as it was before for three keys reasons:

· Product/service lifecycles are shorter

· There are too many offerings (products and services) out there nowadays

· Product/service information are widely and easily available these days

Shorter lifecycles

Well think of it honestly, new Ipads come up every year, blackberries are released virtually every 3 or 6 months, phone apps every seconds and new car models every year as well and this is not just about the technology and automotive industries; all sectors in our current economy are constantly reinventing products and services be it in retail, groceries, fashion and sport industries to name just these. The product lifecycle model as we know it (birth- maturity- growth- decline) is outdated and irrelevant to the 21^st century business environment. The way it is today, is products and services are born and mature virtually within the same time while growth and decline occur so quickly that you do not have time to see when they actually happen—think of the last time you thought you needed a new phone after you had bought one just 3 weeks before—clearly the idea of positioning a product in a particular niche market is as complex as it has ever been for many years.

So many offerings

The reason why we have shorter lifecycles comes down to the fact that we seem to have more of the same everywhere. Just about 10 years ago Nokia was the leader of the mobile phone industry with just a few competitors like Motorola, Sony Ericsson and in a certain measure Samsung and LG. Today the picture is totally different. This is the same with the automotive industry, there used to be a time where only Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota and Ford were the only choices available when you thought of purchasing a car. Well you know this is totally different today. It even sounds ludicrous to observe that new products and services are produced virtually every second today, overshadowing the current ones, and conveying the feeling that what we have just bought from the store or over the Internet is so outdated we need to get something new. This is probably what Belden Menkus referred to when he talked about the age of discontinuity (his article is published on this blog) where everything that happens now seems to be so disconnected from what went on before.

Information overload

Information overload is just a consequence from the previous two. It is actually a term I read about the first time in a MC Kinsey article about coping with the vast amount of information available to CEOs and individuals nowadays. Traditional marketing methods with popular models like the 4Ps (product, price, promotion and place) aims to ensure that customers get the best information available about products. It is based on the premise that a customer that possesses all the good information will surely make the best choice when deciding which product or service to choose. Nowadays such information is widely available, not only that, but it is available in such a big amount that it becomes confusing to make a good decision. From websites, to consumer reports and blogs it is so easy to lose your head over what to believe when it comes to making the right decision about a product or service you wish to purchase.

Why branding

And this is where my point for branding comes into play. Because traditional marketing alone is no more necessary to attract and retain customers, your business will need to capitalize on branding to make a difference. I preferred to use the term faithfuls rather than customers because I reckon that nowadays you really want to retain people that will not only buy what you sell but will tell or keep telling others and spread the gospel (getting a bit religious here!) about your products/services and its various attributes. I believe branding in this sense has a big role to play for three reasons:

· Your identity

· What you stand for

· Why people can and should relate to your company

First of all branding “is the complete set of signals that surround a product, service or a company” according to Van Assen et al (2009) regarding the definition of a brand and how it affects a company’s image and reputation.

Your Identity

This is not just about your name or logo. It has to do with how you make sure you distinguish yourself from others in your sector or industry. It is a combination of the products/services you offer and what your organization understands/believes itself to be within the wider society and why. And this is the reason why you need to agree as an organization what you want to be passionate about especially in terms of improving and changing your environment(the wider society). There are actually so many causes and issues your organization could be passionate about. These will have to be incorporated within your identity statement.

Your values

What you stand for in your organization should not be secretive; rather you need to make sure your customers know about your values and those things that add flavour to your identity. This is the only way you start to connect to customers and their deepest needs. What people get/buy from your business, they can easily get from elsewhere, and not just that, chances are what you offer is available in many other locations and businesses. Your values will ensure customers connect to your organizations and will eventually make them want to stay and continue doing business with you. Integrity, honesty, customer-first, innovation, reinvention and agility are just some of the values out there you might want to emulate to make sure people stay with you and do not go elsewhere.

Create connections

I recently watched Comic Relief, a programme on the red nose day in Britain designed to attract funding from the public through a TV show hosted by popular comedians. The thing which most struck me about the programme was the level of support from the business sector. You would expect a TV show designed to attract financial aid for Africa to be supported by major charity organizations. However the level of support from the profit sector was even more than from the non-profit sector. Ernst and young (many people do not know about) as well as retail stores like Asda (Wal-mart), Tesco and Sainsbury featured in the TV programme.

The idea I believe is for those companies to connect with customers; something like “we are the good guys, we do not just sell the good products and services”. Increasingly customers will not just buy the best products and services, customers will equally put their favourite brands under scrutiny to understand whether those actually contribute to the common good of society. That sounds very utilitarian but it is a true picture of how things stand in the UK and the world over. Recent protests in Central London about cuts are a prime example of that. Big corporations were accused of tax evasion and therefore responsible for the current economic climate. I will not go into much detail about that, but think of those companies like Nike which recently came under the spotlight for allowing children in Asia to work under inhumane conditions in their factories.

If your branding strategy needs to be successful you need to make sure people can relate not only to your products or services but also to your actions and initiatives within your environment especially in terms of how they contribute to make a happier society.

Good...hope that makes sense for you and your business...see you next week with an article on phone apps

References

Jason Gardner (2010) Mend the Gap Inter Varsity Press

Baker, M. And Hart, S. (1999) Product Strategy and Management. Harlow: Pearson Education.

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[1] Mend the Gap by Jason Gardner

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