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.