Grant McCracken on Brainstorming as Intellectual Improv

Following up on my recent recommendation of Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer (as well as my appreciation for Grant's acknowledgment of the strategic importance of empathy), I wanted to highlight one more thought-provoking concept in the book: Brainstorming as Intellectual Improv.  Grant describes a brainstorming session convened by Denise Fonseca, who is currently director of global business and consumer insights for Coca-Cola:

[pp 135-137] Fonseca has assembled people with various kinds of expertise.  Most were from the academic world.  They do not play well with others.  They object, cavil, quibble, carp and niggle.

Fonseca gave us fair warning.  She said something like,

There is one rule in this room: No no's.  You may not contradict, dispute, or disagree with the things you hear here.  I am going to enforce the "no no's" rule with my M&M's.  When I hear you contradict, dispute or disagree, I am going to pelt you with an M&M.  Or several M&M's, depending on the severity of your offense.

I listened with interest.  And I tried my best.  But years of academic training got the better of me.  I caviled, quibbled and disputed several times.  The first M&M struck me in the lapel.  The second bounced off the notes in front of me.  The last one was a direct hit, caroming off my noggin.  (Nice shot, Fonseca!)

The "no no's" rule comes as a surprise to a lot of people.  It seems like a recipe for chaos.  Isn't caviling the very method of quality control?  Actually, it isn't always.  Too often it's the way academics jam the airwaves against new ideas.  But the point of this undertaking is not quality control, it's idea generation.  When what we are looking for is a sheer profusion of possibilities, no no's is the path to riches.

Good brainstorming is an act of intellectual improv.  A group of people agree to break the normal rules and reservations of interaction and "go for it."  Their objective: to go places they could not get on their own...

But how are we to separate the good from the bad ideas?  The good news is that, in good groups, bad ideas go away by themselves.  No one picks them up.  No one remains their champion...

One of the conditions of brainstorming is a "nonproprietary" approach from the participants.  The moment an idea escapes our lips, it belongs to the group...  We have to learn to say goodbye.  We get credit in general for our performance...but otherwise ideas end up belonging to everyone.  This is sometimes the hardest lesson for academics to learn...

Once we learn to say no to no, we have to learn to say yes to yes... Brainstorming works best when we commit heart and soul.  It works best when we engage in a kind of improv.  The first positive rule of brainstorming is just what it is in improv: Take up every pretext and run with it.

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Further Thoughts on Group Process

While I do find Grant's belief in the power of brainstorming compelling (and have said so before), this counterpoint from Johnnie Moore is worth bearing in mind:

Personally, I like methods that allow...people a flexibility to work at different paces and [use] different ways of interacting. I tend not to use the word "brainstorming" as for me it's too suggestive of a relentless fast-pace. With more time for reflection, people sometimes generate ideas that are somewhere in the fascinating gaps between one point of view and another. And I like rules-of-thumb more than absolute instructions for how we might all choose to play together.

Ultimately I think it's most important to be mindful of the overall group dynamic.  For example, do we tend to "object, cavil, quibble, carp and niggle," like Grant's academics?  Then a formal set of brainstorming parameters, such as a hard-and-fast "No No's" rule, might give ideas time to breathe before they're suffocated.

It's also worth considering where the group is in the decision-making process.  Do we need to begin eliminating options in order to reach closure?  Then the time for brainstorming is over, and we need to transition into an entirely different process--but until we reach that point, perhaps we need a set of agreements that will help us stay in idea-generation mode.  Sam Kaner's framework for decision-making is a simple but very useful tool in this regard:

Finally, I'm reminded of Grant's elements of reinvention, an extraordinarily thoughtful list of the dynamics that characterize change.  Put all these concepts together, and they comprise a great set of tools for stimulating idea generation, reinvention, and change while also helping a group ultimately move forward and reach closure.

Comments

[twitter.com/johnniemoore]

Hi Ed, thanks for the link. I agree, context is all and there's nothing worse than rigid rituals.

I'm actually a sceptic about the application of the divergent/convergent model, for similar reasons to my concerns about brainstorming. If we think everyone in the group should be thinking in the same way, about the same problem, at the same time... we're blanking out a lot of diversity and risking simply censoring the healthy non-linear intelligence of the human mind.

So much real creativity comes in a non-linear way and on it's own time schedule. A lot of the research on brainstorming, for instance, suggests ideas often come to participants on their own and afterwards. So telling everyone to converge because that's what the diagram says feels very questionable to me as any kind of standard procedure. Offered as an invitation, what if we try this for a bit, I wouldn't mind so much.

[edbatista]

Thanks, Johnnie--very thought-provoking. I certainly agree that creativity is non-linear and has its own schedule, which is one reason why I generally prefer to do creative work alone and collaborate with others only after we've begun the idea-generation process on our own.

And I readily appreciate that the simplicity of the divergent/convergent model can be a weakness if it encourages groups to apply it when the group really needs to be more open-ended. One helpful option here is to recognize that the timeframe in the divergent/convergent model may span multiple sessions, allowing for reflective downtime and individual thinking between group meetings.

And yet there are times when groups need to do some work that involves both collective idea generation and collaborative decision-making, and I believe the divergent/convergent model can be very helpful in that context. You're absolutely right to point out the risk of missing out on a great idea if someone's creative process is out of synch with the way the group is applying the model's timetable--and it's important for the group's process to flex in response to that risk.

But there are times when A) cohesiveness around the outcome and B) effective implementation can be as important as the quality of the final idea. I'm reminded of hearing Scott McNealy say something to the effect of, "Don't worry too much about making the 'right' decision. Make your decision, and then do what it takes to insure that it was indeed the right one." I'm also reminded of another favorite (although perhaps apocryphal) quote from Patton: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week."

Groups that have work collaboratively can get hung up on optimizing during the idea generation or decison-making stages in ways that undermine their subsequent ability to implement, either because people get anchored on their preferences and ultimately give assent but fail to truly support the outcome, or because they just get stuck and fail to leave themselves enough time to do the follow-up work. And while the divergent/convergent model doesn't always optimize for idea generation or decision-making, I do think that it can help a group make a collaborative decision and support the group's ability to implement, both by building consensus and insuring members' active support, and by preserving time to actually do the work once the decision has been made.

(All that said, I think that a weakness of my diagram is that it implies that an equal amount of time should be dedicated to divergence and convergence. In my experience the former needs much more time and space to be truly effective, while all too often the latter gets more time than it really needs.)

Of course, there are times when it's essential to optimize during the idea generation and decision-making stages, but then I'd ask first whether a group is the best setting in which to initiate that work. Maybe, but maybe not. If it is the best setting, then there are so many aspects of the group's dynamic that need to be attended to if it's truly going to do that work effectively, and I fully agree that simply applying a heuristic like the divergent/convergent model to a group with sub-optimal interpersonal dynamics and expecting optimal outcomes is ridiculous.

Great stuff--thanks for prompting me to think this through in more depth. I'm not sure if we're in complete alignment, but I think we agree on more than it would seem at first glance.