James Royal-Lawson
Thank you to everyone who is helping us with our transcripts. You’re doing a great job helping us make sure they’re published together with the podcast. If you’d also like to help out with publishing the podcast, or even with gathering links for the show notes, just email us at hej@uxpodcast.com h-e-y, or h-e-j.

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 285.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody, welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts James Royal-Lawson…

Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
And we’re balancing business, technology, people and society with listeners all over the world, from Malta to Turkmenistan.

Per Axbom
And today we are joined by Christopher McCann. He’s an individual, team and leadership coach. He’s also a design leader and educator.

James Royal-Lawson
Christopher has not only joined us as a guest on one of the earliest UX Podcast episodes, I think it was Episode #6. He’s also featured as a co-host in a number of shows, including ‘Communicating Design Decisions’ with Tom Greever, and ‘The Build Trap’ with Melissa Perri.

Per Axbom
He also happens to be the person who introduced you and myself to each other.

James Royal-Lawson
That is true. But today, though, our topic is not about how long Chris has been involved in the podcast or where we met or how we met, it’s actually going to be brainstorming.

Per Axbom
And what could one possibly say about brainstorming? Turns out quite a lot.

James Royal-Lawson
I’ve got to get this in my head right now. So Chris, you’ve joined us a fair few times on the podcast. But the last time you were on the podcast, you, Per, weren’t on the podcast.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

Christopher McCann
That’s right.

James Royal-Lawson
Because back then with you, Chris, we interviewed…

Christopher McCann
Melissa Perri. Yeah. Lovely woman.

James Royal-Lawson
Three years ago now.

Christopher McCann
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, welcome back again, Chris.

Christopher McCann
Thank you.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, what we’re going to talk about today, though, is brainstorming. Now, I think that brainstorming seems to have gotten a bit of a bad rap in recent years. I’ve been noticing stuff that’s dissing brainstorming a bit and coming with criticisms about why it’s not necessarily a great method to deploy. One of the criticisms I can think of is that generally there can be very dominant characters that take over brainstorming meetings. So you don’t actually brainstorm very much, you end up just amplifying the ideas of a particular individual.

Per Axbom
But it also feels like you’re forcing people. “Oh, now you have to be here and think and come up with ideas.”

Christopher McCann
Oh, yeah. I mean the environment is really important. But I think you have to take one step back and ask yourself, what are you doing brainstorming for? I mean, what do you want to get out of it? I mean, brainstorming was designed in the late 40s by ad men, to generate lots of ideas. And, they decided, a fella named Alex Osborn, decided that the best way to do it was not to criticize, and, you know, not have any sort of judgement. And I think that worked. But I think now, we want to do something with our ideas. So it’s a little bit different. I think we’ve come longer in our thinking around creative thinking, and there’s been a lot more research. So I think there’s ways of engineering out some limitations of brainstorming. Like you mentioned, forcing people to talk. And I think that’s one of the big weaknesses. It’s the social aspect of it. We want to get along with people. You don’t want to disagree necessarily.

James Royal-Lawson
So the classic brainstorming session would put you in a position where you’re likely to agree with someone’s idea that they suggest.

Christopher McCann
Right, even though you’re supposed to defer judgement. This is my view of brainstorming. You get a bunch of smart people together. I think in an Alex Osborne’s book, it was like 10 people, 10 ad men, and they just fire out…

Per Axbom
10 ad men the same age, the same demographic.

Christopher McCann
Pretty much. Exactly. So this was 1948 when he wrote the book so and we watched Mad Men the TV show so you do the math. So you have a lot of people, although there was Peggy in there on Madmen the show which which was good. So you know, you’re just blowing out all these ideas. And if you have the highest paid persons in the room, you’re going to fall into a social construct that’s going to benefit you. We’re social animals, we don’t want to not be in the group. So you’re going to self-censor yourself quite easily there.

James Royal-Lawson
So the result is not actually producing the ideation, the producing of ideas, the brainstorming, doesn’t happen.

Christopher McCann
Well, people self-censor themselves, so they’re not going to give you those crazy ideas, because they’re gonna think it’s, even though they’re not supposed to, you know, you get the eye rolling, you get the little smirk. So people will limit themselves, they won’t go crazy. You’re not going to go crazy with your boss in a room. But this comes down to really: how does a group have any relationship with one another? How they get along? How open is the communication? How much psychological safety do they have? I think a lot of these things play a part into the classic form of brainstorming.

Per Axbom
So what I’m hearing is like, from when it was kind of invented, the purpose of brainstorming has also shifted to what you were saying, we actually want to produce something in the end or make something happen in the end, whereas they were perhaps brainstorming just ideas for ads?

Christopher McCann
Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, he doesn’t go into details in his book that much more. But to me I think one of the limits of it is a social aspect of it, for sure. And then, the other one is that it’s just an idea. You don’t do anything with it, that’s kind of part two. So you’re in some ways wasting an opportunity, because when you merge different ideas from a lot of different sources is that you’re gonna get better ideas. So there’s no collaboration. So if we go back to the sort of the social aspect, one of the weaknesses that I see a lot in both brainstorming and any other kind of creative activity is really, you need to have a good facilitator, because a good facilitator will be able to manage the situation so you don’t have one person who takes up all the space. So you call, you can invite some of the more quiet people to speak. So there’s there’s ways, I think this is the biggest challenge is I’ve been to many, many, many brainstorming sessions, where the people that facilitating it, just don’t really have the knowledge or the skills to facilitate it well.

Per Axbom
Because sometimes they’re actually from within the same company.

Christopher McCann
Usually.

Per Axbom
There’s also this power imbalance social structure as well.

Christopher McCann
It’s very often the CEO or the the highest paid person is gonna say, “Now, we’re gonna brainstorm” and everyone was like, “Okay, great. What should we do now?” So, I mean, there’s lots of ways you can get around that too. I mean, there’s a lot of tools from ‘liberating structures,’ for example, which we can add in the show notes. And they have the, you know, the classic one, two, four, all. And the idea is that you let people individually come up with some ideas, then you pair them up so there’s two people, and then they work and they distill their ideas together. And then you do take that pair, and they join up with another two people. And then they join together and synthesize their ideas, and then you share it with the rest of the group.

The value of this one is, first of all, you let people do it by themselves first. So they do it silently. So there’s no judgement. People that are quiet, people that don’t feel like being in a group, you know, introverts, this is a great way of getting getting value from somebody by hearing their opinions. And then you start to collaborate, you’re gonna merge them together. And when you start merging ideas together, that’s when the real magic happens. And you can keep doing that in larger and larger groups until you get to the entire group. So that’s one way of managing this particular social aspect of brainstorming.

James Royal-Lawson
So starting off as individuals, so you can work with yourself, right? Is that something you would do in the brainstorming session? Or would you would you do it as like homework or preparation?

Christopher McCann
You could do it like that. But I tend to time everything. And so I think people can produce a lot more things in a limited amount of time that they think they can. So that’s typically what I like to do, you could give it as a homework assignment.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, have you noticed any kind of, think about quality of result or kind of how long you’ve come? Do you get further by having them do his homework before the session? Or do you actually generally come to the same quality of result anywhere, even if you do it in the session?

Christopher McCann
I think in the session, you’re forcing them to do it. I think if you give it as homework, my experience is that 50% won’t do it.

Per Axbom
And then you’ll have that power imbalance again, because some people will spend two hours on it. And they’ll come with all these notes. And all of a sudden they have the upper hand.

Christopher McCann
Which typically is what happens. So someone will come in and have like 30 post-it notes, another person will come in and it’ll be, you know, like maybe one or none or my dog ate it or any other sort of excuse.

Per Axbom
That’s really interesting what you said about the post-it notes now, because I’ve been in a lot of workshops where people actually keep glancing at each other because everybody’s writing post-it notes, “Oh, that person has written seven and I’ve only written two.” And that I guess is the facilitators job then to help people feel comfortable with that difference.

Christopher McCann
Exactly. And that that’s definitely a risk. If you have them together, then they can see oh, that you did 10. And I only did two, because again, we’re putting ourselves into group, you’re comparing yourself to people and other people in a group, you want to stay in a group. So if 60% of the group have done 10 and you did two, you’re like, “oh, shit, I’m gonna get kicked out of my group.” And this is from biology. This is from, you know, our time on the savanna when you got kicked out of the group, you died. So we have that still in our bodies and in the way we think. And so you need to, that’s not going to disappear the next 100,000 years, probably, so we need to find a way to manage that today in 2022.

James Royal-Lawson
So how do you switch the focus to what you’re actually trying to achieve? Because I mean brainstorming? I mean, what the hell’s brainstorming? And what are we brainstorming about? And how do you then stop the inward looking aspect of the kind of individualistic behaviour? And the group behaviour? How do you actually turn the focus?

Christopher McCann
Well, I mean, I can say a couple things about that. First, before I would do a brainstorming. And I really wouldn’t call it a brainstorming because that’s loaded with a lot of beliefs, limiting beliefs. I would even say, I would advise having what I call question storming. And typically, and this is a way of saying, to ensure what we’re working on is the right thing that we’re working on. We’re really quick to get into the solution side of things when we’re when we’re managing a problem. We think we know what the problem is. Let’s get some let’s get some solutions out there. But if you have a question storming, which is a good first thing is saying, let’s generate some questions about this, this area that we want to develop a solution around, that can clarify this more? What questions should we have there? And that’s a really great way of sparking this process where you can actually define and even question assumptions about what we’re working on, or preparing to work on, in a different way. So I really like to do that first, asking some good questions might trigger an insight that maybe this isn’t the right problem, that the problem is something else. And then you can go and have another generative session around working with some solutions to manage that.

Per Axbom
Love that.

Christopher McCann
Question storming.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And because that also circles back to what you were saying before, we need to be aware of what are we trying to get out of the brainstorming session, because people come up with all these ideas. “Oh, so today we’re brainstorming about this. And I have all these ideas about solutions.” But in fact, not everybody has the same idea of what we’re trying to solve.

Christopher McCann
Right, so another way of doing that is you can ask a question before you even start a brainstorming. And this is, again, you’ll notice that these are all facilitative tools. This is what someone who from the outside should really be in there saying, “Okay, what do you want to get out of this hour together?” To all the people in the in the group, you know, and ask them, “What do you want to get out of this?” And you know, people are going to be honest, some, some people aren’t going to be honest, you know, some people might say, “I don’t really want even want to be here, because this is complete bullshit.” Well, that’s information and you can work with that too.

But if you’re getting a lot of different answers, your expectations are different. And then if you’re not sensitive to that, what you leave the meeting with is not going to be in line with what certain people are expecting. And then people are going to have negative thoughts about that, or “this was a waste of time”, or “this was really valuable” or things like that. So I mean, part of it is, you know, when you are working with a group, you want to design how you’re going to work together, you know, how you’re going to speak together? What do we do if we disagree? What do we do with… all these things. Again, I’m going back to facilitation, because that’s really where I see the weakness in the brainstorming sessions I’ve been involved with.

Per Axbom
And that makes me think that the session begins far, far before the session takes place. Because you actually have to start preparing people for what’s going to happen, what do we expect of you? How are we going to work together? So the better you’re at doing that the better of course, this session will work.

Christopher McCann
Absolutely, absolutely. Again, so we’re going to me what you’re describing there is a good facilitation where you did some pre work and decided, “Okay, let’s see where we are at, where we want to go. How do I draw people into the conversation? How do I make sure we keep aligned? What do I do if there’s a disagreement?” All those different things, absolutely. Preparation.

James Royal-Lawson
Speaking of preparation makes me think about, like research. So, I guess if you’ve done some actual research around a topic, how does that weave into, or end up being a brainstorming session? If you end up at a brainstorming session, but you do have some research is it a risk that you’re, you’re ignoring that research? You’re conflicting with it? I think I’m asking, is there a time… When do you know it’s the right time in place for a brainstorming session? That’s probably the question I’m really asking.

Christopher McCann
Yeah, but then we’re not, then I would choose to use different words for what I’m what you’re talking about, to me, research would probably be an input to brainstorming. Insights that we know about the problem that we learned from research.

James Royal-Lawson
I think Chris, maybe it’s just that experience that it’s been used as a substitute for research so many times. And we will solve this with a brainstorming session.

Christopher McCann
Right, and just brainstorm solutions.

James Royal-Lawson
So we’ll put our minds together, it’s like a focus group, almost, we’re gonna come together, we’re gonna work this out. Whereas the true thing you should be doing is probably some some proper, deep research about the problem space before you start working on solutions.

Christopher McCann
Sure I mean that’s the weakness for most of these innovation processes, or design presses or anything, if you do it, if you’re ignorant to the what the real problem is, or the people around it, or how it’s going to influence the people, the environment, the system, I think I’ll throw that in there. Because you have to think about a larger context than just the person or the group. If you’re doing that ignorant, then you know, it’s kind of like garbage in, garbage out. You’re not going to get a solution, or the ideas you come up with aren’t going to be really relevant to solving the problem. You know, but again, this is this is the classic, you know, empathise step of any of the design thinking is to understand, you know, the context, the people, the system of the problem. And if you choose not to do that, then well, you’re definitely not not going to be user centered.

James Royal-Lawson
But you’re going to go forward!

Christopher McCann
Yes, you will make progress, but progress towards what? That’s what my question is. I mean, then we can come in, and I don’t really want to talk too much about this. But then it’s theater, in my opinion, it’s just, I’m going to do the thing. And I can say, I checked off the box, but we’re really going to do the stuff we thought about anyway, from the stakeholders who are sort of guiding our work.

Per Axbom
It’s interesting, because I think a lot of ways people address this, is they say, “Well, we bring in diversity, we bring in lots more different people with different experiences.” But then that takes me back to well, then you still have the power imbalance and the power structures playing in so it really doesn’t matter if you bring them all in, unless you actually are able to help them all speak their own truths.

Christopher McCann
Absolutely. And I think diversity also, that’s really good, because I think you want to get a variety of ideas. I mean, if you look at the research behind a lot of this. Because I mean, he did this in 1948, the first study around this brainstorming idea was done in ’58, I think, and then it’s been done periodically, since then, and you’ve learned a lot about this is that you need to have diverse ideas. Because if everyone has the same ideas, then it’s pretty uniform. And you also need to have perspectives from completely not the same place. So if you go back to how it was created with a bunch of ad men, so basically, that was a pretty uniform group.

So what you want to do is you want to pull in someone who is not an ad man at all, who is you know, working at the local shop down in the corner, or you know, someone from a completely different socioeconomic background. And that’s when you’re going to get the really good ideas, because they’re going to be very different. And then you need to have some kind of way for them to talk about, to collaborate, to take bits and pieces from each one of the ideas and put them together. And that’s when you really get the innovative ideas.

James Royal-Lawson
Cross-pollination.

Christopher McCann
Yeah, and I would say the biggest, I mean, for me, one of the best ways of doing it is just to get a lot of information in your head, to read a lot of different subjects. There’s a study, well, there was a place in MIT and after the second world war called Building 20. I don’t have ever heard of that. That’s when Noam Chomsky developed his theories about learning. And that was a barrack basically from the Second World War that was built at MIT. And it was a pretty crappy building, basically. And they had a lot of different people were working there – a lot of different scientists, had authors, had all these different people. And the stuff that came out of that lab was incredible.

So they said, “Why is this working?” And the real reason is that you could have Noam Chomsky walking down and talking to an astrophysicist talking to a behaviour psychologist looking for the where the coffee machine was and run into each other and talk about things. And that is where the real idea generation happens, where you get different perspectives, completely non related. And say, Yeah, okay, great, let’s talk about this, and share, you know, my perspective with your perspective. And then that’s when stuff happens. But also, the other thing there was that there was a lot of downtime for people, they get a good idea, that’s what I call the information gathering stage. But then you need to say, Okay, I’m gonna just chill out now. It needs to percolate, as I call it, just like a good cup of coffee. And that’s what this Building 20 allowed. So interesting, interesting study.

Per Axbom
That is really, I mean, from the design profession perspective, for me, that is so important, because that’s something we talk so much about that just allowing stuff to just go for a walk. But it’s so hard to argue within the sphere of your workplace that, “Oh, I need to go for a walk, and it’s still gonna cost money. I’m still working, but I’m just gonna go for a walk because that will make my results better.” How do we even argue for that?

Christopher McCann
Well, I mean, yeah, that’s a good point, especially as a consultant, you’re gonna say, “Okay, I’m charging me three hours extra for me to hang out, and take a walk or go with my dog or you know, do some gardening” or something like that. In some ways, that’s the challenge of using our, what I’ll call, our factory mentality of work is, you know, you stand there and you do your thing, and you pass it on to the next person. When you’re doing knowledge work, it’s not physical anymore; you’re using your brain. So if you look at the research, how you use your brain, of course, you need to have downtime to do that. There’s a lot of studies that support that. So I mean, that’s just how the human brain works. That’s the how the machine works that we’re trying trying to manage. But people in organizations, we still tend to organize our work around that sort of the factory, assembly line model, unfortunately.

James Royal-Lawson
I was thinking, reflecting back as well, what we said about diversity. Diversity, that’s one of those words that there’s a lot of different flavours of it. But the automatic one, I think what you were referring to with diversity, Per, was the kind of, I suppose classic diversity of maybe different ethnic groups or neurodiversity, perhaps as well. Whereas what…

Per Axbom
It can be anything.

James Royal-Lawson
Absolutely, and that’s the real point about it, that we’re talking about: diversity of experience, intellectual diversity, as well. Diversity on all fronts.

Christopher McCann
Absolutely. It could be age, you know, you can have children involved. You know, it can be different groups from different countries. You know, definitely different backgrounds, and anything where you’re going to get someone who has different life experiences is going to look at something and say, “Hey, this is my perspective,” because everyone’s gonna have a different perspective. And there’s gonna be some value in everything. No one perspective is the best. I think, what sometimes when I see what’s happening in the design world, at least what I see in Sweden is everyone reads the same books, everyone goes to same conferences, everyone does the same things, you know, listen to the same podcast except this one, of course, this one’s very diverse. And, and you tend to say, you know, you tend to, you know, get your information from a bit of a bubble.

So my question is, you know, is you need to go, you need to start reading magazines that you would never ever consider reading. For me, if I go to the dentist’s office, and there’s a book on there’s a there’s a magazine on like sailing, or cars, or things that I’m completely not interested in, those are what I would grab to read? And why would why would I do that? A) because I know nothing about cars, or sports or boats. But I guarantee you that there’s a problem in there for a boat owner that’s been solved in a way that it’s interesting in another area that I’m working on. And that’s really come in handy with me through most of my career. And so I would invite everyone read something that you’re not interested in, and even something that you would almost say that you would hate and see what happens.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, this is this is this is a really interesting dichotomy because of course, as an industry, we’re constantly striving after the ready solution. You know, we’ve got ready made design systems, we’ve got kind of ready made templates. We’ve got patterns for interaction. We’re constantly hunting for that definitive answer. Yet, what we’re saying is, what you need is the complete opposite in many times many situations.

Christopher McCann
Well, I think they’re we’re talking about two slightly different things. There, you’re talking about production of design. To me that those those are production of design. At one point, you had to think up what was going to be in the design system – that’s design. The production of making something consistent, a consistent interface, you’re going to need to use your design system. But that was thought up. Those design solutions were thought up at one point – that’s design, there’s a distinction there.

James Royal-Lawson
Or are we just goofing all the time? It seems you’re not actually doing the ideation, you’re actually, when you’re supposed to be thinking of something, you’re actually just searching.

Christopher McCann
Okay…

Per Axbom
You’re solving the new problem. So I have this problem. And I have all these tools that we came up with two years or three years ago, I’m going to use those to apply to this problem, even though the problem may not actually be something that can be solved with those tools.

James Royal-Lawson
Someone must have done this before.

Christopher McCann
Yeah, and I have no problems with that. I think that’s good. But that’s part of the information gathering stage, but then you need to let that percolate. One of my favorite artist/typeface persons is Eric Spiekermann. And he tells a story about how when he was, he has designed many famous typefaces; and he would basically, to design a new typeface, he would go visit a couple of different small towns, and look at what typeface was most popular there. He grew up in Germany,

James Royal-Lawson
When you say most popular there, I mean, he’s kind of like looking at building fronts, signage…

Christopher McCann
Yeah, exactly, he’d just go and get a bunch of different…he would wander around and get a bunch of different typeface inspirations. And then he would wait a week, he would wait a week, and then he would try to recreate what he remembered a week ago. And there will always be something new, but with the inspiration of what he saw on those trips. So what I would suggest is you do the same thing with all the things that you’re looking at, all these different types of interface designs, or whatever other people have done, do that. Go out, make notes, make notes in your notebook, remember them, the ones that moved you. Put them in a notebook, close it for a week, two weeks. And then think back what you what you thought, what you experienced, and what you remember from that, and form it into something new. And I guarantee you that will be a completely new design.

James Royal-Lawson
So, we’re seeding rather than replicating.

Christopher McCann
Right, you’re letting your subconscious. It’s the downtime, you’re letting your subconscious percolate, go over these things, you’re going to remember certain things because they resonated with you – certain details. And other ones you’re going to forget or let go, they’re going to become less important. What you come up with will be something new, I guarantee you.

Per Axbom
And then circling back to the organization where we’re doing the brainstorming, I mean, it takes a special kind of organization to allow for that space that percolating as you’re alluding to, but also with everything we’ve set now with all the ideas that we’re bringing in and getting fantastic new ideas from all these different people with different backgrounds and experiences. How do we ensure them? Because now we’ve talked about before the brainstorming, during the brainstorming, what happens after the brainstorming? How do you make sure that we take care of all these ideas, how to make sure everybody feels that it was worthwhile? Do we even have the vocabulary to understand what people were saying? And about their experiences? Because we don’t have them? Are we sure that we actually understood what they said?

Christopher McCann
Yeah. That’s a good point. I mean, what do you do with all the secondary ideas or how do you choose? And, you know, and then I would say you’re gonna have to make it real, you’re gonna have to make it into something more tangible. Some of them, or until you make it real, it’s a cognitive exercise more than anything. That’s why I suggest, that’s why I, you know, typically like to use the design studio methodology where you where you sketch or you’re starting to make this, put it into some kind of real mode, where you can start to experience it in a non mental way. And that works really, really well because you can do lots of things really quickly. But at some point, you need to make it real. You have to realize this and say, “What’s this, if I can hold it, if I can see it, if I can experience it.” In an experience, it’s gonna be very, very different because in your mind, everything’s perfect. You know, when you’re thinking of the great idea, you’re like, “This is a fucking great idea, man. This is like the best ever!” And then you write it down and you draw and you’re like, oh, or even you open your mouth.

For me, I love talking about, I have a great idea in my head when I’m talking like right now a lot of great ideas. And I know if I were to throw them out here number one, you guys would say, “What the hell are you doing that on a podcast?” But number two would be, it would come out of my mouth, and I would realize that was a stupid thing to say. So it’s when you have something that’s very mental, and then you make it real – into sound – that that even is a good way of testing it. And it’s the same thing with more complex ideas. If you make something, a model, a prototype, anything that you can experience in a different way, you’re going to be able to evaluate it from a different plane, I would say.

Per Axbom
What you’re saying really, is that we always need to be moving, because otherwise we won’t get anywhere. We can’t brainstorm forever. So we need to start making things, even though they’re just prototypes on paper or whatever. Because then it’s easier to talk about, we can talk with everyone…And then, I lost my track there completely.

Christopher McCann
Well, then you have something to talk about, then you can say is this right? Doesn’t make any sense.

Per Axbom
And then you have to be prepared to be wrong.

Christopher McCann
Right, so you can’t be too…you can’t you know, hold them too perfectly too. That’s why having that’s why having like paper things is a great thing. That’s why like sketching, post-it notes are great. You can crumble them up and throw away, you can make a new one. Nothing’s gonna…there’s no money lost. Well, there’s of course we’re gonna recycle the all the paper. But, I mean, there’s no real cost to that.

Per Axbom
And you have to be around people who will accept that you are wrong.

Christopher McCann
Exactly. And some people say, “Oh, but you know, you have to disagree,” and I think have a good level of disagreement is is good. I think that’s why I will use, you know, the critique method where you, you know, you do it in a structured way. But you’re not always going to agree. And a little bit of tension is, I think, healthy for some of these issues.

Per Axbom
I think we’re saying that there is no, as with everything, there’s no like set recipe, this is how you brainstorm, you know, it always has to be specific to your context and situation.

James Royal-Lawson
And also, I think nothing is as simple as it sounds.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

Christopher McCann
Right. And it’s very contextual – contextual to the problem, to the group. And you’re right, there’s no simple brainstorming. First of all, it’s sort of one of these words that means a lot of things to a lot of people. And I think it’s very specific to what you want to do.

Per Axbom
Thank you, Chris,

Christopher McCann
Anytime.

[music]

Per Axbom
So when it comes to brainstorming, everybody seems to have an idea of what brainstorming is. And it seems like everybody has this attitude of, of course, let’s do a brainstorming session. And you just kind of think that well a brainstorming session will go fast. And it’s something that anyone can do, and it’s easy to set up. But as it turns out, a brainstorming session can be incredibly complex, and need a lot of planning and a lot of work to turn out right.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So many of the things I guess that we deal with is that it looks simple on the surface, you know, you can grab that pile of sticky notes and throw them out and we can all like start scribbling things down. And that little task is simple. But the structure and mechanism and thinking behind all this is much more complex. And I think I was reflecting on the whole chat with Chris, there’s lots of useful tips. But also, this thought kept coming up of papering the cracks. A lot of the tips that Chris give are excellent, but he was very professional, very adeptly picking up on things that were broken and papering the cracks. Adapting what he was doing to a situation which was broken, but he will be able to fix it as the facilitator, as the manager of these, these workshops. He said, like, a lot of it is down to social dynamics. You can’t kind of fix the social dynamics when you’re in the group, but you can adapt and adjust for those social dynamics once you’ve realised they exist.

Per Axbom
Exactly. That makes me think then the brainstorming session with a good facilitator actually turns into a learning moment for the organization because you might discover things in the brainstorming session that weren’t even part of what you were trying to learn.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, Chris pointed out about, like question storming, sort of been brainstorming and, you know, focus on why you’re doing it. And I tried to get Chris to just jump on my cause of the fact that I think a lot of the time we do brainstorming instead of research and Chris said “Ah, but the research we can use as input” and I realised that Chris would be… he would manage the situation so that, by things like question storming or the way he would structure the event, the session…If he realised you hadn’t done the research, he’d get you to a point of realising that you hadn’t done the research, and then the fact that you need to do it before going on.

Per Axbom
Exactly. He wouldn’t tell them, “Oh, you haven’t done the research.” He would actually. Yeah. So when people are doing the wrong thing, you don’t just tell them they’re doing the wrong thing. You actually help them discover what they’ve done wrong.

James Royal-Lawson
And you don’t just plow on doing the wrong thing.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
So yeah, I mean, reflecting back, I mean, Chris’s coaching qualities do shine through on these tips and advice. And it just makes you realise the power of having a good facilitator in the sessions and how many times I’ve sat through very poor brainstorming sessions, or ad hoc sessions, I guess, which are just papering the cracks.

Per Axbom
Right. And that was something I was thinking as well, what percentage of all the brainstorming sessions I’ve been in have actually been good brainstorming sessions? Just a minuscule amount of them. I would assume, actually.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, I suppose thinking back. How many times have you been in sessions where it’s been a good independent facilitator? I mean, in my world it’s rare that we’ve had a facilitator who I’d probably consider to be a facilitator rather than someone who has been self appointed or is a default.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And that also makes me think about how important it is for all organizations to evaluate what they’re doing in terms of workshops and brainstorming sessions. Because another favorite snippet that I think Chris was on to, was this ‘progress towards what’ because it always feels like we’re moving forward, we’ve done this brainstorming session, it feels like we’ve done something good. But without all the other things we’ve talked about, like the setup, the onboarding, the off boarding, and the follow up, and making sure that we’re working towards a common goal. Without all that, how do we know we’re even moving in the right direction?

James Royal-Lawson
Absolutely. And I wondering as well about how you deal with situations of being thrown into ad hoc brainstorming sessions? How do you empower yourself as an individual in that group? To steer it to a good conclusion or to a better format?

Per Axbom
That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s an excellent takeaway for our listeners, getting these ideas of how a good workshop and brainstorming session should be. And that, actually, probably you can think about that a bit and imagine some questions you would ask to also surface what is wrong in the current session you’re in and perhaps even make it better as you’re sitting in it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Very practical and useful tips. Recommended listening, Per.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I noticed you wrote down toxic dogmatism. That’s something I hadn’t thought about for a while now. It’s one of Lisa’s articles, isn’t it?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. This is the first one we did over a year ago. Episode 252. And in her article which that episode is based on, she does actually call out journey maps.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Like calling out personas as well. And you brought up how you what you liked the fact she’d called out journey maps. And I took it a little bit step further, and called out brainstorming in that show. So maybe worthwhile going back and listening to see what we said then and how it ties in with what Chris has said now. And on top of that, I had another one, which I think is essential listening, not just recommended listening, now I’ve just upped it and said essential listening, Episode 183, which is ‘meeting design’ with Kevin Hoffman.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, that I mean, that’s so practical, extremely practical. I see why you say essential. Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
I think given my reflection and thought about how you’d steer these brainstorming situations where you aren’t quite on course into something better. Kevin’s advice in that episode, I think will be essential.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So last week I was really angry at my friend Mark for stealing my dictionary.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you really angry at Mark?

Per Axbom
Yeah, I had to tell him Mark, my words!