Use The Team To Generate And Evaluate Ideas

July 12, 2009

Professional service teams need to develop new services from time to time; exploit new markets; develop their marketing effectiveness; look for ways to enhance client care; introduce new systems and processes to increase productivity; and change working practices to improve performance. Innovations are necessary for firms to remain relevant and competitive. A continuing stream of ideas is a prerequisite. Good leaders encourage their colleagues to offer ideas individually but there is also merit in using the team, when together, for this purpose. When teams brainstorm ideas, assuming that the process is facilitated effectively, people spark each other off and build on the ideas of their colleagues. There is usually some useful synergy therefore from the team effort.

Here are examples of issues for which your team could generate ideas. You will think of many others:

  1. What new services could we offer to existing and prospective clients?
  2. In which business sectors or geographical areas, where we do not currently work, could we seek new clients?
  3. In what new ways could we market our services?
  4. How can we improve our recruitment so that we attract more talented people?
  5. What changes in working practices would enhance profitability?
  6. What changes in working practices would enhance cash flow?
  7. How can we get our existing clients to refer us to other clients?
  8. What new skills do we need to develop to improve our performance?
  9. How can we reduce bureaucracy and red tape?
  10. How can we improve our communications with other parts of the business?

There are several techniques that you can use to generate ideas. If you have never done it before it is probably best to start with a simple brainstorming exercise. You or one of your team colleagues will need to facilitate the discussion and agree with everyone that some basic guidelines be followed. They are usually along the lines of those recommended originally by Alex Osborn in his article Applied Imagination: The principles and procedures of creative thinking (1953). They first appeared in the 1950s but have stood the test of time. Osborn believed that people are not as creative as they might be because they ‘drive with the brake on’. Too often they try to be creative and critical at the same time. He famously said, ‘It is a little like trying to get hot and cold water out of the same faucet at the same time: the ideas may not be hot enough, the evaluation of them not cold or objective enough. The results will be tepid.’ He recommended that idea generation and idea evaluation should be kept separate from each other. The first step should be to produce ideas. Judging them should be deferred until a later stage. He derived his thinking from Hindu teachers working with religious groups in India. During the process of Prai-Bashana (Prai means ‘outside yourself’ and Bashana means ‘question’), ideas were brought out but there was no discussion and no criticism. The groups met again later to debate and assess the ideas.

Useful guidelines for the idea generation phase are:

  1. Display a statement of the issue or problem for which ideas are required where everyone can see it.
  2. Ask the participants to suspend judgement outwardly but also, if possible, within the mind. Criticism kills creativity. Remind your colleagues of the common response to new ideas, which is to find several reasons why they won’t work. The self-discipline involved in suspending judgement, both internally and externally, is difficult at first, especially for those professionals who use analytical and critical skills in their jobs.
  3. Invite everyone to ‘freewheel’ and think laterally. Suggest that they say everything that comes to mind. Ideas can be serious, eccentric, funny, practical or half-baked. It doesn’t matter. Remember the philosopher Alfred White’s comment, ‘There is a certain amount of foolishness in any idea when it is first produced’. All new ideas go against the existing grain. In any case wild ideas can be tamed afterwards. There is not much that can be done with the mundane. Many people find this tricky at first. Most of us are used to thinking carefully before speaking in meetings. Like most things it becomes easier with practice.
  4. Encourage colleagues to build on each other’s ideas. Creativity tends to be greatest when people let their minds go with the flow of ideas rather than flying off in different directions. Try to get a large number of ideas recorded before bringing the brainstorming session to a close. The more ideas there are, the greater the chance, generally speaking, of finding something of value.
  5. The facilitator (team leader or colleague) manages the process. All ideas are written down on flip charts and posted around the room or displayed on a large screen with the use of a laptop computer. It is the facilitator’s job to discourage judging and to stop discussions developing, although some clarification can be helpful. A good facilitator also monitors the level of energy and calls for a break if the batteries need to be recharged. It is good practice to give everyone a few minutes to write ideas down before the brainstorming begins. Everyone, including the more reserved participants, then has something to contribute. One method is then to go round the table asking each person to contribute one idea at a time until all have been revealed. Another is to invite people to call ideas out at random but no more than one idea at a time. Building on the ideas of others is encouraged.

Brainstorming, because it requires people to behave differently from usual, is best undertaken in a meeting set up primarily for the purpose. Relaxed surroundings can be beneficial. Two or three, but not six or seven, glasses of wine generally help. Successful sessions are often preceded by a warm-up light-hearted brainstorm for 5 or 10 minutes. The team can be invited to generate ideas for ‘new uses for empty shoe polish tins’ or ‘new uses for discarded red telephone booths’, for instance. These sessions produce plenty of humour, relax the participants and get everyone in a more creative frame of mind. It is not a bad idea to put the fool’s cap on once in a while. It is even a better idea to keep it on for the serious brainstorming session that follows. After all, the fool’s job is to shake the habits, rules and conventions that keep us thinking in the old ways and keep us travelling in the old ruts. There are other ways of using the team to generate ideas. Here are a few of them:

  1. Get your team members to fashion an analogy for a problem requiring ideas. For instance, they might suggest ‘how to start a revolution’ for ‘how to get lawyers to bill early rather than late’. They might recommend ‘how to create a beautiful flower arrangement’ for ‘how to improve the coordination of work between team members’. Another possibility would be ‘how to do good stand-up comedy’ for ‘how to make an effective formal sales pitch’. The further away the analogy is from the real issue, in terms of its context, so much the better.
  2. Having agreed on an analogy the team then lists as many reasons as possible why the fictitious problem is difficult to solve. In the case of ‘how to create a beautiful flower arrangement’, these might include no water; all of the flowers are the same colour; the flower arranger is clumsy; it is winter; and the vase is too big. It is usually possible to invent 30 or 40 causes, crazy as well as serious, by brainstorming. The next stage is to formulate one or two solutions for each. These may be serious, practical, amusing, eccentric or plain daft. Finally, the solutions to the analogous problem are then applied to the original real issue with the aim of obtaining insights rather than literal applications. People who use the analogy technique generally say that they find it easier to think laterally. They feel less constrained by the problem and are frequently able to produce rather more novel solutions.
  3. Get your team to seek inspirations from other contexts. We all know that many successful inventions have their sources in the natural world. George Mistral walked his dog in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. He found burrs of the burdock weed stuck to his trousers and to the dog. He examined them under a microscope and discovered a fine mesh of tiny hooks that provided adhesion. It was a small jump in imagination for him to create the product we all know as Velcro.
  4. The dragonfly for reasons of security is able to look in all directions. The structure of its eye provided the inspiration for the design of the cockpit of the spotter plane that allows the pilot and passengers to look upwards, downwards and through a circle. Serendipity underpinned the inspirations for these inventions. However, you and your team can deliberately seek inspiration from other contexts. If you need fresh ideas, for instance, on how to raise morale or improve service quality, why not ask each member of the team to spend some time in a library looking at article titles, in a museum looking at the exhibits or in a gallery looking at the paintings? Alternatively you could ask them to look through an atlas, study pictures in a magazine or read newspaper headlines. In each case the purpose is to search for and record anything that relates to or sheds fresh light on the problem for which ideas are required. Afterwards bring your team together and invite them in turn to describe what they found and explain how it relates to the question that you are seeking to answer. Any fresh ideas stimulated by these comments can be shared. Discussions, which need not take too long, often throw up fresh and interesting answers.
  5. Identify a problem or issue for which ideas are needed. Then ask each member of your team to think about an experience from outside current work that might indirectly have a bearing on the problem and that might provide an insight into solving it. The experience could be from, for instance, pastimes, sports, previous jobs, school or college days, time in the armed services or voluntary work. Ask your colleagues in turn to tell their stories. Discuss the experiences and try to identify how the insights that emerge help the team to resolve the problem or satisfy the issue for which ideas are required.

Jonathan Hood, a partner at law firm Thomas Eggar, describes idea generation in his firm:

  1. Brainstorming is deceptively simple. The usual idea is for people to put their heads together to see if, through suitably animated discussion, useful ideas emerge. Practice is often different. Some individuals dominate in meetings and inhibit the more reticent to come forward. There are in-built restrictions such as deference, shyness, reluctance to have an idea laughed at, fear of offending and so on. Exhortations to ‘think out of the box’ do nothing to remove the inherent problem.
  2. One technique however which my firm has employed with success in trying to tackle such perennial problems as the development of marketing ideas, a topic which tends to be a spectacular turn off for many lawyers, is formal brainstorming which requires the observance of some specific guidelines. There are many versions. The one we have employed involves splitting a group into sub teams. Large numbers assist. Each team is asked to produce say five ideas. This starts the process off. These ideas are then written on large sheets of paper and displayed on a wall. Then everyone simply wanders around looking at the ideas. The teams then reassemble and discuss whether any of the ideas displayed have stimulated any further ideas. If so those are then in turn posted up. During this process everyone is encouraged to avoid being critical. Quite the contrary, people are invited to look for the possibilities. Emphasis is placed on thinking laterally and on building on each other’s ideas.
  3. By this time the individual and collective wells of invention will have been plumbed. It is often the case that an idea, however bizarre, can trigger off a train of thought that may itself prove interesting. Nobody has been exposed to ridicule for the more extraordinary suggestions and nobody claims ownership of any one thought. From this point on discussion can then commence on the ideas that have struck a general chord and a shortlist of attractive ideas can be produced.
  4. Another, and very useful approach, particularly with problems that are politically sensitive or that have in the past proved intractable, is to get the participants to come up with an analogy for the issue. Instead of addressing the actual problem, time is spent brainstorming solutions to the analogous problem. For example an analogy for opening a new office in an area with no clients might be creating a wildlife park in a country where none exists currently. The solutions to the analogous problem are then reviewed to identify insights into solving the real issue. The more offbeat the analogy then the more novel and startling, and innovative, the ideas tend to be.

Not surprisingly advertising agencies make a habit of getting people together to produce ideas. They are good at it. According to Ian Pearman, Account Director at Abbott Mead Vickers, the tougher job for their teams comes at the evaluation stage:

Of course, we get our teams together to come up with ideas. That is no problem. We are good at ideas. Our problem is to decide what to do with the ideas. We don’t need to be told to think outside the box; we do that all of the time. Getting the issues back inside the box, properly defining and distilling a problem and its potential solution, is the challenge for us. It’s a bit like nailing jelly to the wall.

After the brainstorming or other idea generation session, it is helpful to have a period for reflection, an incubation phase, before moving on to the evaluation process. Giving people the opportunity to sleep on the ideas and return to them for evaluation purposes in a day or two’s time can be fruitful. There is no hard-and-fast way to evaluate ideas. One method is to ask the team to select all of the interesting ideas. If an idea is exciting but impractical you can run another brainstorming session devoted to turning the idea into a practical proposition. Another way of screening ideas is to assess them in terms of their attractiveness, for example originality, simplicity and elegance and their compatibility with, for instance, objectives and resources.

You may finish up with two or three ideas that can be implemented immediately. Some ideas will require personal action by all team members and they will become part of a new way of working. Volunteers, on behalf of the team, may implement others. It is important to agree target dates for delivery. There will be other ideas that need to be honed or refined before they can be put into effect. Sometimes research may be necessary or the ideas may need to be sold to people elsewhere in the firm. Again volunteers can be invited to take on these commitments.

It is important that people do not take on more than they can chew. After an idea generation and evaluation session, team members are often fired up and enthusiastic. It is very much the team leader’s job to ensure that the commitments and target dates are realistic. After all, this work is additional to the regular fee-earning or other activities that team colleagues are involved in. I have noticed, time and time again, that when there is a failure to turn good ideas into action it is because the individuals involved have committed themselves to doing too much in too short a period of time. A good motto for team members is: ‘Don’t commit if you believe you can’t do it but if you do commit then you must do it.’

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