Don’t stop at the first good idea
TL;DR version:
When brainstorming, don’t stop at the first good idea.
Full version:
Most brainstorming stops at the first good idea. Don’t stop there. Encourage crazy, zany ideas; they often lead to non-linear thinking which reveals the best ideas.
I had the privilege about 10 years ago to lead a young, scrappy team of software developers and senior data scientists at a large financial services organization on the shift away from VM to, what at the time, was a tough sell: move development to a private cloud.
Without getting too technical and geeky about it, the idea was to shift off of the old-fashioned hardware to a virtual application development as a way to test faster and go to market faster.
My initial ‘sell’ of the idea was simple: Go from two weeks for provisioning down to 5 minutes. It seemed like a no-brainer, but it turns out there was an issue I hadn’t considered: executive commitments.
The executives over each business unit had already committed to milestones and delivery dates for various software development efforts and the time needed to refactor from the old way to the new way was sign as ‘too risky, too time sensitive’. So even though the value proposition of going from 2 weeks (which is 20,160 minutes) to 5 minutes was a 99.975% reduction in time, they were afraid of missing commitments.
Frustrated, I went back to the development teams and asked for crazy ideas instead of more rationalization. The more bizarre the ideas, the more enthusiastic the team became and we captured every single wild idea onto a digital white board. And what started out as just zany, led to new ideas that we’d not considered. In other words, the crazy, impractical ideas led to “yeah, that’s nuts, but now that I’m thinking that way, here’s a more realistic idea that’s way off of how we originally thought about it.”
The result of this brainstorming led to a realization that we could use qualitative data (anecdotal, retrospective insights, surveys, user feedback, etc.) in quantitative ways. And that led to realizing we could simply count the amount of waste in the old system and represent that as real-world budget dollars being spent that could be instantly saved. To the tune of millions of dollars of savings *per year*. Now that got the attention of the executives, who suddenly didn’t mind the cost and time of refactoring (fractional compared to millions saved).
None of the rationalization worked because we didn’t identify the right pain for the decision-makers with our first effort, but the zany ideas led to new ways to think about entirely different ideas that got the attention of all but one of the 10 business units!
Brainstorming isn’t about coming up with good ideas; it’s about deciding on the best ideas that are actionable that come from often impractical or even ‘crazy’ ideas.
