It is widely known that ideas should not be criticised during brainstorming sessions – below, you will find a way, to overcome your inhibitions and share your own ideas, even if they seem embarrassingly poor. It is easy to say that we should share all our ideas, but our inner critic is a serious obstacle to actually doing so. See why it is worth turning off that critic and how to achieve it.
I think that postdoctoral lecturers, senior managers and all those whose reputation in the community is already well established have the hardest time. They control themselves so as not to make a blunder. And that's what brainstorming is all about, bringing ideas out of the unconscious and not controlling whether what we say makes sense or not. Internally checking whether an idea is good enough completely destroys the essence of this creative process. Such a meeting may even be called ‘brainstorming’, but the result is a small number of ideas, and they are likely to be mediocre.
Do you know the story about the helicopter that blew snow off the power line? The idea for this solution came from a cleaner who, during a brainstorming session, suggested that it would be best if an angel flew over the line and blew the snow away by flapping its wings. Normally, ideas like this are hard to voice because we are embarrassed in front of others – what will they think of us when they hear our trivial idea, or judge the idea we haven't thought about too long? After all, in brainstorming, we are supposed to immediately throw out whatever comes to mind. The cleaner in this story justifies the selection of so-called ‘fresh blood’ for the group – people who are unfamiliar with the subject. Their suggestions will help the rest to unblock themselves and inspire the specialists.
If there is a shortage of cleaners, students and others who are not naturally shy about throwing out ill-considered ideas, we can help ourselves with the concept of mental scaffolding. The idea is for someone to walk through my idea as if it were scaffolding. My idea may not turn out to be brilliant, but it will inspire someone to come up with a much better idea. They would not have come up with this better idea if my mental scaffolding had not been put in place beforehand.
The feature of scaffolding is that it is temporary – it is removed after renovation is finished. It does not have to be beautiful either, it is meant to serve as a platform that allows easy access to inaccessible places. The same is true of our ideas that turned out to be poor – but thanks to them, someone else was able to come up with much better ideas. When presenting an idea (which we would normally be ashamed of), we can even say: ‘this could be a mental scaffolding for someone else’.
How does this work in practice?
Once, a few of us were brainstorming the risks involved in a major renovation of the roof of a historic palace. Several fairly obvious ideas had already been presented when a characteristic silence fell. This silence marked the transition to the heart of the brainstorming session, i.e. putting forward non-obvious ideas. We did not make the mistake of ending the session too early, and during the moments of silence, my thoughts drifted back to my childhood, when I helped renovate the roof of a barn in the countryside. I remembered that there were eggs in the rafters under the old roof, so I immediately suggested that there might be some birds there. After a moment, I remembered that the eggs had been left by a marten that stole them from the hens, but the idea had already been voiced.
Almost immediately after my suggestion, the next person on the team said, ‘Bats! There might be bats there.’ All our ideas were, of course, immediately written down.
When we later evaluated the ideas (this is the so-called red phase in brainstorming), it turned out that the risk of bats was the most serious of all. In our country, all species of these flying mammals are strictly protected, so if they had their habitat in this old building, our roof renovation project would face additional complications.
In this particular case, a bat specialist – a chiropterologist – quickly determined that there were no bats there, and we were able to calmly remove the greatest risk. If we hadn't thought about it and there had been bats, the trouble could have been enormous. If I hadn't mentioned the birds, there would have been no idea about the bats. My birds were a mental scaffold that another person walked over and came up with a highly rated idea. This example also shows the synergy of the team; the idea of bats was beyond the reach of any of us individually.
However, not criticising is a difficult habit to implement. The concept of a mental scaffold helps us not to be ashamed of proposing ideas for solutions that seem poor. For brainstorming to be effective, it is necessary to also propose strange ideas, such as an angel flapping its wings, or trivial ones, such as birds nesting under the roof.
Brainstorming is an excellent way to generate more ideas by using delyed evaluation. Because after generation, there is a second phase – evaluation. However, many people do not get as much out of brainstorming as they could. For example, because they close the idea generation phase as soon as the obvious ones are presented. All you need to do is wait a little while for the strange ideas to start appearing, which are great thought scaffolding. And these inspire extremely good, even brilliant ideas.
To help in submitting ‘differently normal’ ideas, you can name the place where you stick notes with slogans ‘Bad Ideas Parking’, as suggested by Karen Gadd in her book ‘TRIZ for Engineers’. Once, when Karen and I were in Oxford for training, she explained to me that it is much easier to submit an idea of dubious quality to a place with this name. I tested it in practice and indeed – it works. You just need to explain at the beginning that we stick all ideas there, both good and bad, and that the name 'Bad Ideas Parking' is meant to help us silence our inner critic.
I have not read about the concept of mental scaffolding in any book, but it has helped me and many participants in my training courses to open up to whole layers of unconscious ideas that have helped the team to come up with difficult-to-access but brilliant ideas.
If you are at a stage where you have mastered brainstorming and this tool is no longer enough to quickly come up with spectacular ideas, then I recommend TRIZ. It is a rich set of tools for solving the most difficult problems, significantly surpassing brainstorming. There are articles and books published about TRIZ, as well as workshops and even TRIZ training marathons.
