NEVER AGAIN!
STC's ATL (Accelerated Thought Leadership) replaces old methods to avoid inevitable disappointments
When the former CEO of BestWestern and Jenny Craig, Jim Evans, told his colleagues they needed more creative ideas, someone suggested to him a brainstorming session. He scoffed and said, "Brainstorming? Ten white boards of ideas and nothing gets done." You probably know the feeling. But why would that be true?
Dale Dauten, founder of The Innovators' Lab and an ongoing advisor to STC, explains: "The nature of the brainstorming is to maximize the number of ideas, employing that well-worn rule, 'There are no bad ideas.' Rare is the executive who knows what to with all those ideas. You could say that brainstorming creates the forest that obscures the trees."
Moreover, there are also the tiresome logistics and costs of brainstorming, especially getting eight or ten bright people in one room for a half a day. It was this later obstacle that led to the creation of "BrainTouring." When Dauten was tasked by STC CEO Mike Popovich to help generate ideas for a pilot project to reinvent health care data, there was no time to assemble a team spread across five states. Knowing that trying to do brainstorming on a conference call was doomed to frustration and failure, Dauten suggested a new combination of both individual and group creativity, fueled by online cases and related exemplars.
Here's how BrainTouring works:
ROUND ONE
- You assemble via conference call 4-8 people from disparate parts of the organization.
- You start the call by explaining the problem/issue.
- The participants are then given "provocations" - internet sites to visit with related information or solutions. They go to these on their own, each with the assignment to jot down ideas. Thus, the group breaks out for individual creativity.
- After 20-30 minutes the group reconvenes on the conference call and participants are invited to share their best ideas.
- The process of coming together then breaking up is repeated twice more.
ROUND TWO
- After reviewing the possible ideas with the leadership team, the group meets again, but this time to focus on the best ideas from the first session.
- The process from Round One is repeated, only with the goal of going deeper, turning a few good thoughts into a few well-developed ideas with a clear vision of how they would look and work.
The tricky part of this new process is developing the list of "Provocations," the internet sites with articles or videos that stimulate
relevant ideas. In classic brainstorming, you simply use exercises like random words to start the idea process. BrainTouring requires much more preparation. Dauten reports that he can spend days, looking for just the right places to send the participants. He says, "You don't want to just google the problem and send people to discussions of existing solutions. That kills thought leadership."
"Instead," he says, "you send them to related solutions. When we were doing the work to reinvent health care information, I found a video in which a pair of graphic designers took their existing bank statement and make it much more helpful. It was a way to see through the eyes of two people who think visually. That was one of a dozen Provocations that helped stimulate ideas for what became STC's revolutionary information service called SMaRT."
The process was also employed for STC's work on increasing vaccination rates, helping lead to A2F2, the All-American Flu Fighters, which has been able to double vaccination rates in onsite flu clinics. And it was put to work on a recent project to enhance communications with STC's clients.
It works for two reasons:
First, the sessions are much easier and cheaper to organize. (No travel. Just a pair of two-hour sessions, each person at his or her desk.) That's why you can readily plan to do two of them.
Then, the second session is what solves the "ten white boards and nothing gets done" problem. The best ideas are taken further and deeper, often in combinations of two or more ideas pulled together.
No more being locked in a windowless conference room, no more white boards, no more frustration of ideas doomed to die.
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