Officially welcome to you all to Experience Point's latest webinar. Our time together today is going to focus on the do's, don'ts and best practises for brainstorming as well as how to set your team up for brainstorming success. I am Keva McCready, a customer success manager here at Experience Point. So which in a nutshell means I'm responsible for ensuring that our clients get like best in class experience when working with Experience Point. I also act as the production manager mentor to our team of fantastic production managers that support our virtual workshops. I'm very, very happy to be co hosting this webinar today my wonderful colleague and expert, Tom Merrill. Tom, would you like to introduce yourself? I would, thanks so much, Keva. And a special thanks to Keva who's based in the UK and so way past her supper time of approaching time to sleep. I don't know how you're managing your brilliant awakeness, Keva, but I know this is way past your normal working hours and we're very appreciative to you for your participation today. I'm Tom Merrill. I'm a master facilitator with Experience Point. I'm one of the few US colleagues, so I'm based in Cincinnati, Ohio, corporate home to places like Procter and Gamble and Kroger. Delighted to be with you all today to lead you through a couple of different ways of thinking about problem solving in a different way. Let's begin with a quick overview of what we do at Experience Point. We're an innovation training company. And what that means is that we help organizations scale their innovation capability and innovation mindsets across their business and even their entire organization. We believe that innovation isn't just for a select team, but it's a skill that can be learned and mastered. We offer a number of experiential, digitally driven workshops that train people and organizations in the problem solving methods of human centered design, one of which you will shortly experience. We offer several workshops that range drastically in matters of time, level of application, virtual versus in person. We've actually even started talking about hybrid deliveries. What do we do when some people are virtual and some people are in person? I encourage you to check out all these options in more detail or feel free to speak with myself or any of my colleagues after our time today. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have or discuss in further detail. Over to you, Keva. Thank you, Tom. So before we start officially, I'm gonna run through the housekeeping to just make sure that you guys all have the best experience today. The webinar is going to take about forty five minutes in length from end to end. First thirty minutes, it's gonna be dedicated to the dos and don'ts of brainstorming and the remaining fifteen minutes dedicated to Q and A. You can of course, and we encourage you to submit questions at any time in the Q and A tab or chat on Zoom. You may have already noticed as well on the top of your screens a flashing red light as you all probably are familiar with now in the world of COVID and Zoom and virtual web conferencing platforms, it means that this session is going to be recorded, which means it'll land in your inbox after this workshop today. So feel free to share it with your colleagues. You can also sign up to our on demand series, which is accessible on experiencepoint dot com. With that all being said, let's kick off today's webinar. Thanks, I have a question for you, by the way, Keva. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word brainstorm? Oh, working with others. All right. And let's do a little crowdsourcing here. Thanks to everybody that's been saying hello from everywhere you are in the world. What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word brainstorming? Thanks, Mohammad. Group thinking, Care and Collaborations, Remy, fun. Oh my goodness. This is really fun to see all these things. All bets are off. I love that. I can't keep up with the ideas. Lack of judgment, thanks. Marie, lots of judgments. Get creative, creative thinking. Word vomiting, Jacqueline. Thank you so much. Trent, the need for process. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm this is great. Thanks, everybody. Clearly, have some folks who are fans of brainstorming. I want to go back to a couple of different comments that I saw earlier, maybe word vomiting or maybe making sure I know, Karen, it's a meta brainstorm, right? We're brainstorming about brainstorming. I love it. So I want to tease us a little bit. Looks like most of us have had good experiences with brainstorms, but maybe some of us haven't. And maybe I'm sorry to disappoint you and that you haven't heard the news, but brainstorming is dead. In the popular press, in academic journals, researchers have at various points over the years come to this same damning conclusion that if you want ideas, just ask smart people to come up with them on their own because group ideation is just another word for groupthink and brainstorming is a waste of time. There's just one problem. Nearly everyone whose job it is to come up with game changing ideas, experts from places like IDEO, one of our partners, Procter and Gamble headquartered here in my hometown, Pixar, the amazing movie house, Brainstorming is a go to technique for them to generate novel and game changing ideas. And this is a really weird disconnect. What's going on here? So to get to the bottom of this mystery about why there's such a disconnect between these critics telling us that brainstorming doesn't work, but people whose job it is to innovate insist on using it. Let's take a quick trip back to the 1940s and meet Alex Osborne. If you know the company BBD and O, he's the O in that company, an advertising executive. Think the World War II era Don Draper. Osborn worked with a ton of people to come up with winning ideas for lots of companies. And while doing this work, he realized that the really hard part of coming up with a winning idea is creating something new or original in the first place. As his quote suggests, Osbourne thinks it's easier to tone down a wild idea than to think of something original in the first place. So he experimented and he found four rules that when enforced correctly lead to more wild ideas. Keva, I'm wondering if you might know what one of those four rules might be. Do you have a clue? How about building ideas about this? Yeah, absolutely. And I mentioned Pixar earlier. Pixar actually has a name, a term for that. They call it plussing. So some of you might know how Pixar works, but one of the first things they do when they're ready to draw the movie, they have this ginormous room where they put up a gigantic storyboard of every bit of story in the film. And they bring in people and they say, Hey, we're having a plussing session. So each segment of the story, they say, How can we make this better? How can we make it more entertaining, more surprising, more theatrical? It's wonderful. And the way they do that is they're building on the ideas of others. So I'm wondering, can you all think of the other three rules that Rosborn came up with? Thanks, Rio. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, so what are the other three rules that we're looking at? Yes, Robin, no bad idea. Absolutely, I love it. Hillary, yes, no judgment. Leo, absolutely, go for quantity. And let's see if we can get yeah, David, everyone's ah, thanks. Mary Lee, there's the last one. Yes, within just seconds, we've gotten all them. Yes, volume over quality. I love it, everyone. You've done brilliantly well. So he came up with those four and they're sort of in this old time oratory language, but let's look at them. So the first one is judicial judgment is ruled out, which is we're not evaluating the ideas when we're in the midst of a brainstorm. Note that he's not saying that criticism doesn't have its place. He's just saying we temporarily remove that when in the act of ideation. Secondly, wildness is wanted. The crazier the idea, the better. As we heard him say, it's easier to tone down a wild idea than to make a boring idea exciting. And thirdly, Mary Lee, thanks so much. You got it right there for us. Quantity over quality? Yes. And some of you might be familiar with design thinking or human centered design. It's also called double diamond innovation. And that first diamond when we're expanding, we're diverging and we're creating a number choices that eventually we will converge and choose from. But when I taught this at my university, I would tell my students, it's like you're filling your produce section with a number of different yes, you've got lots of tomatoes, but you've got all kinds of different types of tomatoes. Oh, and corn and cabbage and broccoli and spinach. And so we want not only lots of different types of things, but different numbers of things. So we're building an amazing produce section. And then finally, as Keva mentioned, that combination and improvement, that yes and technique or plussing, and we build on the ideas of others. Thanks for sharing the rules with us, Tom. Would you be able to share a bit more about why we should brainstorm? Yeah, so in addition to it being a numbers game, the reason we brainstorm is we all know we're paid in our jobs to jump to solution, right? Hey, Kiva, here's a problem. Go solve it. And Kiva goes, Oh, I've seen this problem before. Here's how we solve it. We use brainstorming and other ideation techniques when we don't know the answer, when we need to create something that hasn't existed before or radically alter a solution that already exists. And so when we need new and unimagined ideas, when we do this in a design thinking framework, it's about learning our way into what we don't know. And this brainstorm or other ideation techniques help us, in the best case, think about the potential solution in a way that we've never done before. We'll use constraints, as you will soon see, to help us think our way around the traditional and move to the unexplored. Yes, exactly, Arturo, discover what we don't know. So let's go back to Osborn's rules. A lot of people took interest and actually started adopting Osborn's rules for their own ideation sessions. And almost immediately, another group took interest, my fellow academics, who are trained in rigorous methods of critical evaluation. Well, folks instantly grew suspicious that this is the best way to come up with great ideas. So like any good academic, they set up experiments. As far as we know, the first controlled experimental study of brainstorming happened at Yale University in nineteen fifty eight and it was funded by the US Navy. The researchers assembled a group of ninety six undergraduate students and randomly assigned half of them to work on their own and half of them to work in small teams. They read each group Osborn's four brainstorming rules and gave them problems to solve like, what could you do with an extra thumb? And then they wanted to see do people come up with more unique ideas working alone or working in groups? And the study found that individuals working on their own were almost twice as efficient at producing ideas. And there you have it, everybody. Group brainstorming doesn't work. It's a waste of time. It's better to come up with ideas by yourself. But maybe you can start to see the problem here. This is essentially like giving somebody who's never driven a manual shift car a written list of instructions, no driving instructor, and say, Hey, go drive around the block in this piece of machinery that you've never used before. And oh, by the way, there's a steep hill. And maybe noticing that people are actually walking around the block or getting around it faster than you are. And so, yeah, so there's maybe a skill to the brainstorming. And there have since been dozens of studies like the one we just saw at Yale and the analyses of those studies that have come to similar conclusions. But none of them have prevented the professionals at Pixar and IDEO to flocking to this method. So what's going on here? Well, these studies are rigorous, but there's a professor at the D School, School of Design at Stanford, Bob Sutton, also a psychologist, who points out there's some challenges here. They're not looking at brainstorming when it's done by people who are skilled at that activity. And most people don't include a facilitator, which is a really important role. And they treat brainstorming as a single event that's divorced from any sort of larger process or strategy. But regardless of all this, these studies are rigorous and they are accurate for the specific questions that they're answering. If you simply thrust people in a room together and say, Come up with ideas, it's probably not going to go so well. And let's be honest, that's often how this works in organizations and things often don't go so well. And so we should care about what these studies are saying. And what we think these studies show very clearly is that brainstorming is a difficult skill. So Tom, you're showing that all these studies are showing us that brainstorming is difficult. Why exactly do you think that is? So there's a human element to this, Kiva. Anytime that you put a group of people together in a room, the group gives you some major advantages and some major disadvantages when compared to just individuals working on our own. You'll get some process gains and some process losses. We know that when you put people together in a room, you get instant barriers. We are social creatures and there's some basic psychological things that start to happen. Let's say you want wild ideas. Well, no one wants to look silly in front of other people. Everyone has some fear of being judged, especially if your boss is in the room. Loud voices can dominate. People might get prematurely fixated on an earlier idea that somebody shared. And so everyone's just thinking up variations of one idea. Hillary, I'm going to get to that point. That's a great point that you just put in chat. And actually, I have a little exercise to help us with that in just a moment. Thank you for bringing that up. That's so great. And sometimes they're just mechanical issues. People can be unclear, misunderstand each other, talk over each other, be long winded like I am. All of us have experienced these human foibles. Humans are messy and so are our social interactions. And there's lots of things that can go wrong. But as many of us know, anyone who's done great work in a team knows fantastic things can happen when people work together. A group gives us varied perspectives, a bigger pool of diverse experiences and memories, which can spark so many more associations compared to just somebody working on their own. So we have the potential to produce more unique options. And group work builds shared understanding and commitment to a problem. We all begin to see the problem in this amazing space. And we're less likely to dismiss a good idea because we've got a higher chance that somebody is going to see the potential that I might not have and suddenly we're in an unexplored territory. And finally, doing good work with other people just feels awesome and that positive energy can be contagious and that's worth a lot in and of itself. So Tom, to help me try and understand a bit better, you're saying that when you pull people together, you have like gains and losses. And you think the truth is behind those studies as well. When the process are going to win, who's gonna win the tug of war, think is what I'm trying to say is like, is it, I'm assuming it's the left side of this, on this people that you have on the slide that's gonna win. How do you get the most out of the group when there's tug of war? So how do we move them from the left? From the left to the right, yeah. Absolutely. And Hilary, I love the statement. Hilary, if you saw it in chat, she says, In my experience, people agree to the four basic rules, but don't follow them. So how do we win the tug of war? How do we get people to move from the left side behaviors to the right side behaviors? Well, there's actually a lot of preparation and skill that goes into running a productive brainstorm. But today, let's pay particular attention to numbers five and six here. Have a skilled facilitator. I promise to do that. And then number six, which is about enforcing those rules and following those rules, the most important being deferring judgment but also following the rules. And the more skilled people are at this, the more productive your brainstorm session is going to be. Now studies that looks at groups that enforce some of these rules actually find the opposite of the first studies that we saw. So there's also evidence that brainstorming works. Our take it experience point on all these seemingly contradictory experiences and data is that there's actually a lot of overlapping truths. Brainstorming is a specific and difficult skill because of that tug of war between the process losses and the process gains. But it can be very useful if you take some specific steps to win that tug of war. And right now, we're going to try two high impact things that each of us personally can control and practice to get better at ideating with your colleagues. Now, the reason we brainstorm, I talked about this earlier, is to come up with as many different options as possible that we can use to surprise and delight our users. And these specific words are important. Surprise and delight because at this stage, we're concerned with what would be awesome for our user, not our company, and many indifferent because ideation, as we know, is a numbers game. The more number of different options you have, the more likely you are to have a great idea in the mix. This is something that almost everybody agrees on. So to weigh the win the tug of war game in brainstorming is not to come up with the most practical solution. We deal with that later. The way to win the game is to have as much quantity and variety as possible. Now let's meet the biggest enemy of quantity and variety. This is the enemy of evaluating. And let's get one objection out of the way right now. Even the biggest fan of brainstorming will tell you, yeah, some ideas are silly and can't work, but there's no reason to point out in the midst of an ideation session that an idea is silly. Evaluation becomes important after the brainstorm is over and we begin to converge and choose those ideas that we think are going to be amazing. But evaluating during the brainstorm is how we lose the game. And when we say evaluation, we're actually talking about two things. And the first is a sneaky little problem, evaluating our own contributions, being apprehensive about what others are going to think. Here's how this usually goes. Say we're brainstorming ways to make our workspace more interesting and you think, Oh, let's have a work for Mars day. But a little voice in your head says, Don't say something dumb because your boss is in the room and he's going to think you're an airhead. So you end up watering down your idea until there's no flaw in it. It's offensive to no one and you end up with something boring like, what about an open office concept? So censoring our own contributions is a great way to sterilize a brainstorm. And as some of you know, in some cultures, it's especially hard when the higher up is in the room. So you want to think carefully about who's in the room in the brainstorm if you want to get the most out of it, just a word of wisdom there. So censoring our own contributions is a great way to sterilize the brainstorm. And of course, the reason that most of us censor ourselves is because people evaluate other people's contributions. Most of us are rewarded in our careers for our skills at analysis and diagnosis. So this is challenging to overcome. In the worst case during a brainstorm, somebody's just going to outright say, Yeah, but that's going to cost too much, or That's never going to work. But much more likely, people will disguise their concerns as innocent little questions. So, Tom, if I'm going to try and give an example for this, would it be something like, Oh, interesting. How much do you think that would cost? Or how about something like, Cool idea. How would our users use it? Or like, How would it work? That's part of the You got it, Kiva. None of this evaluation during the brainstorm adds any value to our ideation session. It becomes useful much later in the process. So you're saying that evaluating is something. So we're talking about evaluating others and evaluating ourselves, which we're all guilty of. Are there any drills or warmups we can use to help like counteract these tendencies that we all show? Absolutely. I'll share a couple with you that we use at Experience Point ourselves. You've all got your chat fingers warmed up. Thanks so much. So get ready to participate in chats for Drill One here. It's called Unfiltered. I'm thinking of that beautiful unoaked chardonnay in my refrigerator right now. And it's all about giving yourself permission to drop your filter of self evaluation. We all want to look smart, so our instinct is to really think through our ideas before sharing, factor in all the objections, scrub out questionable aspects. But now I want you to try sharing your silliest, wildest, craziest ideas, the one that you think might not be practical or cost too much or sound dumb. It's the antithesis to our Instagram age of filters. Here's the question. Please share some of your ideas in chat. How could we make our workspaces more fun? How could we keep our workspaces more fun? Oh, thank you, Kiva, bouncy capsules. Zoe, puppies, balloons, hammocks, celebrities, a traveling cloud, says Scott. I love it. My goodness. Katrina, this has to be the best brainstorming session ever. It's like one hundred and seventy people I can't even keep up with. Trent, a Friday poker tournament. Thank you. Karen, if they're too fun, then nobody's going to get work done. Love it. A jungle gym. Cathy, alcohol. I love it. Train squirrel, a All right. Great. Confetti falling down from the ceiling at random moments and chimes and whistles for achievements, Hillary says dancing. All right. Beautiful folks. Keep him coming. I love it. Great. Now remember what Osborne said, it's easier for us to tone down a wild idea with some nugget of potential than it is to think up a new idea. Joe, your job is to count the number of ideas that we've generated in this brainstorm. Good luck. I think we've just set a world's record. So now let's look at drill number two. And I'm sorry everybody but you should have never let your guard down and trusted me, your facilitator, because drill two is called the Terminator. I'm going to call out one of the great ideas that we shared earlier, and you're going to be on your worst behavior. Let loose. You tell us all the reasons why the idea is dumb and won't work. And bonus points if you can post your criticism as a question. And so I think I'm crowdsourcing this. I forget who the original sender of the squirrel on the scooter idea was, but let's terminate that idea. Let's think of all the reasons why that wouldn't be a good idea. Arturo wins the prize for posting it as a question. Thank you so much. Isn't that dumb? I love it everybody. What if people are allergic? What if the squirrel bites you? What's HR gonna think? Squirrels can't ride scooters. What if people get injured? Oh my goodness, oh carrots squirrels poop everywhere, right? John what are we going to do with all the nuts they eat? I love it. Oh yes we're going to get the what's the pet the PETA people involved. Maybe what if the squirrels form a union and then we have to like give them days off? Oh my goodness, yeah. Great everybody. This is brilliant. Fantastic. I've never been in such a fun brainstorm. So the value of this worst behavior exercise is that it lets everyone in on the brainstorm model and see the very thing that we're trying to avoid. And so somebody is less likely then. So I will often do this like we are now at the beginning of a brainstorm session. I say, hey, let's do a couple of warm ups, right? And this is one of them and I'll call it the Terminator style of work, right? And so I as a facilitator then would say, Hey, Keva, are you trying to be a Terminator with that question, right? And so it's a way that we keep track of one another and avoid those terminator behaviors when we're in the midst of a brainstorm. I'm flossing one on Tom's comments that the amount of brainstorm ideas you guys have come up with, they're all pros, it's amazing. So congratulate yourselves and pat yourselves on the back. But Tom, for people you're talking about back to evaluating, people feel uncomfortable, including myself about evaluating themselves and others. Do you have like any advice for people that feel uncomfortable? Yeah, and I do, Keeva. And let's take a page from Pixar or from improv comedy writers, plussing and that yes and. The antidote for judging others is building on their ideas. So if you learn to say yes to their idea and add something useful to it, no matter what, it's a very helpful situation. So squirrels on scooters, yes, and that happens every Friday during happy hour, right? So we add to the ideas of others. And I just took somebody else's idea there. I'm sorry, I forget what it was. I've never seen so many ideas generated in a brainstorm. And the second technique for helping that is about encouraging those wild ideas. In a moment I'll give you some brainstorming stimuli that you can use to make this happen. So I'm going to give you a question: How might we help people maintain social distance? And we're going to type in the wildest ideas we can. We're going to build on the ideas of others. And then we're going to look at some different stimuli to help us stretch our thinking. Ready? All right, here we go. So some quick ideas. Thanks, Jacqueline. For how might we help people maintain social distance? Broomsticks, electric shocks, Zorbs, don't shower. Hey, Anne's onto something. Let's come up, and Karen is too. Let's come up with ideas now that incorporate smell. Only ideas that incorporate smell for a moment here. Thanks, Kiva, curious skunk. Kathy, going the opposite way, too much perfume, Max Body Spray, I love it. Oh, a garlic t shirt, Erin Beautiful. Monica is on the garlic diet page. Limburger cheese, says John. Scott, taking a page from our earlier brainstorm. Squirrel poop, I love it. Fart cans, says Steph. Great, let's do another one. Let's move away from smells, thank goodness. And now think of ideas that cost ten million dollars What are some really expensive ideas that we can come up with to help maintain people maintain? Yes, let's go to the moon. I love it. Make education. Give everybody a car. Platinum pool noodles, Rima. Brilliant. One room per person. Yeah, I'm going to take a page from Harry Potter and say we all get brooms that we can fly around on so we can use three d spaces to stay away from one another. A diamond ring, Aaron, so big that people can't come near me. Brilliant. Let's develop a new gadget, says Faye. Robin, yes. Develop personal robots. I don't know if anybody's seen that robot video with the three robots that are dancing. That's pretty scary and amazing. All right, one more. How would a three year old solve this problem? How would a three year old solve the problem of helping people maintain social distance? Brilliant, Robin, dodgeball. Yes, Rima, a temper tantrum. I love it. Shout personal unicorns. Fatima, scream, thank you. Pinching, says Jennifer. Remy, we're just gonna tell them. I'll cover their hands in paint and run towards you. Brilliant, poison giggle. Yes, I love it. Gosh, I can't keep up with them all, everybody. This is so energizing. Thank you so much. All right, just great, great work everybody. Thank you. Nicely done. Keva, over to you. Yeah, congratulations on your ideas. Great. And I hat off to Tom's ability to read the chat so quickly. Something a skill that I do not have myself. So I'm really happy to share with you guys the content that you and Tom's just shared with us today is a part of our new Spark series. It's the fifteen to twenty minute burst of learning that reinforce the human centered mythology. Each episode has a tool built into it that people can use in their day to day lives. And I'm happy to share that all of you will receive this tool in an email after the workshop today. However, don't sign off yet. We're not done. Ahead of the webinar today, we asked you to send in your topics, brainstorm topics that you guys needed help with that we could maybe try and solve in the session today. We would love to have been able to help you all. There were so many great topics that we felt we could contribute towards, but we have gone, we've decided to today's session we are gonna go with drum roll Tom, thank you. How might we foster a culture of self driven learning in our organisation? So Tom, you had another way to help us think differently about the idea. Would you like to share with everybody? I would love to share. And I'm actually, you all are so brilliant at brainstorming. I think you don't have much more need to learn about that. But do let me share with you this mind mapping tool. So right now I'm using a software application called Miro, M I R O. It's free to use. They're not a partner of ours. I just found that they had a pretty handy mind mapping tool, so I just borrowed that to share with you. Here's where I start to make my mind map. So a mind map helps us explore both the known and the unknown. And the first thing that I'll do yeah, Leo, we actually use MURAL all the time at Experience Point is I'll start breaking up that how might we into small segments. So foster, self driven, learning culture, our organization. And let's look at what does self driven mean for me? Well, I'll say, gosh, what's in it for me? Or, oh, AI autos are now self driven. Or self driven is about reaching a goal. And then I'll do further tendrils. If mind mapping is familiar to you, you'll know this. So reaching a goal, hey, I'm going to lose ten pounds, or I want that mountaintop experience, or let's get a badge or a certificate. If I think about AI, oh, Tesla comes to mind, or aren't those dangerous, or man, we're really looking into the future. What's in it for me, WIIFM, what's in it for me if you don't know that abbreviation? Will this help me get a promotion or a pay raise? Is it going to help my team? And then we start to explore, well, what does learning culture mean? Well, obvious example is a school or maybe we're learning a new sport or dating. Do I want to get to know this person better or what if I'm rejected or maybe we should just be friends first? And I'm sure this organization is not like yours. I'm sure all of your organizations are brilliant, but maybe mine is slow to move, change is hard, we're too big to be nimble, change has to come from the top, we have too many silos, we don't communicate well, it's not my job care. What's HR going to think? Is it going to fit with our strategy? What's the CEO going to think? Will it improve shareholder value? All those questions we think about. And then when it came to foster, what does foster mean to me? Oh, to raise someone responsibly. I think about foster parents or taking on a new challenge or supporting somebody in another way. Oh, well, let's tease apart those. Kathleen, like anything, it's free in a limited way. Yes, of course, you can pay. And so support. What does support mean? Well, need some structure. I need help. I need stability. What does raise responsibly mean? Well, let's nurture them. Let's give them rules or morals. Let's provide for their future. Let's learn a new skill, earn a new degree, move to a new country and experience a new culture. So here's the way we start to think about it differently. But now let me add the secret sauce, if you will. So it's at this point that I will bring in some analogous inspiration. What's analogous inspiration, you might ask? Well, restaurants. So let's look at restaurants. How would restaurants deal with a badge or certificate? So maybe you move from a sous chef to a line chef. What's the mountaintop experience for a restaurant? Oh, you get a five star review. What's the terms of weight loss? Well, maybe your supply chain's becoming more efficient and you realize savings in your supply chain. What does nurture look like in a restaurant? Well, maybe it's the way you train up new servers. What are the rules, ways that we do and do not interact with our customers? How do we provide for the future in restaurants? Great questions. And so now looking at how an analogous situation deals with this, are there pages that we can take from how restaurants will deal with the fostering that we can then apply to our how might we question. I bet as I was talking about this, you could already start to think about different ways that how a restaurant would solve this could actually help you solve your own problem. Yeah, we've used all of these, Mural, Miro, Google Jamboard, lots of different ways that we help you think outside the box. Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry, let me do a quick zoom out. There's the whole thing. Well, actually, we've saved this as a PDF, and we'll send it to everybody as well at the end. This was my work only, so feel free to judge away. Just quick off the cuff examples. I didn't spend any more than ten minutes building this, I promise. And it was only me, so it was not a team building it. Great, great everybody. So Tom, you mentioned the restaurants was an analogous situation. Analogous situations are difficult for people new to brainstorming and to understand or get their heads around. Would you have a better example? Could you share one of my favorite stories of all time for the rest of the team, please? I will. Pacific Power and Light had this huge problem where they had an issue in the fall and spring when ice would form on their power lines. The lines would sometimes break and oftentimes in remote places that were dangerous and difficult for crews to get to. It was expensive and dangerous work. So they brought together about twenty people from across the industry to try to figure out how to solve it. They brought in a creativity expert. And after two hours, they'd gone nowhere. And so the expert called a break, said, Let's come back in ten minutes. Take a break. During the break, he overheard two of the linemen who had just been out in the spring to repair some lines. And one said to the other, Yeah, the last time I was out there, the bears had just come out of hibernation and they were all over the place. It was a little scary working out there. And so the creativity expert thought, Bears. And so everybody gathered back and he said, Listen, I heard these two guys talking about the last time they were out there, and there were a lot of bears in the spring. So how are we going to get bears to solve this problem? And everybody kind of looked at me said, no, just go with it. And somebody said, well, I've actually seen a bear climb one of those poles. And when the bear climbed the pole, the pole was really shaking. And so if we could train the bear to climb the pole, the shaking would get the ice off the lines. And everybody laughed. And somebody else said, Yeah, well, what's the incentive for the bear to climb the pole? Why would the bear want to get up there in the first place? And somebody else said, Well, let's put a honeypot on top of each of the poles. And everybody laughed. And somebody else from another part of the company said, Yeah, but do you know how many poles we have out there? How are we going to get that many honeypots on all those poles? And somebody else from another part of the company said, Oh, well, we own helicopters. Let's just load the helicopters up with honey pots and deliver them to each of the poles. And that actually became the solution, not bears and honey pots, but helicopters. So now when the time is right, the company will fly their helicopters at a low level on top of the power lines, and the force of the downdraft of the chopper blades will keep the lines clear of ice. Yeah, me too, Maria. Now, maybe they would have got to that decision without using bears and honeypots, but it took that analogous thinking to really help them to arrive at a solution that was safer and less expensive than sending crews out to remote places in dangerous conditions. So we promised you a little bit of time. I know we're darn close to our time now for a few questions and answers. We're squirrels. Yeah. Any particular questions? Joe, I don't know if you've been curating any over that. You're most welcome, Lauren. Happy to share that with you. Thanks. Yeah, so Janice, great question. I love this. Traditionally, our friends at IDEO, when we brainstorm, we do it on Post it notes. And IDEO pretty much demands, when I've been embedded with IDEO teams, that there's sketching on each of the Post it notes. If you're using a virtual tool like Miro or Mural or Google Jamboard, you can do that sketching. But what we found, and I think what you've experienced, is in a virtual space, brainstorming in chat is amazingly fun. And like with this group of people that we have, to see the amount of ideas that flow out from the assembled crowd is pretty amazing. Swathi, yes. I think it is effective in every field. Here's the caveat. Take great care with who you have in the room. So I'm imagining like a bunch of software engineers, right? If they're all ideating on the same thing, maybe you want to bring in a diverse set of brains or two. So somebody from out, maybe a customer that you're trying to help with that, if you're not dealing with an intellectual property. The more diverse you can make your brainstorming team, I think the better off you are. But honestly, anytime you need to come up with new ideas, brainstorming is a go to technique. Kate, user input so is that more along the lines of what the problem is we're solving? If so, yes. Oftentimes, we come to a brainstorm with a specific use case. I've also seen teams where they'll, in that glorious day when we had a dedicated space or even a dedicated mural board, we'll spend ten to twenty minutes brainstorming and say, Hey, we're going to keep this board or room open for another X amount of time, a day, a week. And we call them shower thoughts at experience point. You're waking up, you're in the shower, and you think, Oh, man, there's an idea that I should have had. I wish I could have contributed that. So we might leave the brainstorm room open for another period of time to let people add. When we do, we ask that they add that idea in a different color that hasn't been used yet so we're immediately aware of the new idea when we begin to start to move out from the ideas. Oh my goodness, let me see if I can. Arturo, it depends. For us, typically our rule of thumb is ten minutes. I think that's with a group of five or six or seven, that's about the right time. Our sort of rule of thumb is one idea per person per minute, and that'll get you sixty or seventy ideas if the group is good at it. Before that ten minutes, I would do just like I did with you all and establish some norms, establish behaviors. As a facilitator, I would be empowered to call out people if they're doing one of those non helpful behaviors. Practice one of my favorite warm up drills is what can you do with a French brigette that doesn't involve eating it? And that always gets people going. So around ten minutes, Arturo, certainly no more than twenty. I think ten keeps it fresh and engaging. Yes, Arturo. So what I would do as facilitator is if I see that ideas are starting to slow down, I will apply a constraint like we did. Remember when we said, what are some ideas that could cost ten million dollars What's an idea that could incorporate smell? I, a facilitator, would know this particular subject area, so I would have different levers that I could pull. What would get my boss fired? What would accounting do with this? There are lots of different ways that we could do this. Yeah, Alex, so it comes down to when we begin to converge around our ideas and sort of tease out those ideas that we will think surprise and delight our user, that's where we begin to turn that corner. Hey, folks, I know I'm over time, and thanks everybody for staying on. I did want to get to a brief infomercial. I promise this is only seconds. We have some things called virtual public events. We invite you to give us a test ride for free. Joe, I wonder if you might put Jamie's email. If you're interested in one of our upcoming virtual public events, Jamie is the person to contact. Joe will throw that into the slide. Keva, I might just take this next part in the interest of time. We'll send you all this brainstorming tool that gives you a schedule, timed out schedule, Arturo, to your point, for how you can get the brainstorming done. Do please keep in touch with us. Please follow us on our blog. Follow us on Medium, or get in touch with us personally. Joe will oh, you already did it. Put my information there, my email there, or feel free to reach out in LinkedIn. And Keva, over to you for the last words. Yeah, no, just wanna thank you all. I know there was a lot of great questions in that chat that we didn't get time to answer today. So feel free if you just literally copy and paste it quickly, shoot it over to Tom. Joe's in the background helping us all that organise this. He's capturing all our questions. We will respond to everybody who's asked the question. So please keep them coming. Thank you again for joining. You've been amazing participants today and we look forward to seeing you in the next webinar.