Brainstorming: Is Your Mind Wild Enough to Make a Conceptual Leap? | Bill Burnett | Big Think

Brainstorming: Is Your Mind Wild Enough to Make a Conceptual Leap?

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Brainstorming is on the endangered words list, at risk of slipping into ‘buzzword’ territory any day now – although some would argue it’s already there. That’s because everyone is doing it, but many of us don’t quite know how to. According to Bill Burnett, Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford University, the process is fundamentally misunderstood – it’s about more than sitting in a group expecting genius to unfold. What’s missing from most brainstorming sessions is the notion that this is a skill, not a magic trick.

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BILL BURNETT :

Bill Burnett is a Consulting Assistant Professor and the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He directs the undergraduate and graduate program in design and teaches at the d.school. He received his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Product Design at Stanford and has worked in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple designing award-winning laptops and a number of years in the toy industry designing Star Wars action figures. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents and design awards, and, in addition to his duties at Stanford, he is on the board of VOZ, a socially responsible fashion start-up, and advises several other start-up companies.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Bill Burnett: Everybody kind of knows the rules of brainstorming. You get four or five people together. By the way you can’t brainstorm with 20 people. Everybody has to be able to see each other. I think of brainstorming like a jazz ensemble. Maybe you can have a trio or a quartet. A quintet maybe. Past that you can’t play jazz. It’s just too complicated, too many people. So we get together and they often, you know, come up with a question and they brainstorm for a while and they go great, that was fantastic. And then there’s all these post-its or all these notes on a whiteboard. And somebody says I’ll take a picture and they take a picture with their cell phone. And then that’s where ideas go to die. Ideas just go to die on cell phones.

Somebody’s got a picture and they all walk away. And then I ask them well what happened? They said well we had a brainstorm. I said well what was the result? They said well we had a lot of ideas. What are you going to do with it? And they haven’t really made it actionable. So here’s the thing. Brainstorming works great for coming up with lots of ideas and very diverse ideas, particularly if you have a really good jazz team that can really play off of each other. But, you know, at the end of a good brainstorm – when we run it at the D School there will be 100-150 post-its on the board. But that’s not the end because you haven’t really done anything. Generating the ideas is relatively simple once you get good at it. Figuring out what you’re going to do with the ideas, putting them into sort of buckets. Often ideas are clustered around certain themes so the first thing we do and the reason we use post-its is then we stop and say okay, the brainstorm is over. Now we’re going to do a little bit of evaluation, a little bit of what we call naming and framing the ideas. We’re going to put them into the cluster – like this cluster is all around one thing, this cluster is all around another thing. These are all wildcards. They don’t cluster at all. We just kind of move the post-its around. And then we try to give them – we try to put the buckets or sub buckets into some kind of a framework and we just give it a name. And the funnier the name the better. These are the crazy grandmother ideas. These are the ideas if ducks could fly or if chickens could fly this is what the ideas would be.

So we give them funny names but the idea is to sort of bring them back down into reality and put them into some kind of framework. Because at the end of my brainstorms if you ask somebody what happened they’ll say we had 150 ideas. It turns out they were in about six different categories and then we ranked the top ideas in each category and we have seven ideas we would really like to build a prototype of because we think these seven ideas ask the most interesting questions around the problem or the space that we’re doing. The same thing with life design. When you finish your three odyssey plans we say find four or five things on the odyssey plans you want to brainstorm because it’s something you’re curious about. I just discovered hey, maybe I was...

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