Ideation Techniques: Assessing the Effectiveness of your Brainstorming Session
I’ll never forget what my piano teacher once told me when she said, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Now a quick internet search reveals that my piano teacher might not have been the originator of that quote. Regardless, this lesson has stuck with me: If you want to get better at something, you need to deliberately practice.
Like playing an instrument, brainstorming and other ideation techniques are skills - if not arts - that need to be practiced. There’s a lot of good advice out there on how to brainstorm [1], but how do you know how effective your brainstorming actually was?
My experience with brainstorming, however, is that objective brainstorming feedback is hard to find. Most people will accept whatever ideas get thrown up and move on. But not us! We are intelligent citizens of the design community who want to get better at brainstorming! What resources are out there to help us improve our ideation practice?
Well, here’s two to get us started:
Tom Kelley, former general manager and current partner of the design firm IDEO, wrote the book The art of Innovation. Kelley refers to brainstorming sessions as “brainstormers” [1].
Jami Shah, Noe Vargas-Hernandez, and Steve Smith (a team of researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A & M University) wrote a groundbreaking paper called Metrics for measuring Ideation Effectiveness [2]. I’ll refer to this paper as “Shah’s paper.”
Shah’s paper gives us four metrics that give us objective feedback on our brainstorming sessions. These metrics are Quantity, Quality, Variety, and Novelty. I’ll explain each of these below and how thinking of them can help improve your ideation.
Quantity
Quantity is how many ideas you have at the end of your brainstorming session. Simply count how many ideas you have by the end of the brainstorming session, and you have your quantity.
Linus Pauling, an American Chemist, said that “the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas [2].” The more ideas you have, the more of the design space you can explore and the more likely a good idea is to pop up.
An important factor in reaching a high quantity of ideas during a brainstorming session is to not shut down ideas when they are given. Kelley wrote, “Don’t start to critique or debate ideas, It can sap the energy out of a [brainstorming] session pretty quickly… At IDEO many of our conference rooms have brainstorming rules stenciled in six-inch-high letters on the walls, for example, ‘Go for quantity,’ ‘Encourage wild ideas,’ or ‘Be Visual [2].’”
For engineers, it can be difficult to write down wild and random ideas when our training better prepares us for critiquing ideas. Most of my college assignments have been centered around “does this work” or “how (strong, light, conductive) does this need to be to work” instead of “give me as many imaginable ways this could work.” Learn to momentarily suspend belief and give it a shot. You can realize for yourself that the more ideas you push yourself to have, the more good ones you’ll have.
Quality
Quality measures how well the idea would work in real life. You can break down quality into two categories:
How well does this idea meet your performance measures? [3]
How feasible, or implementable, is the idea?
Please note that we are not discussing quality here because we need to whittle out the “bad ideas.” Don’t worry yourself with bad ideas during brainstorming. After concept generation comes concept evaluation. This is a different stage in the design process where you will decide which ideas to pursue further. Instead, we remember quality during a brainstormer because it keeps us geared towards those performance measures.
Before you begin brainstorming, do a thorough job researching your problem. Then, create a succinct list of performance objectives that defines what you need in a solution. Now when you’re in the heat of a brainstorming session, instead of worrying about if your ideas are good enough (and preemptively shooting down those important wild ideas), instead ask yourself, “what ideas could better meet this performance measure?” Or, “we have a lot of ideas to address our first performance measure, but what about the second one?” You can get high quantity and high quality ideas simultaneously.
Variety
Just because you get a high quantity of ideas doesn’t mean you did a good job of exploring your possible options. This is why variety is important. Variety measures how different your ideas are from each other. Idea sets with greater variety do a better job of exploring the design space (think of the design space as the figurative space where all your solutions could be). The more of the design space you explore, the more likely you are to find creative solutions.
Shah explained why variety is the necessary counterpart to quantity in ideation. He wrote, “Variety is an indication of the multiple perspectives that one may use in solving a problem… the ability to generate a wide variety of ideas is directly related to the ability to restructure problems [3].” To give an example of what Shah’s describing, pretend you’re brainstorming ways to open doors. You think of door knobs, and then say, “ok, how about a blue doorknob? And a teal one, chartreuse, maroon, fuschia…” While you’d make your local paint store proud, you will not be anywhere closer to finding an innovative solution.
Continuing with the door knob example, instead of listing off 100 minute variations of the same idea, consider instead asking your team something like this: “So far, all of our door opening ideas use round knobs. What are other ways to open doors?” Mechanisms such as sliding bars, levels, or push only doors may then come to mind. When a brainstorming session begins to stall, identify the function used to satisfy your need and challenge it. This will engender different ideas in your idea set.
Novelty
Novelty is how new, rare, unusual, or unexpected something is. Whereas variety captures how well the design space is explored, novelty expands the design space. Shah wrote, “novel designs occupy points that are initially not perceived to be within the design space. Expanding the design space offers the opportunity to find better designs that are so far not known to exist [3].” As designers interested in bringing new, creative ideas to the world, novelty should be at the front of our minds.
When assessing your generated idea list for novelty, ask yourself these two questions:
How frequently is this idea used in addressing the need?
How frequently is this idea used in other areas or domains aside from the need I’m brainstorming?
Question two is especially important because it encourages us to look for existing solutions in other application areas. Kelley calls this cross pollination [2,4]. He wrote, “Try approaching projects with humility and the knowledge that answers may come from places you least suspect… If you expect to find answers from unusual places, it’s far more likely to happen [2].” For example, IDEO developed a new water bottle for mountain bikers by imitating a heart valve.
I used to feel that if I took my ideas from preexisting ones, that they wouldn’t be new or creative. This was a terrible way to think about design. A lot of ideas that we would consider new, exciting or fresh, are derived from a plethora of ideas surrounding it. And that’s ok! For example, the design of Star Wars drew heavily upon pre-existing sci-fi media and history [5]. But even then, Star Wars has felt like a new kind of sci fi and has been cherished by fans for 45 years now.
Becoming a master cross pollinator will make you a novel brainstormer. You can begin by being observant to how things work around you. Pay attention to manufactured products, mechanisms found in nature, toys, and your favorite sci-fi devices. Surround your working space with inspiring knick knacks. Drawing from the best of other fields will lead you to novel ideas in your application area.
Deliberate Ideation
Kelley finished the chapter on brainstorming by writing, “Everybody brainstorms. And everybody could get better at it… A brainstorm can feel like it’s just another meeting, or it can be a fun, invigorating experience that can take a project or team to a new level [2].”
Be deliberate in making your brainstorming more enjoyable and worthwhile than ever before. Songs aren’t learned overnight on the piano, they’re mastered through deliberate practice. Approach brainstorming as an art that can be mastered through practice, rather than a static skill you learned in elementary school, and you can become a brainstorming virtuoso.
References
[1] Ideation Techniques: Brainstorming by Kaityln Collins Blanco, https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/ideation-techniques-brainstorming
[2] Kelley, Tom. Art of Innovation. Profile Books Ltd, 2001.
[3] Shah, Jami J., et al. “Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness.” Design Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003, pp. 111–134., https://doi.org/10.1016/s0142-694x(02)00034-0.
[4] The Third Face of Innovation: The Cross Pollinator by John Salmon. https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/the-third-face-of-innovation-the-cross-pollinator
[5] Is everything derivative? By John Salmon and Restraint–A Secret to Design Success by Samuel McKinnon. https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/is-everything-derivative, https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/4xzuza4hfg536b15buh2hfnhk93sls
