To remain relevant or to disrupt an industry, you need to innovate. Many organizations turn to brainstorming as a method for generating new ideas, but it’s not the best way to be original, says Sheena Iyengar, author of Think Bigger: How to Innovate.
“Brainstorming certainly captures a lot of excitement and intrigue,” she says. “It’s fun to do and people like it. But it’s really just a bias-making exercise inherent to the way it’s structured.”
A choice scientist and professor of business in the management department at Columbia Business School, Iyengar wanted to find a better way to find new choices. She was inspired by a quote from French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who said, “Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.”
“The real power of choice doesn’t come from merely the exercise of picking and finding,” she says. “The real power of choice comes from your ability to pair the exercise of picking and finding with the exercise of imagination. If you put those together, that’s what leads to the construction of the most meaningful combinations.”
To replace brainstorming, Iyengar created a six-step process she calls “choice mapping.”
1. Choose the Problem
The first step is to choose a problem to solve. It sounds simple, but the problem may not be self-evident. For example, the problem may be that you need to be aware of potential disruptive technologies. Or you may want to know how to make your current product lineup more carbon neutral.
“Einstein once said, ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions,’” says Iyengar. “Like Einstein, write and rewrite, frame and reframe your problem from myriad perspectives in order to discover the problem that is most meaningful and feasible to solve.”
2. Break It Down
“Almost every consulting firm tries to do some kind of a problem analysis or industry analysis,” says Iyengar. “The only thing that’s different about the way I have them break it down is that I have them pay very close attention to cognitive limitations.”
To push past the limitations, break down the problem into subproblems. You may identify several but choose no more than five. Subproblems are a piece of the larger puzzle. “If you were to solve these, you’ll solve about 90% of the problem,” says Iyengar.
Breaking down the problem into subproblems becomes a thought exercise. The more meaningful and deliberate you are in the process, the better your results will be.
3. Compare Wants
Next, determine what you want to feel when you solve the problem. “Most of the time when people say, ‘What do you want to achieve? What are your goals? What are your metrics?’ it becomes very objective,” says Iyengar. “We’re not objective creatures. Instead, it’s about ‘How do you want to feel?’”
For example, if you want to identify the most disruptive technology out there, is it because you want to be cool? Or is it because you want to be the richest, most powerful person on the block?
“Everybody’s got some feeling, and you might as well just surface that because that is ultimately going to serve as your selection criteria,” she says. “And if it doesn’t serve as your selection criteria, you’re never going to be motivated to take that idea.”
4. Search In and Out of the Box
In the fourth step, Iyengar recommends creating a structured process for gathering relevant information by creating a matrix. With the problem broken down into five subproblems, find two examples of how the subproblem has been solved within your industry and three examples of how it’s been solved outside of your industry.
“Typically, when someone has a problem, they go look at what their competitors have done and they study their own area of expertise,” says Iyengar. “On a choice map, only 20% is dedicated to industry expertise. If you want out-of-the-box solutions, you have to look at what exists in other boxes.”
For example, someone in the airline industry solving problems around logistics can look at adjacent industries like other forms of transportation. Or they can look at companies in other industries, like, say, Disney.
5. Create a Choice Map
The fifth step is choice mapping. Take one option per subproblem and determine how you could combine them to create a new solution.
“You have so many possible options that you can be combining,” says Iyengar. “No two people imagine the same thing given the same materials. Look at the choices separately, not in the same room. That’s how you’re going to get real diversity.”
6. Do the ‘Third Eye Test‘
Choice mapping can create thousands of unique solutions. Compare your wants to get a big picture score, then use your big picture score to identify your top five different ideas. But don’t stop here, says Iyengar.
“You’re still a bias-making machine,” she says. “You know your idea is great in your head, but you don’t really know what that idea means once it gets out of your head.”
Avoid posting your idea on a forum where you might get likes or dislikes. Instead, describe your idea to someone and ask for them to repeat it back to you.
“What you need to know is what are they seeing?” says Iyengar. “When they tell your idea back to you, what stuck? What did they edit out in the retelling of your idea? Maybe they reframed it and added some interesting tidbits that you didn’t even think. You’ll get valuable information for how to further edit my idea.”
Iyengar says brainstorming is the golden child for coming up with ideas, but most ideas suck. “Instead, you need to teach people how to come up with good quality ideas, and in particular, how to evaluate them,” she says. “The key is creating choices. Multiple choices don’t come from giving people pure freedom. You get your best choices through structure and constraints.”
