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You Get What You Expect Until You Fail

By Peter Lloyd

Even when asked to listen for something else, your brain pays more attention to what you expect to hear instead. So say the results of experiments at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Brainstorming facilitators have known this for a long time. That's why the good ones go to great lengths to force the brains of their brainstorming session participants out of such thinking ruts.

The story "How phones ring a bell in your head" explains how researchers recorded the brain reactions of a dozen volunteers as they heard their cell phones ring, while watching a film and while waiting to hear the ring of a different cell phone.

Naturally the subjects' brains lit up when they heard their own phone, but even while assigned to press a button when they heard another phone, their brains gave more neurological attention to their own phones. Put another way, even while listening for something else, our brains pay more attention to what we have taught them to attend to over time. Our soggy wads of neurons just can't help it.

We can and should take this lesson into every brainstorming session. Typically brainstorm participants come to a session inclined one way or another about the problem they're about to tackle. Some will bring their pre-conceived ideas, prejudices, pet solutions, office-politics affiliations, and so on. They will hold these inclinations with different degrees of tenacity. A facilitator's job, not an easy one, is to neutralize these inclinations.

Now that we've seen more evidence of the brain's reluctance or inability to ignore what it has been trained to notice, it's clear that decisive measures need to be taken to ensure that brainstorm players leave what they expect outside the brainstorming room door.

One of the first techniques to use, one very effective for unloading pet prejudices, I call Idea Dump. Assign everyone attending your session the task of bringing five, ten, or twenty-some ideas to the session. Among these you'll find ideas your attendees needed to get off their chests. If you prefer, you can start the session with a ten- to fifteen-minute Idea Dump. Have everybody write ideas on index cards—one idea per card. Collect the cards, shuffle them and have small groups select cards at random and develop the ideas they contain.

Another way to prevent your session from getting bogged down in politics and pet ideas: keep the ideas coming too fast for anyone to quibble over. Use Brainwriting, a favorite of Michael Michalko. This guided idea generation tool also generates many more ideas than fielding one idea at a time from your group.

There's no use brainstorming unless you're after fresh ideas. To get fresh ideas, you have to break the brain's habit of going where it's been trained to go. Edward DeBono calls this pattern break Lateral Thinking. Stephen Grossman argues that you'll never break pattern thinking until you admit to yourself that what you've been doing has failed. A brainstorm facilitator, then, needs to convince the group, if only for the success of the session, that "we're here because we don't have a solution."

Scott Wurtele, ceo of IdeaConnection, believes so strongly in the value of admitting failure that in Blogging Innovation he suggests we coin a new word for "failure." After thinking about that for a while and playing with anagrams of "failure," like "a lure if" and "air fuel," I thought, why not simply "success"!

Read Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko, Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius by Edward DeBono.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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