CenterBrain Partners

To really do effective and efficient brainstorming I’ve found that the process can’t be a free for all.  You have to have objectives and you have to have structure.  It almost sounds counter intuitive to the idea of creative exploration, but really it isn’t.   Structure and objectives provide focus and a level of comfort for those important people on a team that may not think of themselves as being creative.  Often those same people who feel uncomfortable have a lot to offer and a big stake in whether some ideas go forward.  So, it just makes sense to include them in the early creative process.

I find that creating the opportunity for intense focus on a problem or a product starts by eliminating variables.  Let’s face it, just by the nature of doing group work there are a lot of variables…personality, background, political agendas.  I use a technique that comes out of  the world of quantitative research and is actually something I learned from my good friend Ron Nelson.  Ron looked at the technique of problem-detection with its ensuing statistical analysis, and thought why not turn it around and evaluate the positive.  He taught me about promise testing and I took it a step further for use as a way to structure brainstorming.  Here is how it works.

First, whatever the opportunity you are working on begin by framing it using the 5-steps I outlined in a previous post.  Here they are again for those of you who missed it.

1. Problem (What problem is the new idea trying to solve)

2. Solution (How the new idea solves the problem)

3. Benefit to you (What is the one major benefit to the buyer, consumer etc.)

4. How it works (What are the features of the idea that support the benefit)

5. Don’t worry (The answer to the one major objection your consumer would have.  Think of this is the lingering doubt we all have about new ideas)

Once you’ve done the framing, now fracture the idea to get the creative juices flowing.  You fracture the idea by using promises.  Promises are simple.  They are sentences that state a benefit followed by a reason why, or if you will a reason to believe.  Here is an example.

This blog post will make you more confident in your next brainstorming session, that’s because it tells you the structure for expressing your idea in over 50 ways.

Notice how the promise is written. It always starts with a benefit (not a feature) and is followed with a reason the reader should believe you can deliver the benefit.  I generally write 50-60 of these going into a brainstorming session, after I’ve had a chance to gather individual input from the project team.  Note I said individual input not group.  Individuals, if interviewed correctly, do a lot less political censoring.

I write all the promises for a brainstorming session, because I can then eliminate one variable…writing style.  When the team comes to the brainstorming session there is a big reveal of all the promises and most people see their ideas expressed creatively, and that makes them energetic about the work ahead.  Even the most pragmatic in the group can see how they have contributed to the creative process.  They all see how the idea has been fractured and feel confident that when we re-frame it we have virtually left no stone unturned.

I won’t get into the mechanics of a brainstorming approach I’ve branded CenterStorm, but perhaps you can see that structurally fracturing your idea helps everyone focus, allowing for better expansion and contraction of ideas and ultimately better creative outcomes.

When I was a kid I learned about the concept of purgatory..not quite heaven and not quite hell.  I think that is where many people I speak with find themselves when they choose the route of “professionally qualified” to teach at a university or college.  For those of you who are not real familiar with the term it refers to people who have significant practical or professional experience but not a PhD.

I am now the Harrison/Omnicom Professor in Integrated Marketing Communications at West Virginia University, a post I took after looking at a number of options once we decided to leave Ole Miss.  I was CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at Ole Miss and liked the work, but because we’re Jewish and I have small kids it was a difficult place to practice our faith.  So we decided to move and struck out for Morgantown so I could try my hand at full-time faculty work.

I’m classified as a Visiting Assistant Professor, have a contractual arrangement with the university, which means I’m not on a tenure track.  I’m a lucky guy in the higher ed world, because I have an endowed chair even though I don’t have a PhD.  In fact, the school of journalism actually sought out a professionally qualified person for the job, which is  pretty progressive thinking so I hear.

Making a career in the academic world is not something I ever intended.  But, somewhere along the line I figured out that I was a pretty good teacher.  I proved that by teaching as an adjunct and becoming an executive-in-residence at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.   My students learn important things they can use in the real world where increasingly our students know virtually nothing about the real world when they enter the real world…you know the place they are going to work and be the engines of an economic renaissance in this country!

Despite my fortunate situation, I know from talking to others who are considered professionally qualified too that we are viewed as second class citizens.  The second class status comes both ways..from the PhD’s and from the those who are still working in the real world.

PhD’s dominate the academic world and I am buying this dominance in some subjects..particularly the sciences.  My dad had a PhD in Chemical Engineering.  He was a smart guy.  People with PhD’s in Higher Education Administration, well not so much.  But the PhD club runs our universities and they have formed an alliance of entitlement. I’m not in the club and never will be.

On the other side are those who practice in the real world.  In my case that’s people in marketing or advertising.  They view the professionally qualified as the “hacks” that couldn’t make it.  I can’t relate all the  conversations with people in the business world I’ve had since taking my academic position, but suffice to say their first assumption is that I don’t really know much and they go out of their way to instruct me on the basics of branding etc.  Fact is, I still consult to the biggest companies in America and have put nearly $4 billion in new business on the market in the last 20 years.  I also own a growing healthcare company.

Here’s my point in all this.  PhD’s and Business Folks need to help those of us who are professionally qualified out of purgatory and preferably to the heavenly side!  PhD’s need people who understand the world they either never were in or left deliberately for academia and they need us to teach, something many find to be a pesky impediment to their research work.  Business folks need professionally qualified people to train their workers, yes train them, because you are not doing this anymore.  You also need to hire professionally qualified academics to work with you, because many of us gave up tens of thousands and more in annual income to do this noble work and believe or not we actually are on top of the latest techniques because universities study these things.

Actually right now we’d all just settle for a little respect.  Give it some thought.