Idea Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs

Q& A with Author Bryan Mattimore

1. What's the most important thing a person-or an organization for that matter-can do to become more creative?

The most important thing is to define oneself and one's organization as creative. Being creative is a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you think of yourself as creative, you tend to persist on the creative task until you get something unique, new, and wonderful. Those who don't think of themselves as creative-and this is true for organizations as well-give up too quickly.

2. Why is it so challenging for a group to come up with breakthrough ideas?

You need at least three things to come together in a group ideation session to generate game changing or breakthrough ideas. First, you want an interesting mix of seemingly contradictory kinds of people: experts and non-experts; those who own the project and the result, and those who don't; introverts and extroverts; males and females; creative crazies and pragmatic doers. It's this eclectic mix of people and thinking styles that can trigger unexpected, truly great ideas. Second, you want a wide variety of ideation techniques that will stimulate people's brains in entirely new ways to help them make unique connections. And third, you need a facilitator who is at once creative and non-judgmental, someone who's skilled at prompting the group with a range of open-ended, provocative but also relevant questions. Typically these prompting questions begin with: "How about...? What if...? Is it possible to.....? Could we...?"

3. You talk about the "facilitating leader" in your book. What's a facilitating leader?

The facilitating leader is anyone in any organization, ranging from the CEO to a department leader, to an assistant brand manager, to a team member tasked with a creative challenge, who embraces the notion that his or her coworkers can be immensely valuable in defining-and solving-creative business problem. Idea Stormers is intended to give both current and aspiring facilitating leaders the tools and inspiration they need to succeed their roles.

4. The efficacy of brainstorming, one of the most popular ideation techniques, has been questioned by some creativity experts. Is brainstorming a good technique for producing great ideas?

Brainstorming was a great technique for its time when it was invented in the 1930s. But today, since the competition for discovering new, non-obvious ideas is so great, brainstorming is not enough. Teams now need both stimuli-rich, and customized ideation techniques to help them make unique and unexpected creative connections. I've included more than 25 of these techniques in Idea Stormers.

5. What is brainwalking and why is it better than brainstorming and other traditional ideation techniques?

I invented the brainwalking technique when looking for an alternative to a group ideation technique called brainwriting. Brainwriting is a simple group ideation technique in which each person in the group writes an idea down on a piece of paper and then passes his or her paper to the person to the right, who then builds on that idea and contributes his or her own. If you repeat this process five times in a group of 10 people, you would develop 50 ideas in no time. A great technique! But brainwalking is even better. Instead of passing the paper around, you post flip chart paper around a room. Each person has to go around the room, adding his or her ideas to each piece of paper and building on those already submitted by his or her peers. It's a lot more fun. Since each person can write his or her ideas down without "presenting" them to the group, both brainwriting and brainwalking have the advantage of eliciting ideas from the introverts in the room-which is a shortcoming of traditional brainstorming.

6. It is true that group sessions often seem to be hijacked by the bold extroverts and compulsive talkers. How can a facilitating leader avoid this so that everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute?

Different ideation techniques can help. Brainwalking is one technique that will guarantee everyone, including the introverts, gets to contribute. Another is a visual combination technique called picture prompts, which I present in the book. The facilitating leader can also design the ideation session so that people are working in small teams, as few as two people working together at once. The facilitator can also call on the introverts directly, especially when their body language or a facial expression tells the facilitator they might have something unique to add.

7. Do you have a favorite technique that seems to work well with all industries and backgrounds?

There are literally hundreds of ideation and innovation techniques. My coworkers at Growth Engine-the innovation consulting firm I cofounded-and I have spent the last twenty-five years inventing new techniques as well as trying to learn which techniques work best for different kinds of creative challenges. But a favorite technique, one we use all the time for new product development ideation, is called semantic intuition. It's a technique in which you name the idea first before you know what the idea actually is. It sounds crazy, I know. But there is a precedent for this approach in the arts: songwriters often title a song first and then write the corresponding lyrics and music. At Growth Engine, we've used semantic intuition to invent everything from new writing pads to automotive air hoses, new make-up products to the phone of the future, new bank services to more visually-interesting ways to televise a tennis match.

8. What's the difference between "ideation" and "innovation?"

People often confuse or use the words "ideation" and "innovation" interchangeably, but there's a big difference. "Ideation" is the term used to describe individual or group creative techniques that can be used to help generate new ideas. "Innovation" is the process of bringing these ideas to market.

9. Speaking of innovation, why is it so hard to take an idea from concept to development to launch?

It's hard to take an idea successfully from concept to development to launch because you have to get so many things right. To successfully innovate a new product, for instance, you have to get the name, the positioning, the package, the ingredients, the price-value equation, not to mention the promotional, PR and the advertising ideas all right. All these elements have to come together in a seamless way offering a unique and highly-desirable new consumer benefit. Get one of them wrong, and you've got a failure. Most people believe innovation is just about coming up with a great idea. Not true: Innovation requires a great deal of just plain hard work that goes well beyond generating a big idea in the first place. And it takes every bit as much creativity- maybe more so-as it does to generate the initial "killer idea." That's why in Idea Stormers, I include not only ideation techniques but innovation processes as well.

10. What can someone in charge of leading a group through a creative challenge do to ensure success?

Several things. First, you want to make sure you have "framed" the creative challenge correctly in a way that encourages and liberates new thinking. An example of creative framing I give in the book was when a company that produces irons asked me to help them "invent new irons." I knew from experience that this would be too limiting. So, I got the client to agree that we should invent "new anti-wrinkle devices." And then we went even further and agreed that we should be inventing "new garment care devices."

Second, the facilitating leader needs to spend time both selecting the right ideation techniques and then customizing those selected techniques with specific stimuli relevant for their particular creative challenge. In Idea Stormers, I'm very specific about identifying not only which ideation techniques we've found work best for different kinds of creative challenges, but also showing readers how to customize these techniques to increase their chance of success.

Finally, the facilitating leader needs to know that all ideation techniques will not work all the time. Far from it. For whatever the reason, some techniques may just not work on certain days at certain times, with a certain group of people. That's okay. That's why you use a variety of different techniques in every ideation sessions. The facilitating leader must stay optimistic and confident even when things are not going well. It's important to remember that it takes only one or two great ideas to justify the investment of the group's time.

11. Why is creativity so important in our personal and professional lives?

Being creative is how you can change the world and your life-and have fun in the process. It can literally transform failure to success! Think of JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series: by being creative she climbed out of welfare to become the richest woman in England.