On Lateral Thinking

I understand why some people are so afraid of brainstorming. Coming up with ideas that no one else has thought of before is an intimidating task. But a large part of the intimidation comes from the belief that coming up with amazing ideas is a serendipitous experience.

It’s not by the way. But for some reason, no one ever tells you that.

Brainstorming is a process. Coming up with the ideas during a brainstorm is attributed to a creative method called lateral thinking, which is the polar opposite of the logic-driven vertical thinking that we use to get us through the day. Lateral thinking is about identifying ideas that are not immediately obvious – they can’t be reached by using step-by-step logic. Lateral thinking is about finding connections between previously unrelated ideas or concepts in order to break out of old patterns and stimulate new lines of thinking. It’s a network model on overdrive.

So what sparks imaginative lateral thinking? In my opinion, it’s unexpected stimuli (auditory, verbal, visual, it doesn’t matter). The lateral thinking secret is that if you don’t have new stimuli, you can’t make new connections. Sit around the IC office for an afternoon and you’ll start to realize why this group is so capable at this type of thinking – our interests are so divergent that we continuously generate new and diverse types of stimuli. From sociology to human factors, film noir to robots, graffiti to gaming, and academia to ambient computing, this is an eclectic crowd with a very, very wide set interests.

The Problem with Dandelions

A (brief) moment of honesty – I used to be a really bad at brainstorming. Even worse, I thought I was phenomenal at it. If all you ever knew were dandelions, you wouldn’t realize your were missing out orchids. And when you work in an organization without a disciplined approach to great ideation, you lose the context that allowed you to discern what an original, quality idea looks like.

I used to be into dandelions in a serious way.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if your organization brainstorms infrequently, you are probably dandelion-lovers. If you only talk about your own business during these ideation sessions, you dig the yellow weeds. If the only people who attend your ideation sessions are senior managers – dandelions. And if you all reach consensus in the first twenty minutes of your brainstorms, you guessed it – dandelions.

Dandelions are what keep organizations from coming up with breakthrough ideas. And unfortunately, when you don’t know realize that you’re missing out, you’re unlikely to change. I recognize that a single post isn’t going to convince anyone that their organization’s brainstorming practices are flawed, but perhaps I can appeal to your sense of logic. Mastery is an elusive goal that requires practice and dedication. If you agree, then I think you’ll be willing to believe that there’s room for improvement in your brainstorming methods.

Get Stimulated

For experienced lateral thinkers, drawing on a lifetime of diverse experiences and interests to provide that stimuli that inspire creative ideas is natural. For those of us who aren’t quite as renaissance, a little help is always appreciated. It took some serious help from my good friend Matt Milan of Normative and a little orange box.

If lateral thinking is about connecting previously unrelated concepts, then the more concepts you can draw on the less expected the ideas. Teasing experiences out of our subconscious for use as stimuli is not always easy – especially when our peers, managers and clients are all (secretly) judging the quality of our ideas. Working with Matthew, I was taught that it’s okay to use external tools as stimuli in lieu drawing on past experiences to make connections.

And with this, an amazing thing happened – I relaxed, I experienced flow, and I saw orchids for the first time.

Where to Find Inspiration

I’ll re-iterate. Use external stimuli to brainstorm better. Even if you think you’re phenomenal at ideation, I guarantee that drawing from unexpected places will make you better. Don’t be shy or embarrassed about using external tools. Your team will forgive you quickly if you come up with a game-changing idea.

Here are three sources I regularly use when I need some brainstorming stimuli:

Use a randomized list of words. The little orange box I mentioned earlier is what I describe as my brainstorming crutch – a tool called ThinkCube. What is valuable about this tool is that it uses a curated set of words to spark connections (the dictionary is always another more laborious option). Terms like ‘Story’, technologies like ‘RFID’, and concepts like ‘Biomimicry’ injected at an appropriate time can spark completely new lines of thinking. During a previous ideation session, a card that said ‘Puzzle’ allowed my team to completely re-imagine how financial services products are sold.

Use images to spark your imagination. If you’re luck enough to have gotten your hands on our book No One Works Here, you’ll see some of the photographs that have inspired the Idea Couture team while problem solving. If you don’t have a copy, head over to Flickr, use a generic search term like ‘Unexpected‘ in slide show mode.

Crowdsource your stimulus needs. Wikipedia has consolidated the world’s knowledge into one location and introduced the killer lateral thinking tool – ‘Random Article‘. Visit Wikipedia with a problem and use whatever random content they provide as inspiration.

Lateral thinking is a skill that requires practice and inputs. Regardless of how good we think we are at it, there is always room for improvement. People who generate masses of truly original ideas are really just experts at accessing their historical experience. Using external tools featuring words, ideas and images can help level the playing field and help spark unknown connections.

We don’t all start out as ideation experts. If we’re willing to admit there is room for improvement, then we can begin to break out of old patterns of thinking and come up with the brilliant ideas that we are all capable of.  Explore new ways of making connections and shed your dandelion complex.

Design changes are a reaction to pressure. This is true of both evolutionary design and human design.  In a completely stable system (of which there’s no such thing), there is no pressure to make design changes. In today’s chaotic environment, there’s a bigger demand for designer for change.  Expect to see more B-school program on design and innovation.
Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or initiate change in man-made things and in nature. The process begins with the identification and analysis of a problem or need and proceeds through a structured sequence in which information is researched, ideas explored and evaluated until the optimum solution to the problem or need is devised. The problem is in the traditional process (many still practice it today), the work of the expert in the process was often compartmentalized, each having little, if any input in matters which fell outside the boundaries of their specific domains. Thus, participants explored their ideas unilaterally, with one or another participant, through virtue of their “expertise”, imposing constraints upon all others. As they pass the bucket, the product designer has veto on matters to do functionality; the engineer has veto on technology and the human factor in usability.

Look back at the years of the Bauhaus movement when they attempted to knit the design process into a coherent whole. Students were encouraged to study design in a way that was both total and detailed. That is, designers were expected to balance all the considerations that came to bear upon the design of particular artifacts, systems and overall environments. As a result, design quickly evolved into a closed activity – an activity in which all but the designers themselves had little, if any valid input on questions of base materials etc. That was the birth of the multi-disciplinary designer.

Design is important for any organization but not many organizations get it. This includes Google. Bowman, former visual design lead of Goggle accuses the company’s culture of relying too much on numbers, to the point where creativity suffers. According to Bowman, “Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better,” he writes. “I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.”

Created by Richard Shed,  “The Good Design Manifesto” in London is a collection of 100 brief responses from industry experts to the question “What is good design?”  Here are a few of them:
Good design…
…makes ordinary people’s life more meaningful. (Lavrans Lovrie, Livework)
…brings the intelligence of nature together with man’s production capabilities. (Jonathan Prestwich)
…is finding new places where what we can dream meets what we can make happen. (John Miller and Anna Hart, Mark)
…is no longer about 20th century debates around form or function. Good design will ensure we got a future on this planet.
…is sooo boring. We need GREAT design: Vision. Humanity. Sex. Death. Art. Love. (Richard Eisermann)

Image Source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HwdkdfjE8Tk/SLY90CTrO6I/AAAAAAAAAeM/YTTydMbcX5U/s400/Coke_Butler.jpg; http://www.modernclassicsdirect.co.uk/imagesstatic/big/breuer/Wassily%20Chair.gif

Part of the problem is that many “social media experts” confuse the ideas of participation and expertise. Having profiles on social networking sites doesn’t mean you understand the nuances of the distinct cultural communities that exist within these spaces. Posting a video to YouTube doesn’t mean you know understand the nuances of setting up channels for a business. And posting your company’s traditional marketing on social networking sites doesn’t mean you get social media at all (although it often results in you gaining the title “expert”).

Self proclaimed “experts” also run down the theory versus practice road. There is an incredible amount of information that has been written about how organizations should participate in social media available online, but understanding core principals is not the same as having practical experience planning and launching social media initiatives. Social media is a dynamic environment that is constantly changing. Theorists simply can’t keep up with the fluid nature of the social web.

The areas of Social Media expertise
My big problem with the term Social Media is the semantics of expertise. A self-proclaimed expert in social media positions themselves as someone who understands the nuances of taking a brand into the social media sphere. The vast majority of these practitioners are really social media generalists – they have a narrow understanding of how social media works, usually based on the fact that they were early adopters of the technology.

When you deconstruct the skills needed to really launch a social media strategy, you realize it’s impossible for one person to be capable of it all.

• Strategy – Defining the objectives of social participation and how to effectively measure performance.
• Anthropology – Understanding the cultural nuances of the communities in which you will be participating.  And these differ by social media platform.
• Research – Extracting insights from the myriad of data available.
• Public Relations  – Monitoring social media activity and understanding how to participate in a dialogue in the social realm, and how to plan in case things go wrong.
• Technology – Being able to understand the technical integration issues, API’s, etc. These also differ by social media platform.
• User Experience – Seamlessly integrating the social strategy into the current brand user experience.
• Mobile – Understanding behavior relating to the portability of your messages and communication on a small screen.
• Marketing Strategy – Being able to ensure that your messages are seen and optimized for the communities you are trying to reach.
• Content Strategy – Defining the voice of the organization in the social sphere
• Analytics – Measuring the effectiveness of social media participation.
• And the list goes on…

The need for self-selection
Social media experts are 2009’s version of the kid in his garage building you a website in the 90’s – he can get the job done, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Amazing social media experiences require planning and building by a team with a variety of expertise. Having all of the abilities required to make a social media project successful concentrated into one person is next to impossible. It’s ok to admit that you’re a generalist – your perspectives on social media problems are an extremely effective way to help an organization deal with the complexities of the cultural shift towards social participation. But don’t be the kid in a garage.

Don’t claim to be a one-stop shop. There are plenty of social media experts – measurement specialists, social media researchers, cultural experts and content strategists – who understand aspects of SM in a narrow and deep way.

When I first entered the Web Analytics world, I was often referred to as a guru, mostly because the industry was new and niche. As the industry matured, Web Analytics was deconstructed into several core skills – technical implementation, deployment, optimization, testing, analysis, governance, statistics, etc.  The idea that one person could be an expert in a practice that spans so many areas seems ludicrous to me.

So why do we look at social media in that way?

Social media experts do exist – they’re just experts at social media something. The idea that a single person can understand all of the intricacies of your organization’s social media participation is next to impossible. Let’s start focusing on real social media expertise and really start to create change.