Is your team falling short of creating ideas?
Is it unable to brainstorm new and innovative
ways to solve complex problems?
Well, if that's the case, in this video,
I'll show you how you can help your
team get out of this creative rut and
unlock its creativity almost instantly.
Hey, friends.
Welcome back to the channel.
And if you're new here,
my name is Vibhor. I am an
Executive Agile and Leadership Coach
based in Toronto, Canada,
and on this channel we explore the
tools and strategies that help us be
more Agile,
not only at work or in our careers,
but life as a whole,
In general.
There are time stamps available in
case you're watching this on YouTube,
so feel free to skip around the video if
you feel like it.
But for now,
let's get started.
Brainstorming is a great way to get
the new ideas and solve problems.
It's easy to execute and usually generates
a large number of useful,
innovative ideas.
Or at least, that's what we think.
Whenever we feel a need to innovate or
generate new ideas,
we schedule a meeting,
make the team sit in a circle, hand them
post it notes and ask them to spill their
brains and regurgitate a masterpiece.
something new and
extraordinary that the world has
never seen or heard of before.
And don't get me wrong.
You do get many different ideas,
but those ideas are sometimes too broad
and absurd,
and lack the specifics required to
take the action.
You get a lot of ideas,
but most of the time those are the ideas
that you are not looking for.
As marvelous as it is,
brainstorming sometimes fall short when
trying to solve complex organizational problems
or impediments.
We expect our teams to think out of
the box without defining the box's dimension
in the first place.
So what can we do?
How can we make our teams get out of
this creative rut?
Well, I'm happy to report that there
is a solution.
Sometimes to see a picture clearly,
we need to turn the picture upside down.
All it requires is a change in
perspective.
Where traditional brainstorming falls
short, the right next step to solving a
problem is to turn the problem on its head.
And that's where the concept of
Reverse Brainstorming comes into play.
Reverse Brainstorming as the name suggests,
flips traditional brainstorming techniques
180 degrees,
allowing you to approach complex problems
from an entirely different viewpoint.
Where traditional brainstorming demands
your team to focus on collecting ideas
to SOLVE a particular problem in
Reverse Brainstorming,
the team instead looks at, what could make
the problem worse or why the problem cannot
be solved.
We then reverse those ideas to discover new
things we didn't see before,
enabling ourselves to look at the problems
the cause and the solution from
completely different angles.
Reverse brainstorming works best
when the team is finding it difficult to
come up with the new ideas in a short
period of time.
When they have expressed all
their best ideas and have nothing more
to add.
It works best when the project itself
has become so difficult and complex that
it has sucked out all
the team member's creative enthusiasm,
turning them into naysayers.
Reverse brainstorming can make use of
this negative energy,
turning the negative feelings and frustrations
into resources that can be used to
explore new and innovative opportunities for
improvement.
It works best when you want people to
let go of the preconceived notions about
a particular topic or subject.
Reverse brainstorming can lead to some
surprising out of the box thinking or
unexpected discoveries that can make
a real and positive difference.
It can literally force people to think
differently,
making them learn by imagining their failures.
So when you want your team to think out
of the box and reveal hidden problems that
are not visible in normal circumstances,
use Reverse Brainstorming.
Okay, so there are five steps to use
Reverse brainstorming.
In step one,
we identify the problem.
Just like the
traditional brainstorming session we
first need a problem to solve.
For example,
in our case,
let's take a generics
"increase sales in the store"
as a problem to solve.
In Step two,
we reverse the problem,
and instead of avoiding it,
we make it the goal or the vision that
we want to achieve.
For example,
instead of asking a team to brainstorm
how to increase sales,
we asked them how to decrease sales .
In step 3 we brainstorm
ideas to achieve the
reverse goal.
For example,
in our case,
we let the team members come up with
ways to decrease sales,
and we welcome all ideas,
no matter how outrageous they are.
In step four,
we analyze all the generated ideas by
asking whether the business is currently doing
something similar to what is stated in
the negative idea.
For example,
if one of the idea to decrease sales is
to leave the store unstaffed,
then we need to consider if,
in fact, we do leave the store un-staffed
on occasions for various reasons.
Or maybe there is a lack of staff in
the store to attend to all the customers.
You'll be surprised by the kind of
problems you can uncover in this phase
of reverse brainstorming.
The fifth and the final step is to
evaluate the selected ideas and identify
the solution for the problems identified,
In step number 4.
We use creative and analytical methods to
identify ways of preventing those problems.
For example,
one of the solutions could be hiring more
Staff, or even better,
letting only a certain number of customers
enter the story at a given point in
time, making a queue outside the store.
This will not only solve our problem but
will also serve as a wonderful marketing strategy,
showing the demand for the store items
to the public passing by.
Reverse brainstorming
is a great tool that can energize a
big brainstorming session and engage participants
who feel disempowered or disconnected from
the process.
It can also be a good way to help your
team members step back from the day
to day experiences and see the process,
product or service from a new and different
point of view.
So there you have it.
Reverse brainstorming is really useful
and effective.
It is a powerful tool,
but an untrained,
less experienced team can easily get
off track while using it.
It can take longer than a typical brainstorming
exercise,
and participants may have difficulty flipping
negative comments to find positive solutions.
For these reasons,
I advise you to run Reverse Brainstorming
sessions with the help of a
seasoned facilitator.
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And also please do not forget to provide
your valuable feedback in the comments.
I'll see you in the next video.