Home: http://www.Daxle.net
Date: May 10, 2011
Book: Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas
Speakers: Brian Oates & Shawn Coyne
Source: http://www.daxle.net/imprint/media/Imprint_088_Coyne.mp3
Permalink: http://www.daxle.net/archive/brainsteering

Brian: Welcome to Imprint: Business Author Interviews, from Daxle.net. Today's book is Brain-Steering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas. Shawn Coyne joins me today. Shawn, welcome to the program.

Shawn: Hi, Brian. It's nice to be with you.

Brian: Well, brain-steering is different than brainstorming and let me just begin by saying that I'm probably a child of brainstorming. I've heard this all of my life. You get in a room, I've done it, you sit with people. You think of ideas, some are crazy, some are cool, and you walk away and hopefully you got some little gem in there somewhere, but now your book comes along and you force me to rethink what I've been trained to do. It may not really be the best idea, right?

Shawn: That's exactly right. Actually, most of us are actually children of brainstorming because brainstorming is really the only ideation technique that most people are familiar with. It's been so famous for about 60 years, in everything from business schools to Fortune 500 companies, everybody always learns about brainstorming. The problem, though, is that there is all kinds of research that's been done over the years that shows that traditional brainstorming is actually highly ineffective and inefficient. In fact, there are studies that show that if the leader of a traditional brainstorming session wanted to generate more and better ideas the would actually be better off gathering their team members together, telling them their objectives and then sending them off to work in separate rooms, rather than having them work together, because so many of the things involved in traditional brainstorming actually subtracts from creativity, rather than adding to it.

Brian: That's so interesting! So out-of-the-box, inside-the-box, we have all these cliches and buzzwords that we throw around, but if we're not going to brainstorm then, of course, I have to ask, what are we going to do when we have a problem that we need to tackle or generate some new idea?

Shawn: What we would suggest is that you do what we call brain-steering. The difference is this; brainstorming and brain-steering are both designed to meet the same objective, which is to come up with terrific new ideas, but they approach it very differently. Brainstorming, if you think about the name, the problem with brainstorming, and it's right there in the name, is that it's a little like a lightening storm in that there's a tremendous amount of energy involved, but only occasionally does it produce anything productive because so much of that energy is unfocused and scattered about. Brain-steering, on the other hand, we try to take people's creative energy and steer it in a more consistently productive direction, by helping them add just the right amount of structure to the process and helping them understand just the right questions that they need to ask themselves.

Brian: So give me an example. What would you do wrong with brain-steering and right with brain-steering?

Shawn: Well, a great example would be that we've probably all been in brainstorming sessions before where somebody says, "Well, gee, how can we increase profits?" Well, the problem with that question is 1) it's extremely vague, and 2) it's the same old question that people have asked themselves a million times before. What we would suggest with brain-steering is that you ask yourself a very particular question that will focus your thinking much more tightly and force you to look at your problems from some sort of uncommon perspective. So, for example, instead of saying, "How do we increase profits?" you could ask yourself, "What's the biggest hassle our customers deal with and how could we profit by eliminating that hassle for them?" Another great example question would be, "Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities or in unusual ways, and how could we take advantage of that and sell it to other customers on that same basis?"

Brian: So you're more specific, rather than being so general?

Shawn: Exactly! To give you an example of a, "What's the biggest hassle?" question paying off for people, the United States Post Office, or the postal service I should say, used this technique a few years ago and when they asked themselves that very question, "What's the biggest hassle that our customers put up with?" they discovered that people hated always worrying about whether the first class stamps that they had bought last week or last month were no longer good, or had the postal rates gone up in the meantime. So they were either worrying about whether the letter would go through or get returned to them, or they were constantly having to make trips to the post office to buy those little one and two cent stamps to top it off. That led them to create what we now know as "The Forever Stamp", which means that when you go buy the stamp it's good for first class mail forever, no matter when you eventually use it.

Brian: Yes, and we all love that Forever Stamp, too.

Shawn: Yeah, and they've sold billions of dollars worth of that stamp since then, too.

Brian: Well, then we get to all of these ideas being generated, or however many are generated, but then you have to decide which ones are worth their weight in gold. How do you judge when you should pursue an idea and when you should just let it be?

Shawn: That's a great question. Another one of the common things that goes on in brainstorming is that people say, "Just go for quantity. Kick out lots of ideas. There are no bad ideas." Well, the fact of the matter is that, of course, there are lots of bad ideas, [laughter] including any idea that doesn't acknowledge the legitimate constraints that you face. At your company there might be time constraints or money constraints or organizational assets or skills that just limit you in a certain way. Don't waste your time thinking of ideas if they aren't going to work for your company. Can you stretch your thinking a little bit? Of course you can, but you can't think with absolutely no constraints. So what you ideally do is focus your thinking with a great question, like the ones we mentioned, and then once you've got several ideas the way to sort out the bad ones from the good ones and then refine the good ones into great ones is to ask yourself a few more questions, things like, "Is it demonstratively different from the current ideas that are out there? Is it valuable in a way that I can clearly articulate and, preferably, measure, and then is there a very sizeable subsection of the population who should immediately find it irresistible?"

Brian: Wow, that's brilliant! Would you break up the book for us and take us through it, tell us what's in there and how it would be helpful?

Shawn: Sure, the book is broken into four parts. After the introduction, which kind of lays out the case for why people should even be interested in brain-steering, why people need better ideas. The first part of the book teaches them this principle of asking the right questions because we believe that if you ask the right questions good ideas will follow. The second part of the book then helps people learn a little more deeply how to take their personal ideation skills to the max. It shows them how to get beyond hit-and-miss approaches to more systematic approaches. It tells them how to use analysis the right way and not the wrong way in helping to spur their ideation. Then, in the third part we teach people how to lead other people to create great ideas. There's a great chapter in there that a lot of people have told us they appreciate; chapter 7 is called From a Bad Brainstorming Session to a great Brain-Steering Workshop. So if you're ever put in the unfortunate position at work of suddenly having to lead a group brainstorming session, that chapter will help you avoid all the pitfalls of traditional brainstorming sessions and teach you how to do it the brain-steering way. The final section we call The Grand Finale and it's for budding entrepreneurs out there. It's about how to develop your own billion dollar idea. Then the last part is an appendix that actually has 101 examples of those right questions that we were talking about, to help people really spur breakthrough ideas

Brian: When you said, "The one chapter that everybody loves," I thought you were going to talk about the gift thing, but we'll just leave that as a gem for somebody that picks it up, but selfishly I saw that and I went, "Oh!"

Shawn: Yeah, we'll let that one be a nice surprise for people. How to find the perfect gift for your spouse, and even though you've already bought them 50 over the years, this book will solve that problem for you.

Brian: That's great! Shawn Coyne has been my guest. The book is Brain-Steering. Shawn, thanks for joining me and sharing some of your insights.

Shawn: Thanks a lot, Brian, I appreciate it. If folks want to learn more about the book they can just go to www.brainsteering.com

Brian: For more business author interviews visit Daxle.net.