Team Brainstorming and Innovation in 2010
14 January 2010 Tweet In Short Stories From The Front people mentioned that brainstorming within a virtual team was difficult to impossible; for example, “Especially brainstorming in a virtual team is almost impossible.”; and, “The virtual world will never deliver the value of the hallway conversation.”
Why is it so difficult? We aren’t living in the stone ages!
In the stone ages we could run down the hall to our local “guru’s” office and solve a problem. A few hours later we would emerge feeling happy that the solution was the best, of course, until another person or group took a look and all the sudden the “best” solution didn’t look so good anymore...
If we are only using stone age tools, email and phone calls, or relying on the input of one or two individuals, then brainstorming and idea generation is going to be difficult. Email and phone calls are constrained by the fact that they limit the number of participants involved. Email has a To: field and an inbox to contend with and phone calls are limited by the requirement that all participants need to set aside a specific time for the discussion.
Sharing ideas, brainstorming, problem solving and innovating across multiple disciplines are essential for success in today’s idea driven economy. Projects move at light speed, complexity increases and there are multiple "guru’s" to consult. This current state was summarized in: Collaboration between Business and IT Leads to Innovation:
- The software world is faster today; Teams must deliver functionality faster in order to stay competitive.
- Requirements are more complex covering concerns like security, business continuity, internationalization and many others. And applications typically have more complex integration needs.
- Build vs. Buy are the extremes - the more likely scenario is that a solution requires assembling a number of parts; build, partner, third party api's, open source, etc.
- Innovative solutions can come from different parts of the organization and leverage examples from other industries.
- Given the scope/on-time/on-budget dependencies, many applications (and I would argue all customer facing applications) should optimize time and budget over scope. Scope can better be addressed by a series of follow on enhancements based on customer analytics and feedback.
Today, we have the capability of creating and defining people networks for a specific purpose. One of the features that Google Wave, Facebook, Twitter, and Wiki’s all share is the ability to capture the stream of consciousness from the network participants. The capability of defining the network and capturing thoughts with respect to a specific issue or problem replicates in a much more powerful way the hallway conversation. A few advantages of this form of collaboration are:
- Is not constrained by time or number of participants – people can contribute whenever they have a thought or insight;
- Enables people from across the organization to participate;
- Allows all participants to have an equal say in the alternatives and discussion;
- Enhances organizational learning;
- Can be customized for the specific issue or problem;
- Allows continuous project monitoring so risks can be quickly identified before the next weekly team meeting;
- Creates an archive of thoughts and ideas to facilitate ongoing innovation.
Application of the 4P’s of collaboration needs to take into consideration that problem solving and innovation are essential to the successful functioning of any business. However, the form of that collaboration needs to be defined. Does this primarily require one-on-one discussions, small team discussion, a larger multi-disciplined team, or does it require that the customer be brought into the discussion within a social participation framework? The key is that this requires a definition of the “network” of participants based on the Purpose, People, Processes and Place of the collaboration. Depending on the results of the 4P analysis a collaboration strategy can be developed, and as mentioned previously on this site, the tools would be evident from this analysis.
There is no reason why people should feel that they can’t “brainstorm” if there is a formalized approach to defining and creating an effective collaborative environment.
Al Schmidt is a customer experience consultant with over 25 years of experience with a broad range of products, technologies and industries. He is focused on understanding how people use and incorporate technology into their day-to-day activities so that the overall experience, utility, and ease of use are optimized. Follow Al on Twitter.
Lokesh Datta
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