Brainstorm "inside the box" at "World Cafe"

Have you ever been exhausted from a brainstorming session? What's even worse, those "exciting" ideas are not helpful to you at all, because you're lack of resources or budget.

People usually encourage to think "outside the box" and expect to have great ideas if they are lucky. It might work sometimes, however if it's applied in a team discussion, usually it cannot lead the team to a solid conclusion or a feasible solution. In a HBR (Harvard Business Review) article - "Breakthrough thinking from inside the box" by Kevin Coyne (http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp;jsessionid=5DJ0JBUEO3W0AAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0712E&ml_page=1&ml_subscriber=true), it highlights why brainstorming doesn't work, and suggest the process to be effective and fruitful. Bottom line is to set the "boundary" of the brainstorm session beforehand, such as how long to see the impact, how much the budget, and what resources we have.

Talking about process, it reminds me a book read recently, called "The World Cafe" by Juanita Brown, which is highly recommended by Dr. Peter Senge, author of "Fifth Discipline", as a very good practice for learning organization. Both articles elaborate in very detail on the process to help meeting host to have better brainstorm session. Nevertheless, I think the most critical part is not the process, but "asking the right question".

Take an example from "inside the box". If you set your topic as "How to decrease the cost?", then it might lead the team nowhere with too many possibilities. However, if you prepare your homework and change the question to "What services can be eliminated to cost down 50%?", focus and specific, then you can expect to have most creative conclusion from the meeting that can be put in actions immediately. In "World Cafe", it suggests to have pre-meeting with several key persons to come out "right questions" for the meeting, that I think we should pay more attention to, instead of process itself. Interesting enough that I found out most of examples in "Inside the box" article serve "good to great" purpose by using negative questions such as "What prevents certain group from using our products?", so to improve the process to attract that neglect part of customer set.

Team member selection is another important step for preparation. You will need members with different talents/responsibilities who can initiate new ideas or had experience to share. One successful Sales experience helps a baby food company find a big potential elder market. I also had hosted a meeting with Sales sharing their successful selling of a new technology, then found a potential mid-market segment suitable for this technology, so successfully grew that business 110% in one year.

Both articles will be very helpful and can stimulate more new ideas. Enjoy your reading and kindly share with me your thoughts.