Brainsteering

The Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas

Kevin P. Coyne, Shawn T. Coyne

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062042255
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

“[The Coynes’] logical thinking exercises will help readers to maximize their ideation skills, both by systematically exploring every possible nook and cranny of an issue to find new ideas, and by systematically evaluating and honing the results.” —Publishers Weekly

From business strategists (and brothers) Shawn and Kevin Coyne comes a breakthrough problem-solving framework for developing better ideas.  Brainsteering is a comprehensive, research-based, tried-and-tested approach to the principal challenge in business and life: how to consistently and effectively create powerful new ideas. As a powerful brainstorming alternative, Brainsteering offers a way out of fruitless sessions. In the tradition of the Heath Brothers’ Made to Stick and Gordon Mackenzie’s Orbiting Giant Hairball, the Coynes deliver the surest path to success for anyone looking to unlock the secrets of innovation.

This practical guide to innovation offers a new framework for creative thinking:

• A Proven Method for Breakthrough Ideas: Learn to ask the right questions and steer your creative energy in a more productive direction, moving beyond the limits of traditional brainstorming.
• The 'Right Questions' Framework: Discover a comprehensive, research-based process to systematically explore any issue and generate powerful, actionable solutions.
• Tools for Business Strategy: Apply tried-and-tested techniques used in over 200 McKinsey client projects to tackle challenges in product development, cost reduction, and business growth.
• Enhanced Creativity and Innovation: Maximize your personal ideation skills and lead your team out of fruitless meetings toward consistent, effective, and innovative results.

PART I

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS (AND GOOD IDEAS WILL FOLLOW)

Chapter 1
The Proven Power of Questions to Help You Find Ideas

Asking the Right Questions made a huge difference for Don Frantz. And for the founders of Compaq and all the Z–1–4 companies. And for all those other people we cited. But how can you be sure that a question-based approach will make such a difference for you?

Indulge us, if you will, in a two-part experiment. It will take less than half an hour.

First, take a quick look at your watch and block off fifteen minutes. Then put down this book and think up a great idea for any new business you’d like. The only constraints are that it doesn’t already exist today, you haven’t thought of anything like it before, and it doesn’t depend on inventing any new technology (yes, teleportation travel could be quite lucrative, but for now we’ll consider it off limits). Don’t pick up this book again until the end of that time.

Ready? Go.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

No, really! Go for it! Be creative! Think outside the box! What are you waiting for?

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

Okay! How did it go? Got a great idea?

If you’re like most people, your answer is “No. And in fact, I really waited only five minutes because I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

Don’t worry—even the most creative people have trouble with a completely open and unstructured directive like the one we gave you. Their minds race rapidly among various possibilities, failing to find anything they can focus their thoughts on. Before long, doubts start creeping into their minds: “Which lines of thought should I explore? Should I continue along my current line of thought or change direction altogether? How do I decide what’s a good idea and what’s not? How do I even decide how I’ll decide? Augghhh!” Soon they start thinking about completely unrelated problems, like what time Jenny’s soccer practice ends, or what to have for dinner, or which chipper young singer they’re going to pull for tonight on American Idol. Before long, they’ve progressed from confusion to distraction to lethargy—and they shut down all together.

As you’ve probably just experienced, a completely unstructured and unconstrained approach to the task of idea generation rarely produces much. So before we ask you to take on the second part of our experiment, let’s focus your mind with a question: “What do Rollerblades, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and the Batman movies have in common?” We’ll even give you a hint: all three are variations of the same business idea. What’s that idea?

“They’re all fun,” you say. True, but awfully broad. We can’t just ask you to develop a new business idea that’s “fun” and expect you to produce a much better result than you did a few minutes ago.

“They’re all things that I loved as a kid.” True, sort of, but are they really just the same as when you were a kid? What you did was most likely old-fashioned roller skating, not newfangled Rollerblading. You ate ice cream, but was it really as rich and sweet as Häagen-Dazs? And the Batman comics you read probably weren’t quite as elaborate as the megaexplosions and mind-blowing chase scenes in The Dark Knight.

But you’re getting close. In fact, building off that last observation, here’s the complete answer: all three are variations of a single business concept derived from the following Right Question: “How might we take something that was emotionally powerful for people as children, then reproduce it in a more exotic—and expensive—form for adults?” Great business concept, eh? Too bad it’s now been done three times, so there are no more opportunities left to take advantage of.

Or are there? Of course there are! In fact, this same concept lies behind dozens of successful products and businesses. What about $2 gourmet cookies? Or designer jelly beans that sell for $5 a pound? Ever seen those exotic $100 kites? Or $200 sneakers? Ever heard of baseball fantasy camps (or for the musically inclined, rock ’n’ roll fantasy camps)? Isn’t paintball just a more exotic and expensive grown-up version of playing soldiers? Ever been to a fancy corporate event where a company came in and built one of those ten-foot-tall $25,000 sand castles? What about Disney collectibles? Toy museums? Dude ranches? Any number of “adventure” vacations? Or our personal favorite, space tourism? That’s right: a wealthy American businessman named Dennis Tito had the pleasure of becoming the world’s first space tourist when he paid the Russian government $20 million for the privilege of spending eight days aboard the International Space Station in 2001.¹

Want more ideas that could have sprung from that same well? Asking the “emotionally powerful as a child/expensive form for adults” question while sitting at Chuck E. Cheese (a pizza restaurant with a large arcade for kids) could logically have led to Dave and Buster’s (a casual dining restaurant with a large arcade for adults). The popularity of Saturday morning cartoons directed at kids later gave rise to a host of evening cartoons directed at adults, from The Simpsons to King of the Hill to Family Guy to a whole host of “Adult Swim” shows. Other kid-targeted forms of entertainment like circuses and Sesame Street paved the way for adult-targeted versions like Cirque du Soleil and the Broadway musical Avenue Q.

All right, now let’s do the second part of that half-hour experiment. Your task once again is to invent a new business (one that, again, does not require any new technological inventions), but this time, it must be one that takes something that was emotionally powerful to you as a child, then reproduces it in a more exotic—and expensive—form for adults.

Ready? Go.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

How did you do this time? Better? If so, you’re not alone. We’ve put literally thousands of people through this exercise, and the overwhelming majority of people have succeeded in creating a business concept. They’ve invented businesses like “fashion camps” in New York; playing cavalry commander with real army surplus tanks; cotton candy or ice cream in grown-up (read: cocktail-inspired) flavors; services that help you play hooky from work in any number of ways; and dozens of others.

When we conduct this exercise in large groups, we often split up the attendees into teams of three to five people (more later on why we specify groups of that size), then run a contest to see which team has developed the “best idea.” Teams who wish to participate in the contest bid against each other (using money from their own wallets) for the right to be one of four teams who will be given the opportunity to present their idea to the whole gathering. The top-bidding teams put their money into a pot, and in return they’re given one minute to make their pitch. All the attendees then vote to determine the “best idea,” and the winning team claims the entire jackpot. And what usually happens? First, the majority of teams like their idea enough that they enter the bidding. Second, many teams like their idea so much that they bid up to $100 just for the right to present. And third, we occasionally have teams who refuse to reveal their idea at all, because they intend to actually pursue it.

Why did you likely succeed in the second round of this experiment, when you might have failed—or bailed—in the first? Because we helped you steer your creativity in a productive direction. The Right Question provided you with just enough of a constraint to help you focus, or “anchor,” your thinking. Instead of bouncing around randomly, you were enabled—in fact, forced—to more fully explore a carefully defined subset of the possible universe. And because you stuck with that single Right Question for several minutes, you were able to take your initial ideas, which were probably only so-so, and keep massaging them until one or more of them evolved into a good one, or even a great one. “That idea won’t work,” you probably thought, “but maybe this one would.” Or “That idea wouldn’t work under those circumstances, but it would work under these other circumstances.”

All thanks to the Right Question.

Ironic, isn’t it? One of the classic “creativity” mantras we’ve all heard repeatedly over the years—“Free yourself completely and think outside the box!”—turns out to be precisely the wrong advice. People actually tend to perform worse, not better, when they’re given no constraints at all (as in, “Think up a great idea for any new business you’d like”). As it turns out, you’re more likely to succeed by thinking inside a box—the key is to find just the right box in which to think.

Need a second demonstration to really convince you? Maybe you’d like to see how a single Right Question can lead to an idea for a “serious” new business—none of that grown-up kid stuff. Maybe you’d like to see an idea for a business that should exist but doesn’t.

In the earliest days of developing the Brainsteering approach, we were charged with finding an important innovation for one of the world’s largest gasoline retailers, a company that owns thousands of gas stations and convenience stores across the United States and around the world. Frankly, the gasoline retailing business is a difficult one: profit margins are slim, competition is fierce, and it’s gotten even worse in recent years as large grocery chains and warehouse stores have entered the market with cut-throat pricing. (Twenty years ago, gasoline stations added convenience stores and siphoned off the high-margin snack business from grocery stores. Now, in what must be some form of karmic payback, grocery stores have learned to price gasoline low in order to steal back customers from the convenience stores.)

We asked ourselves questions—lots of questions. The breakthrough came when we asked, “What is the single biggest hassle that a customer puts up with in purchasing gasoline?” We started out thinking incrementally—things like getting their hands dirty, getting out of the car on a cold or rainy day, and so on. Then we thought more broadly: actually, the biggest hassle is having to go get gasoline at all.

At first, this insight led to an unhelpful detour (one that we’ll teach you to avoid later), as we discussed ideas like electric cars and hydrogen-based cars. But soon we realized that those inventions wouldn’t really eliminate the hassle factor; they would only change its form. For example, instead of driving to a gas station and hooking a gas pump to your car, you’d have to drive to a hydrogen station and hook a hydrogen pump to your car.

Then it hit us: The biggest addressable hassle was having to go to a gas station to purchase gasoline. After all, the average car sits around doing nothing about 95 percent of the time. (Driving a typical 15,000 miles a year at an average speed of 35 miles per hour takes 429 hours, or about 5 percent of the total hours in a year.) How could that idle time be used to fill up the car with gas?

The answer came instantly: Bring the gas to the car. Imagine a fleet of cheerfully logo’d, friendly looking pickup-truck-sized vehicles—miniature gasoline tankers resembling those familiar TruGreen ChemLawn trucks that cruise through suburban neighborhoods each day to spray fertilizer on the lawns of McMansions. Now imagine each minitanker being driven by a courteous uniformed attendant who could service your car right where it’s parked.

Of course this idea, like most ideas, wouldn’t work everywhere. One problem for the vendor would be overcoming the inherent inefficiency of driving around searching for cars needing to be filled. Another would be the difficulty of handling cash or one-off credit card transactions. And, importantly, would anyone really want to sit around in his car waiting for the truck to come by? That would defeat the entire purpose of the service.

Yes, there are problems, but the idea just feels like something consumers could get excited about, doesn’t it? Something that could be made feasible under certain conditions? So your restless mind automatically begins generating the next round of relevant questions. For example: “Where and when are there consistently going to be many cars parked right next to each other for long periods of time? So many cars that, even if only one in ten or one in twenty needs gas that day, the next customer’s car is easy for my truck driver to find and only a very short distance from the car he just filled?”

We know your mind is already racing ahead with potential solutions to the questions above, and probably with further helpful questions as w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Brainsteering?
• PART I: ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS (AND GOOD IDEAS WILL FOLLOW)
• PART II: TAKE YOUR PERSONAL IDEATION SKILLS TO THE MAX
• PART III: LEAD OTHERS TO GREAT IDEAS
• PART IV: THE GRAND FINALE
• Appendix: 101 Right Questions to Spur Breakthrough Ideas
• A Note on Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher