brainstorming – Justkul

Steve Jobs and Market Research in Contexts of Uncertainty

Posted on January 11, 2014January 14, 2025 by John Hannon

According to some, market research is pretty useless in contexts of uncertainty. These contexts include disrupted markets, the introduction of radical new innovations, or the launch of new products and services. Steve Jobs explained this view in an interview:
“The problem is that market research can tell you what your customers think of something you show them, or it can tell you what your customers want as an incremental improvement on what you have, but very rarely can your customers predict something that they don’t even quite know they want yet. As an example, no market research could have led to the development of the Macintosh or the personal computer in the first place. So there are these sorts of non-incremental jumps that need to take place where it is very difficult for market research to really contribute much in the early phases of the thinking about, you know, what those should be. However, once you have made that jump, possibly before the product is on the market or even after, it’s a great time to go check your instincts with the marketplace and verify that you’re on the right track.” (PBS/Nova Interview,1990)
Steve Jobs could recognize the usefulness of market research, but he suggests it is not useful when the market is going through these non-incremental jumps. A similar mindset is found in an even stronger form in certain parts of the present-day startup community: it is often thought that it’s better to just bring a product to market and see what happens, rather than rely on misleading market research that is incapable of envisioning the future.

There is no doubt that many companies succeed by adopting approaches that do not involve much market research. However, this in itself is not a sound proof for ruling out the usefulness of market research, because we have no idea how many failed startups would have succeeded if they had paid more attention to the findings of market research. Instead of being based on a sound empirical argument, the plausibility of this argument seems to rest, in part, on a number of assumptions about what market research is, and how it works.
Standard Market Research and the Principle of Continuity
When Steve Jobs spoke about market research, he was likely speaking about a particular kind of research. These are the surveys asking you to rate services on a scale of 1 to 10, asking you whether you prefer red cars or blue cars, or giving you complicated conjoint trees to determine if it is more important for you to get more product or lower prices. All of these studies depend implicitly on a principle of continuity: that your present opinions can be used to reliably predict your future actions.
As Jobs appears to recognize, this principle can break down in disrupted markets. If we look at this principle in more detail, it typically implies at least four sub-principles, all of which can fail when one is conducting research:
1.   The overall market will be the same in the future as it is now. This principle is reasonable in many situations, but Jobs proved it false when his teams introduced the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, each of which changed the markets in fundamental ways. Furthermore, it fails all the time in ordinary business practice: financial bubbles burst, companies that are on the top of the world go bankrupt a few years later, entire industries disappear.
2.   A respondent’s beliefs will be the same in the future. Closely aligned with the preceding principle, a respondent’s views can change even if the other components of the market do not. Someone might be against sharing credit card numbers or personal information online when they take a survey, but come to accept the practice a few months later.
3.   Respondents are accurately conveying their present beliefs when they take a survey. It’s common knowledge that people sometimes lie on surveys, or under-report activities they are ashamed of. However, even when people are trying to accurately convey their present beliefs, they may fail to do so. In particular, we tend to think of our personalities as uniform over time and place, but many of us adopt very different personas when we spend time with our family, or with our friends, or with our colleagues, or when we are on our own. A view we reveal on a survey may not reflect the view we act on later while partying with friends.
4.   What someone says accurately reflects what they will do. This belief is questioned frequently today as big data enables us to actually track the difference between saying and doing. In certain cases, it may turn out that basing predictions on past actions rather than opinions produces more accurate results.
In markets that remain constant over a long period of time, it may be unnecessary to question any of these principles. For instance, a mere correlation between what people say and an increase in sales might be all that is needed for an incremental gain, and no one may care to think any more deeply about why it’s the case.
Market Research in Uncertain Times
However, as soon as contexts arise when the principle of continuity does not hold, companies and whole markets can be led badly astray if they merely follow past correlations. In these situations, as Jobs notes, respondents may very well not know what they will want.
Yet, even in the most disrupted markets, where there are many discontinuities at the surface, there may be underlying factors that do not change, and therefore at deeper levels the principle of continuity can still hold, and research still has something to say.
In these cases, instead of mechanically asking respondents, “How likely is it that you would buy this new product?,” one should begin by thinking hard about the context of purchasing and using the product and ask, “What things have to be true if people are going to buy this product?” Moving from the general question to a hypothesis about its components in this way does at least four things:

First, it forces us to articulate and address the most important assumptions we are making. Often, we are implicitly assuming things that will prove to be false. Identifying the assumptions before conducting research allows us to explicitly test them.
Second, once we have identified a broader range of assumptions, we may be led to reconceive the range of possibilities we need to take into account in our questions and in the subsequent analysis. For instance, we may determine that a particular assumption does not hold in general and thereby identify new segments. These different segments may have different needs and decision-criteria.
Third, it can lead us to identify important outliers that do not necessarily conform to our expectations. If we think that a factor is essential, and it turns out to be false for a small number of respondents, this may be a cue to talk further with those individuals. Perhaps they are anticipating the next big trend in the market.
Fourth, it makes us think more deeply about the enterprise we are undertaking. Part of this comes from the fact that good research leads us to ask “Why?” questions that we may not have even thought about before.

Analyzing decisions into components makes it possible to find continuities in conditions of uncertainty. Moreover, when we have the whole framework of assumptions and possibilities available, it then becomes possible to track underlying factors that do change through proxies and analogical trend analyses.

Implementing this approach well requires a different mindset and a broader range of skills than most standard market research companies offer. Identifying assumptions requires being able to break things down into their components like an engineer or analytical philosopher. Exploring possibilities and outliers requires a certain openness to possibility characteristic of design-thinking approaches. Thinking more deeply may require additional skills such as big-data analysis, statistics, expert interviews, or ethnographic studies. Yet, all of these approaches can be incorporated into a research strategy.
Many skills may be required, but great consultants and entrepreneurs often bring together many of these research skills. I’m thinking of when Orit Gadiesh talked to customers and metallurgists when she introduced a Bain client to continuous casting techniques in steel manufacturing. Or, when survey data led Howard Moskowitz to discover that there was no perfect recipe for Prego tomato sauce. Steve Jobs, especially, shows the passion of a good researcher. This is quite apparent in his interviews in which he enthusiastically discusses quantifying data, visiting 80 automated manufacturers in Japan to understand automation, or revising products after observing people using them. People can bring about the future through research, albeit of a non-standard type.
This much may be obvious. However, what might not be obvious is that even the most humble research tools can benefit from this approach. An online survey constructed to test hypotheses about decision factors can tell you not only why your customers make the decisions they do, but also can help you make better predictions in uncertain contexts.
Follow Jobs’ Advice: Ask the Right Questions
In another interview five years later, Steve Jobs was asked about his transition from being a hobbyist to being the executive of a multimillion dollar company. “How do you learn to run a company?,” he was asked. He observed, “You know, throughout the years in business I found something, which is, I always asked why you do things. And the answer you invariably get is that it’s just the way it’s done. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business, that’s what I found.” (Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview, 1995)
It turns out Steve Jobs didn’t like market research when introducing non-incremental changes, because he was a great researcher himself. According to his own account, the secret to his success in business was asking the right questions and not settling for status quo responses. Unless you have the luxury of being in an industry without innovation or disruption, you and your research company shouldn’t settle for the status quo either.
By @jfhannon, CEO at Justkul Inc., a research firm focused on the needs of strategy and private equity.

Failing for Success: The Importance of Low-Fidelity Prototypes

Posted on March 4, 2013November 30, 2015 by John Hannon

Many of the strategic issues we’ve been thinking about at Justkul Inc. revolve around the intersection between design-thinking and corporate strategy. Although we believe both can be compatible, they are often in tension with one another. One of our hopes is to bring both fields closer together.

One concept about which many design thinkers are seemingly at odds with corporate strategists has to do with failure. Business strategy often ruthlessly avoids failure. Yet, in many cases, “failure” can be good and should be strategically incorporated into business processes. I say “strategically,” because not all failures are the same, and recognizing this point can have a profound impact on innovation.

To understand the importance of this point, it is worth keeping in mind how large corporations succeed. Corporations do this primarily by developing reliable processes that can be replicated through time while avoiding failure. Some industries, such as the automotive industry and manufacturing aim at six sigma accuracy, which is typically defined as less than 3.4 mistakes per million products. When you consider that individual products can have hundreds if not billions of components (think computer chips), to even come close to achieving this level of accuracy is an amazing accomplishment, and requires not only technological innovation, but also corporate cultures that are committed to the goal of avoiding failure.

Yet, even though many mature companies aim for that level of accuracy in some processes, it can be detrimental to other processes. For instance, any firm that is developing a new innovative product should generally not aim for perfection in the beginning of the product’s development, but should rather aim for rough prototypes that test the fundamental ideas first. This is because the process of developing a revolutionary new product often requires a great deal of failure. At an opposite extreme to six sigma accuracy consider the famous 5,127 prototypes that James Dyson made before he finally hit upon his famous vacuum. If you want to look at this design process using the same scale as a six sigma process, instead of 3.4 failures per million, that would be a failure rate of about 999,800 per million, or 294,000 times an acceptable six sigma rate! No large corporation would survive if it had that kind of failure rate in one of its key replicable processes.

However, Dyson’s “failures” were of a very different sort than the failures that prevent a company from achieving six sigma accuracy. They may have been failures so far as they failed to manifest the final successful product, but successes so far as they were important steps along the way. Thomas Edison encapsulated this thought well: “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Dyson and Edison’s “failures” reflect the very nature of the process of innovation.

Most companies have come to recognize this truth in some form, and the phrase, “fail early, fail fast, and fail often,” has become a mantra for R&D. Consequently, management is usually willing to tolerate a certain degree of “failure” from their R&D departments, and to understand that the same metrics cannot be applied there as in other parts of the corporation. However, being tolerant of failure often doesn’t go far enough. There are circumstances in which failing to produce a perfect, compelling product should not only be tolerated, but encouraged.

Aiming for Imperfection

Imperfection should not only be tolerated, but encouraged in the early stages of product development. In these circumstances, striving to produce too perfect a prototype can lead to significant failures later on.

To see this, note that any prototype of a product will succeed in some ways and fail in others. In one extreme let’s imagine the 5,126th prototype of Dyson’s vacuum cleaner. I have no idea what the product looked like, but given the late stage in the development, I imagine that it was very close to the final product. It had high fidelity in relation to the final product. When Dyson was evaluating such a product, most of the details were likely working satisfactorily, but there may have been one or two things that were off: perhaps the color or the texture of a surface material, perhaps there was a defect in the motor that needed to be fixed. But I hazard to guess that at this stage of development 99% of the product was in its final form and functioning correctly.

Again, I have no idea precisely what Dyson prototype #1 looked like, but given the nature of innovation, I would be inclined to imagine it was very different from the final product. It had low fidelity in relation to the final product. It probably did not match the final product in shape, color, size or even function. It might have even been made out of cardboard or drawn on paper.

The level of fidelity of a prototype is important because it is directly related to the type of feedback one will receive. If a potential purchaser of a Dyson vacuum cleaner were shown prototype 5,126, that person might decide to buy it on the basis of its color, regardless of what functional innovations it incorporated. The product just looked nice. In contrast, a viewer of prototype #1, whatever that looked like, would probably not be distracted by the color. In fact, it would be pointless to ask about color at that stage, because color preferences will likely change as other important factors changed.

If the goal is to receive feedback on fundamental concepts, then there is no need to produce a finished model. In fact, the finished model with all its polish and beauty can be a distraction from the intended evaluation. Hence, for a very interesting reason, one should not aim to produce perfect and beautiful prototypes early on in a design process: they can be distractions from the basic innovations that one wants to evaluate.

Not just a Concept for R & D

The same principle holds in areas far removed from product development, and this concept can be carried over into all aspects of business and life. For instance, the broad outlines of a new business strategy might be evaluated incorrectly if it is initially packaged too well. A hiring process might not be optimized if a job candidate is expected to perform too well on an initial interview. An initial brainstorming session is often less productive if there is an expectation for too refined a result. And as I will explain in a future post, one will learn things more slowly if one doesn’t provide adequate space for failure.

Everyone wants to have their ideas succeed. Corporate culture only reinforces this inclination whether you are in a six sigma operation or a less than one sigma one. The fact that beautiful prototypes can succeed more often than ugly ones, that quantitatively validated ideas can succeed more than those that are more nebulous, encourages us to adopt certain strategies. But when it comes to early stages of a product’s or an idea’s development, this in itself can be a mistake. Fail early not only because it is better to get such failures out of the way in the beginning, but also because it may be the only way to ensure products will succeed in the end.

By @jfhannon, CEO at Justkul Inc., a research firm focused on the needs of strategy and private equity. This post and the concept of fidelity were inspired by an excellent talk I attended by Anijo Matthew (@anijomathew) on 2/13/2013.

7 Ways to Turn Failures into Successes

Posted on May 22, 2011November 30, 2015 by John Hannon

If someone is really trying to be innovative, almost by definition that person will fail from time to time. This is because innovations that have never been tried before are often risky undertakings, and failure is far more likely than success. James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes before he came up with his famous vacuum cleaner. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” To persevere is certainly a virtue, and many examples show that such persistence can ultimately pay off. But this kind of persistence is a virtue in an individual, not necessarily in an organization or company. A company that constantly follows failing strategies will be out of business rather quickly.

Because of this, businesses are very concerned with failure, and the punishment can often be severe: loss of jobs, financial penalties and so on. Although sometimes it is necessary to take such severe measures, there is a trade-off in terms of loss of communication, and such decisions can also limit the possibility for individual or organizational improvement. There are more constructive ways to respond to failure. Here are seven ways for a company to respond.

Use mistakes to pinpoint areas of improvement. In a recent interview Milton Glaser made the observation that failures are sometimes better than successes: successes merely reaffirm your previously held views and reinforce the status quo; only failure provides genuine opportunities for improvement. But to actually produce this improvement takes more than simply admonishing an employee with a cliche like, “Don’t do it again.” Successful people and businesses know how to focus in on the specific factors that led to a failure. A pianist who simply continues to play a piece from the beginning, is unlikely to perform the piece as well as someone who spends extra time mastering the difficult passages. Similarly, a company that doesn’t provide appropriate focus on the specific cause of a failure will not improve as quickly as one that does. Hence, you should offer people who have failed new ways to meet the challenge in the future. For instance, if a client presentation doesn’t go well, offer to excuse the employee from other tasks in order that she or he can obtain sufficient training to do better next time. For a company, this is a prudent investment in the future.
Use mistakes to understand the limits of current possibilities. Another way to learn from mistakes is to use them as opportunities for understanding the limits of a domain. I have a mathematician friend who spent more than a year with colleagues throughout the world working on a proof that ultimately didn’t work. However, the funding for the project required a specific output, and so he did what scientists often do, and turned the study into a disproof of the original methodology. Far from being a cop-out, such a move represents a genuine advance in knowledge. This lesson can be applied to companies too. For instance, if there is a client product that cannot effectively compete against the competition based on feature or price, then that might be the signal that the company should leave that market, and head in a different direction that better suits its strengths. This is a loss, but because it allows you to redirect your resources, the project also represents a positive gain for future strategies.
Steal from your mistakes. Google is a company that has managed to respond well to failures. For instance, consider the recent failure of Google’s Wave service, a service Google pulled the plug on in August 2010. The service developed a fresh new approach to online messaging, but for various reasons it never caught on. However, despite the fact the service had to be closed, many features of that service are now entering the market as enhancements to other services that Google offers, and vestiges of Google Wave can be seen in Google Docs. This is one of the ways you can respond to failure in a creative way. If the overall system doesn’t work, then analyze it down into its components and see if there are ways to construct new services from the pieces. This requires investing time in understanding a failure, and in seeing how to reintegrate the results into the overall strategy of a firm.
Keep a record of mistakes. This is closely connected to the previous observation. It may be the case that there are no obvious ways to steal from a mistake at the moment, or that the reasons for the failure are currently too opaque. However, it may turn out that six months or a year down the road a new opportunity will arise in which the learnings can be applied to significant advantage. In order to take advantage of these situations, many details of the previous failure may need to be recorded and reviewed. If blame is attached to specific individuals they may be less forthcoming about the real reasons for the failure. Hence, a database of previously attempted initiatives incorporating a certain degree of anonymity should be maintained. I’m actually surprised so many companies do not have specific people in charge of understanding failures and finding new creative applications for the results. Given that the development costs of these failed initiatives are already paid for, such failures can often provide the proverbial “low hanging fruit.”
Turn the failure into a challenge. If it is particularly important to overcome a failure, throw down the gauntlet and constructively challenge people to do better. There is an amusing story recounted on Michael Schrage’s HBR blog post of how Charles M. Schwab used a challenge to motivate workers. After learning that the day shift at a poor-performing mill produced only 6 heats, he proceeded to write a large “6.” on the floor. When the night shift came on, they saw the number and knew that they could do better, and worked extra hard to put a “7” on the floor. The process accelerated when the day crew arrived, and by the time the competition completed the mill was producing more than any other mill in the plant. Competition is an effective tool for improvement whether it be in business, evolution of species, or in breaking the four minute mile. For this process to work well in a business it is important that the emphasis be on the success rather than the failure: in a race in which only one person wins, there is little point in berating everyone who didn’t.
Outsource a part of a challenge. If a product or service is generally working, but there is one component that is consistently failing, you may want to consider outsourcing that component of the product to a company that has the knowledge or resources to make it work. Although these may not be prime examples of “failures” Netflix was able to retool their algorithms for movie suggestions by outsourcing it through a competition. P&G famously decided to increase efficiency and reduce cost by aiming to outsource up to 50% of its R&D work to third-party providers. When companies outsource capabilities to other firms they can focus their resources on those aspects of projects in which they can obtain the highest value.
Let an employee keep at it. There are a variety of ways of responding to failure, but one of the ones we value most in our society, whether it is in inventing or playing video games, is the value to keep at something. As the options above indicate, it is sometimes important to recognize when something will not work, but this doesn’t mean that one should always give up. For instance, if there is an employee who is particularly passionate about a cause, why not let him or her spent a few hours each week pursuing it long after the company goes in a different direction? The most you are losing are a couple of hours, but the added gain in letting the passionate employee own the task, and of keeping the project within the company’s fold may be significant if it does work out.

If you are striving to be innovative, it is important that you have a plan for dealing with inevitable failures. By concentrating creatively on what can be gained from a given case, one can turn current failures into future successes.

Do you have any interesting examples of failures that you turned into successes? Do you have ideas for other ways to make use of failures? Feel free to comment below.

By @jfhannon, CEO at Justkul Inc., a research firm focused on the needs of strategy and private equity.

Thoughts on Reading Sticky Wisdom

Posted on April 17, 2011November 30, 2015 by John Hannon

For Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15th-21st) I’ve decided to write something about a book that has recently had an impact on how I think about creativity. This is Sticky Wisdom: How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work. The book is relatively short, and can be finished in about a day. It has a number of interesting examples of creativity, and offers a framework for thinking about creativity and innovation.

The part of the book that I found most useful is the distinction between analytical and creative thinking and the importance of signaling when one is changing from the one to the other. I just defended a dissertation in analytical philosophy, so I am probably the poster-child for analytical thinking: whether it’s ancient mathematical proofs, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or applying skepticism to any proposition (“Do I exist?”—”Not entirely clear.”), I’ve done it. “Analysis” means breaking down a proposition into its component parts, and comes from the Greek word for loosening or untying a difficult problem. Analysis is not necessarily the opposite of creativity: it can take considerable freshness of thinking to be able to see the assumptions upon which an approach or statement is based. But there are contexts in which it can definitely be in tension with creativity.

This is often the case in a business context. Businesses are incredibly analysis-based. This is in part because of the complex types of problems that corporations face. A successful launch of a product in a new country depends on getting hundreds of details right, whether it’s understanding the customers, determining how to distribute the product, identifying costs, coming up with effective branding, and so on. If any one of these things goes wrong the launch could be a disaster. This is perhaps the reason why analysis is so central to MBA education, and why corporations and consulting firms can be obsessed with it in the interviewing process. But the analysis focus goes even deeper than this: most corporations are obsessed with risk management. There are people whose only jobs are to avoid risk, committees and boards are designed to distribute risk, jobs are reduced to such tiny pigeonholes that no one can cause too much damage, and at the top there is a CEO who’s job it is to never say anything that will risk the company’s reputation. Hence, when a new idea is proposed, the default setting for most people is, “What could go wrong with this? What are the risks if we do this?” Yet, although these are necessary questions to ask in some contexts, they can be inimical to truly creative and disruptive ideas that no one has thought of yet. This is because—by their very definition—such disruptive ideas are risky.

Hence, in Sticky Wisdom the authors argue that it is important to set aside space for another mindset. They call this “greenhousing,” and it can be roughly described as a context in which risky ideas are not only allowed to grow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This is particularly important in the early stages of an idea, before it has had a chance to be worked out in any detail. As Sticky Wisdom emphasizes, at these stages a simple, “Yes, but . . .” or “We’ve tried that before,” could be enough to kill a potentially exciting and innovative idea. What one really needs is a context in which even an initially ridiculous idea can be explored. As I have said in an earlier post, I sometimes have started a brainstorming session with the question, “What’s the most ridiculous way to solve this problem?,” and have been surprised at how much insight can be gained in approaching a problem in this way. But given the focus on analytical thought in a corporation or in academia, you have to often make a point to signal when you are looking for growth-support rather than criticism.

The advantages of having an organization occasionally adopt this mindset are manifold: new opportunities can be identified, and genuinely innovative approaches to problems can be found. One might even argue that it is not accidental that many of the most influential technologies and innovations arise outside of a corporate setting: whether it be Twitter, Facebook or Google, small entrepreneurial groups can be more willing to take risks because they have less to lose if the idea doesn’t work out, and are often more willing to be creative. When large corporations are not at least sometimes willing to take similar risks, they create risks of their own, including the risk of missing the next trend in innovation. And the funny thing is that large companies don’t necessarily have to miss that boat: if a corporation provides contexts in which employees are encouraged to think creatively, they too can have the insight to come up with similarly innovative solutions. But this takes more than a mission statement about the importance of innovation, but a genuinely new way of looking at the world. Sticky Wisdom offers insights on how to look at the world in this way.

I hope in honor of Creativity and Innovation Week and Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday companies, schools and organizations set aside some time to think about creativity. Having the staff reading Sticky Wisdom can be a good start.

By @jfhannon, CEO at Justkul Inc., a research firm focused on the needs of strategy and private equity.

9 Steps To A More Successful Brainstorming Meeting

Posted on September 10, 2010November 30, 2015 by John Hannon

In the course of my time teaching and managing people, I have become very interested in how to make conversations more conducive to creativity and innovation. Although there are no general ways to guarantee that a conversation or meeting will lead to new and creative results, I have identified at least nine steps that can turn an ordinary brainstorming meeting into an innovative and interesting one.

Develop a Non-Standard Context. All too often managers and other employees are accustomed to interacting in very specific and structured ways: some people are used to talking, others to listening, and everyone wants to be recognized for their particular areas of expertise. To truly encourage creativity it is often very useful to introduce a context in which people have very few expectations, such as having a session in an unusual space like a hallway or kitchen, or encouraging people to play devil’s advocate to their own ideas. One of my favorite ways to encourage creativity is to open up a meeting by presenting a problem and then asking, “What’s the craziest way anyone could solve this problem?”
Ensure Everyone is Beginning on the Same Page. Knowledge is power, and power can be used to quash discussion. It is important that everyone start from the most even playing field possible. If there are facts that a decision must be based on, it is useful to distribute those to all the participants ahead of time. Further, if a range of solutions is clearly “wrong,” that should be known ahead of time too. One can always choose to ignore some of these considerations within the meeting or discussion, but no one should feel that she or he is walking into a “mine field” in which some of their answers will be criticized for being wrong for reasons they could not possibly know ahead of time.
Remove Boundaries. In normal conversations, especially in a workplace, there are many conventions about how we interact with other people. People in authority generally demand some respect from those beneath them, new people in an organization who are unaccustomed to the conventions and expectations can often sound timid or out-of-touch, and experienced employees can be trapped by preconceptions about what their jobs are and what they are entitled to say. The first step in getting a group to truly foster creativity is to remove many of these boundaries. People in authority should let others take the lead; new employees should be encouraged to talk if only because their ideas have a better chance at being genuinely new, and more experienced employees should be challenged to think outside of their particular job functions or roles.
Provide Structure. Even if one removes ordinary boundaries in a discussion, it can be very useful to impose novel or extraordinary structures in a discussion. No one can produce productive solutions to specific problems in a vacuum, and forcing people to look at problems in new ways can lead to new approaches and fresh ideas. For instance, ask people to think about the problem as someone else in the room would, or to look to a parallel problem in a very different environment, or ask participants to change sides in the middle of an argument. Creative rules often create creative solutions.
Accommodate a Wide Variety of Styles of Thought. Some people need silence and preparation to develop genuine creative solutions, while other people need to hear lots of ideas and enjoy jumping into the discussion suddenly and unexpectedly. Some people demand logical precision in their thought, while other people like to think in metaphors. One of the main challenges in fostering creativity in a meeting is developing a way of interacting that allows each person to participate effectively. Often just recognizing the differences in the room can be a cathartic exercise.
Actively Listen. In my experience, this is the single most important rule in encouraging creativity in a discussion. No one learns anything new in a meeting if they do not spend time listening to other people, and yet very few people are careful listeners. Listening involves not only passively hearing what other people are saying, but more importantly, it involves finding ways to interpret those utterances constructively. For instance, when I ask people to come up with the craziest possible solution to a particular problem, I am often surprised at how even the craziest ideas have a great deal of structure to them, and can be quickly developed into a constructive solution, provided that one pay attention to those details.
Let Participants Own Their Ideas. The paradigms of creative individuals are artists at work in their studios, producing original books or paintings that express their particular viewpoints on the world. The connection between personal expression and creativity is strong. Hence, it is important to make people feel in control of their own ideas at a meeting, or when they seek to further develop or implement them. When a person feels responsible for his or her own idea’s success, that person is more likely to be emotionally engaged with that idea, and there will be an added incentive to bring the idea to completion.
Empower People to Develop their Ideas. Coming up with new ideas is just the first step when innovation is the goal. Providing the infrastructure for evaluating ideas, for developing them, and monitoring their progress is critical. People often fail to recognize just how much work and time it takes to bring an idea to fruition, but that is where the real work lies. Anyone can come up with a great idea; it takes true genius to bring it to fruition.
End with Clearly Defined Next Steps. This is basic good business practice, but it is particularly important when a creative discussion ends that there be clearly defined next steps. This is because the particular context that produced these ideas may be difficult to replicate, and when people take up non-standard roles in a discussion, it may take serious thought to redistribute the components of those ideas to the right people in the organization who have the expertise and abilities to bring them to completion. Everyone should leave the room knowing what steps are being taken, that the right people are taking them, and understand the criterion for the success or failure of those steps.

These are just some general ideas on how to structure a brainstorming discussion that is conducive to the creative and innovative development of new ideas. It is worth keeping in mind that this is only one of the contexts in which new ideas develop. In particular, in some stages of the development process a great deal of structure is needed, requiring managers to do what they should do best: distribute complicated tasks among the right people in the organization and at the right times to get them done. At other times, it may be more useful to have a passive way of gathering information, such as a designated bulletin board or wall. Nevertheless, if you find your company or organization is suffering from a lack of new ideas, occasionally implementing some of these steps in a meeting may help.

By @jfhannon, CEO at Justkul Inc., a research firm focused on the needs of strategy and private equity.