'10 Minute Tip' by Peter Wadsworth - Brainstorms That Don't Suck - 7am until 9:30am
Peter Wadsworth, founder of &us, is an innovation and organisational design and transformation specialist. Peter studied Design Thinking at the Hasso Platner Institute in Berlin. He spent just over seven years as a founding member of the Bosch Home Appliances Design Thinking transformation team. He also led the roll out and development of the Bosch connected home platform, Home Connect.
Recently Peter worked in cloud native transformation with Shell, Inditex (Zara) and ASML and agile/leadership development and teaming with Novartis, HP and GoFundMe.
Peter works really well with senior management in larger organisations. However he’s also had great success with smaller teams in smaller organisations.
About the conversation:
Tips for Brainstorms That Don’t Suck
Here’s how brainstorms usually work: you gather a bunch of (often expensive) people in a room, say something like “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” and demand creativity with no context.
In this short talk Peter Wadsworth will break the brainstorm meeting into its three critical component parts, two of which no one ever does. He’ll provide some tips for getting the most out of all three sections.
Point 1: Establish your Axioms.
Context and be clear about what this session will form the input for. Everyone likes to talk about meeting outputs and outcomes, but no one ever talks about what a meeting is feeding into. Who will be working on what we create in this session, and what do they need to do their best work?Point 2: Come up with ideas.
Plot twist, the brainstorm itself is the shortest part of the brainstorm. It’s also terrifying for quite a lot of people, and saying “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” is the same as saying to someone with arachnophobia “don’t be scared” when they’re about to hold a tarantula: it’s meaningless. But there are ways around this, and I will tell you what they are.Point 3: Prioritise and Select.
Every worthwhile meeting will finish with everyone feeling clearer about what’s being done and by whom and about what than they were when the meeting started. Brainstorms are usually the opposite of that, I’ll show you how to close the meeting with purpose and clarity.Creative collaboration is a critical part of any business, this framework will help you provide a much more effective environment for creativity with your clients and employees, helping you to arrive at well-considered, experiment-worthy ideas faster and with greater confidence and clarity.
