Is my big idea really outside the box?
Cognitive psychological tips for finding your honeypot in creative brainstorming.
Ever since that meeting, PP&L uses helicopters to fly over the power transmission lines after ice storms. It works beautifully. Linemen are no longer required to climb up ice covered poles to shake the lines. The brainstorming session was a success. But remember, if they hadn’t found the bear, they may never have found the helicopter.
— Elaine Camper, The Honey Pot A Lesson in Creativity & Diversity, April 2, 1993
In the past two years, I have introduced the honeypot and helicopter story again and again in various workshops. The story explains how a cross-functional group successfully goes ingenious from impossible.
All of my participants love the story, but few of them could generate creative and executable ideas after listening to this tale. Many of them told me they have difficulty in replicating this thinking process to their business cases. As a result, they are less patient about the BIG IDEA session and start questioning the reliability of such a co-creation format.
It bothered me so much that my participants only view my workshop as a way to have fun instead of a creative problem-solving methodology. I realized that there could be something missing from my understanding, which stops me from guiding my participants to obtain satisfactory solutions.
Remember we have 3 crucial principles for BIG IDEA:
- More writing less talking
- Quantitive over quality
- Build your ideas on others
Have you ever wondered what would be the thought behind these guidelines, and why it is so crucial to follow them? In this article, I will reinterpret this team-based ideation process from the cognitive psychological perspective. And hopefully, by understanding the supporting theories, we could have a better strategy of guiding our workshop participants toward the solutions in their expectations.
What is the ‘box’?
Newell and Simon (1972) proposed a framework for problem-solving in which goals are achieved by movement through the problem space. Within this framework, different problem spaces are mental representations of varying task environments. When a problem object is identified, problem-solving can be perceived as a search process in the problem space for finding a relationship between a set of problem-solving goals and a set of alternative paths.
The figure above represents most of the daily problems we encounter, in which we understand what the desired outcomes and the solution path to reach those outcomes. If any of the problem solving specified properties is not included in the problem space, we will find it difficult to solve the problem. Hence ‘thinking outside the box’ is not easy for most of us.
‘The Box’ of honeypot and helicopter story
Let’s take a look at ‘The Box’ of honeypot and helicopter story. The group has a clear idea about the current situation and the desired outcomes. What they need to do is find the solution path from the current state toward the goal.
Inside the box: 1. Current state: Undesirable and unsafe job situation for the PP&L linemen; 2. Goal: To remove the ice on the powerline.
Outside the box: A way to remove the ice without sending the linemen to climb the icy poles and towers and shake the lines.
You might think the brainstorming session works before it helps us to find the magical path outside the ‘box,’ but actually, it helps us to expand the ‘box’ (problem space) to bring the potential solutions into our attention. In other words, when we have a larger problem space, we will have more options for the solution path.
To expand the ‘box’
Principle 1 — More writing less talking
When we tell our workshop participants to throw all their thoughts onto the post-its without much consideration. We are actually helping them in expanding the problem space. According to brainstorming research conducted by Isaksen, Scott G., and John P. Gaulin in 2005, ‘brainwriting with facilitator also generating’ is the most fluence idea generation method.
Principle 2 — Quantitive over quality
Another thing we encourage participants to do is generating wild ideas. By recognizing the ideas which are always categorized as impossible, participants would be able to correlate to the ideas in between easier.
To find the magic path
Principle 3 — Build your ideas on others
While we are cultivating the problem space, another critical thing to be considered is the team dynamic.
The past research of cognitive psychology indicates that navigating a sophisticated problem space, we often use the heuristic called hill-climbing, whereby people take the action that leads to the most significant similarity between current state and goal state. Hill-climbing is relatively easy when the problem-solver works as an individual instead of a team. Working as a team, the participants need to give full support to their teammates and help each other to move the thought forward.
In the representational change theory (RCT) of Ohlsson (1992), there are three restructuring processes people use to overcome impasses:
- Elaboration or addition of new information
- Re-encoding, which entails focusing on correcting the faulty representation of a problem that is mistaken rather than incomplete by recategorizing or deleting some info
- Constraint relaxation, in which initial incorrect assumptions or constraints on the goal are revised.
An individual can indeed complete the restructuring process by himself/herself, but the team would be able to solve a problem much faster when the hint is provided on time when an impasse occurs. Hence, the team fails to support each other will find themselves suffering from constant deadlocks, and goes back to the starting state repeatedly.
How to apply these theories to my BIG IDEA?
What we usually experience in the brainstorming session is: the participants write all the notions on the post-it, and try hard to convince the rest of the group their own ones could be the best. The rest of the group does not deny it nor support it either. All the contents on the post-it are fragmented and at the same knowledge level.
Everybody is moving toward the goal using their own ways, which is not surprising at all because co-creation is never effortless. Co-creation requires each team member to evaluate the idea equally, being ready to give up the originality, and co-own their findings with the team.
Here are several ways that might be able to make your participants more comfortable with the co-creation process.
- Mini-exercise before formal brainstorming: Introduce one initial idea to the team, and invite everybody to use ‘hill-climbing’ method to build their concepts on top of the previous person’s one.
- Change of interaction format: Instead of putting the post-it on the board immediately, pass it to the next person, and invite for an extension building.
- Extensive facilitation: when a new idea is released to the group, the facilitator should ask questions about the 3 restructuring process: elaboration, re-encoding, and constraint relaxation.
I have included more recommendations about facilitating co-creation workshops in general in the article below:
Himalaya mountains
Solving a complex problem as a team is like ascending the Himalaya mountains. There is only one summit, which is your goal. You need to understand the geographic space and design the route to the summit, which is your problem space, and solution path. Moving toward the peak, you will be supported and supporting your teammates. Your cross-functional teammates are well-rounded enough to survive on their owns, also unique enough to bring distinct value to the crew. Your team will be climbing one step at a time, which is your hill-climbing heuristics, and never look back when the journey starts. Most importantly, when you reach the Himalayan summit, you will be incredibly proud!
References
Isaksen, Scott G., and John P. Gaulin. 2005. “A Reexamination of Brainstorming Research: Implications for Research and Practice.” Gifted Child Quarterly 49(4): 315–29.
Patrick, J., & Ahmed, A. (2014). Facilitating representation change in insight problems through training. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 532–543.
